No Premier League manager has won more games 1-0 since Mikel Arteta took charge at Arsenal than Arteta himself, and Sunday’s win at Anfield was the latest one-goal job done the hard way.
Opta’s numbers, correct up to 20 October, have Mikel Arteta on 33 wins by 1-0 in his first 257 Premier League games. Pep Guardiola is second over the same spell, six behind.
Those figures were put together before the trip to Merseyside, so the Kai Havertz goal that beat Liverpool only adds to the pile. It was Arsenal‘s first win at Anfield in 14 years, and it looked exactly like the kind of game these numbers describe.
How many 1-0 wins does Arteta have at Arsenal?
Thirty-three, and the striking part is how slowly it started. In his first season in charge Arteta won just one Premier League game by that scoreline, a 1-0 win over West Ham United in March 2020.
The habit grew as the team did. The peak came in 2025/26, when eight of the 26 league wins finished 1-0, in the season that brought the club’s first Premier League title in 22 years.
That is the point worth dwelling on. Title sides are remembered for the big nights, but eight 1-0s in a single campaign is what turns a good season into a winning one. Every one of those games could have been a draw, and every one of them was worth two extra points.
Where does he sit against Wenger and Ferguson?
On raw totals, nowhere near the top yet, and that is only fair given how long the leaders lasted. Alex Ferguson has 104 Premier League wins by 1-0, and Arsene Wenger is second on 89.
Arteta sits 16th on the all-time list, two behind another former Arsenal manager, George Graham. At the rate this side grinds out results, catching Graham looks like a matter of months rather than years.
The percentages tell a different story. Among managers with more than 100 Premier League games, Arteta is joint-fourth for the share of matches that end 1-0, with 12.5% of his games finishing that way. That is not a quirk of a short career. It is a pattern across seven years.
The one-goal record that matters more
A 1-0 is the cleanest version of it, but plenty of games are won 2-1 or 3-2 after sitting level for most of the afternoon. Count every win by a single goal and Arteta’s record gets even stronger.
He has 67 one-goal victories in his first 257 Premier League games, more than any other manager in that time and 14 clear of Guardiola. He is also in the top five Premier League managers for the share of wins by a single goal, at 26%. Top of that list is another former Arsenal boss, Unai Emery, on 27.6%.
Champions who live on the edge
In 2025/26, 14 of Arsenal’s 26 league wins came by a single goal. No champion had won that many by one goal since Liverpool’s 2019/20 side, who also had 14.
The last title winner to go beyond that was Manchester United in 2012/13 with 16, which matched their own record from 2008/09. Arsenal are in serious company, and none of it is the flashy kind.
Why Anfield fitted the pattern
Sunday was the model of it. Havertz scored early from Declan Rice’s pass, and Arsenal spent the rest of the afternoon making sure the home side never found a way through. As we covered in our report on Arteta’s Anfield breakthrough, Liverpool had plenty of the ball and still failed to land a single shot on target.
It was not pretty, and Arteta admitted as much afterwards, with his side struggling to break out of their own half for long spells. But games like this are where the 1-0 numbers come from. You don’t rack up 33 of them by playing well every week; you get there by refusing to lose your nerve when you aren’t.
The one caveat is at the other end. A team this good at protecting one goal still needs someone to score it, and the debate over who leads the line has not gone away just because Havertz tapped in at Anfield.
Verdict: winning 1-0 is a skill, not luck
There is a lazy argument that winning by one goal is lucky and the luck runs out. Seven years and 67 one-goal wins say otherwise. This is a side that knows how to manage a lead, kill a game and trust its defence, and that is a skill, not a fluke.
Arteta’s side are three points clear at the top after Anfield, and if the margins stay this thin all season, I suspect nobody at the Emirates will mind one bit.
