LONDON -- Though there was some to-ing and fro-ing as to the order in which the offenses should be considered, it seemed fitting that what would have been Arsenal's best scoring chance of the first half of their 1-0 win over Hull City was wiped out for an offside. Here is a team whose attack has been drifting so out of sync that promising situations fall apart without the opponent needing to get involved.

Sometimes the opponent is even willing to offer them a helping hand. Only the members of the International Football Association Board might be able to say for sure whether Arsenal should have had a penalty when Kai Havertz's shirt was pulled by Hull City's Nobel Mendy as Bruno Guimaraes took a long-range shot. The striker was impeded, but he had been standing in an offside area. Was he attempting to play the ball when Mendy grabbed hold of his jersey? If not, then the foul should have taken precedence and Arsenal should have had a penalty. Instead, they had to wait until the 72nd minute for their win, Martin Odegaard bundling in the rebound off Noni Madueke's shot.

At least that meant Mikel Arteta could jokingly say he had not seen the spot kick that might have been. There may be a question about that particular penalty and offside, but the big-picture statistics are mind-boggling, such that there surely has to be some air in these numbers. 

In the last seven Premier League seasons, no team has averaged more than three offsides per game. Only Burnley in 2021-22 and Liverpool two years later have averaged more than 2.5, in the process reaching over 100 for the season. In their 10th game of the season, Arsenal committed offside offenses Nos. 32, 33, 34 and 35. At the final whistle, that was 11 more than any other team in the league, and there is a very real prospect that lead does not get eaten into. Field a team of Pippo Inzaghis and you'd do well to put up these numbers.

There has to be something to this, right?

What makes this all the more curious is that Arsenal have not been a team that particularly struggled to stay onside before this season. In the previous six campaigns, they were caught about as often as the average Premier League team when you adjust for possession. When these relatively low-volume statistics warp like this, at least part of the answer is going to be variance. A bit more of it might be that Arsenal have a 10-game sample size that includes Aston Villa. Still, that sample is over a quarter of the season. Arsenal have had a string of games where they have been caught offside with frequency.

This looks like a problem. Even Arteta acknowledged that. "There are many areas that we need to improve. That's one, that's related sometimes to the timing or the situation, or really the position [of the opponent], where he's lined up and what space he's given you.

"Certainly it's far too many. It's true that the Villa game obviously he's putting those stats in a different perspective. I think the sample is quite short to analyse it, but you have a point there."

As for the Villa game, Mikel, yes, that's eight of your 35. Leeds is seven, though. Coventry five, Hull four. These are all well above the Premier League average. The chief culprit for this spate of infractions is certainly Havertz. His 15 offsides are not just seven more than any other player in the top flight; they are more than any Arsenal player committed in the entirety of last season's title campaign.

Again, this feels a little unprecedented. In the six seasons prior to this one, Havertz ranked 48th among forwards in the division for how frequently they were caught offside. The worst offenders, your Ashley Barneses, Darwin Nunezes and Cristiano Ronaldos, might get flagged once every 70 or 80 minutes. Havertz hovered around the 140 mark. This season it's not far off once per half.

Has he lost some burst? Gradient Sports' physical data would suggest he is moving about as swiftly this season as any other. A broader view is that this attack might have greater joy punishing high lines with more pacey options in it. For a player who makes so many runs off the ball, Madueke is caught offside relatively infrequently (though his was one of the four today). That is probably because he can give his man a yard in a way that Havertz or even Bukayo Saka, third in the league with seven offsides, can't quite.

Have defenses sussed Havertz's movement out? That doesn't seem entirely clear, not least given that Hull misjudged their line more than once, allowing Havertz in a one-on-one position where he should have done much better than cut the ball onto Mendy's trailing leg.

Arteta's explanation is simple. "It's all about timing," he said. "So there is a signal on the ball, and you need to time it around that. If that's a second too late or half a second too late, that's all." 

Certainly Arsenal could release the ball a bit quicker. If there is a flaw in the game of Odegaard, whose nine passes to an offside teammate also lead the league, it is that he tends to want that one extra touch. That much was apparent in the win at Aston Villa, when the captain had the ideal chance to slip Havertz through in position to bend one in the far post. He took three touches when two would have sufficed, and it was all a moment too late.

Bruno Guimaraes (four such passes) is in a similar vein. And perhaps Arsenal as a club are a bit too much of that ilk. Does the specter of Alex Hleb and Samir Nasri still haunt this team? Arteta might have said as much, that the thing about Arsenal is they always try to walk it in.

"We need to find ways to be more efficient, sometimes even more pragmatic," he said. "Sometimes my feeling is that we are trying to score a perfect goal against these low blocks. We need to be much more chaotic than that."

You can see that in some of those offsides above, especially the smattering around the right flank that Arsenal like to make their creative hub. It's the attempted reverse balls, the quick one-twos and slide-rule passes to a teammate on the overlap. Offside No. 36 might well have been another of those, an overlapping run from Jurrien Timber where Madueke released the pass a beat too late and the Dutchman stopped rather than cede Hull a free kick.

Instead, Madueke proved the value of an alternative approach right throughout this match. Driving at his fullback time and time again, he manufactured positions where things might happen without having to worry about a give-and-go or timing his run correctly. In an age where so many opponents, including Hull, are more intent on gumming up their opposition than gritting and grinding, a bit of unpredictability from one of Arsenal's own players goes a long way.

As for the offsides, of course that feels like a problem, a lot of possessions wasted by Arsenal players' own inability to get on the right beat. It has been. It does not mean it is going to be. Injuries mean that Havertz and Odegaard have rarely shared the pitch over the last few seasons. Get them and Saka together for weeks on end and the old rhythm will come back to them, and this should be nothing more than a weird, if intriguing, blip.