Sitting in the relegation zone at Christmas, Ipswich face one of their hardest trips of the season as they head to the Emirates Stadium. We look ahead to the match with our Arsenal vs Ipswich prediction and preview.
Arsenal vs Ipswich Stats: The Key Insights
Arsenal are big favourites for this game, winning 84.2% of the 10,000 Opta supercomputer pre-game simulations.
Arsenal are unbeaten in their last 41 Premier League home games against promoted sides (W36 D5), winning the last 12 in a row.
Ipswich are winless in their last 11 away league games against Arsenal (D4 L7), losing the last four in a row.
Arsenal host Ipswich Town at the Emirates Stadium two days after Christmas, with high expectations of giving their fans a late present with a win. A victory in this game would take them to 36 points in the Premier League, three times as many as their opponents, highlighting the gulf in quality between the clubs in 2024-25.
After a bumpy seven-game spell between the October and November international breaks when they lost more games (3) than they won (2), Arsenal have recovered to build a run of seven wins and two draws across nine matches. Including the 1-1 draw at Chelsea on 10 November, the Gunners are now unbeaten in 10 successive games in all competitions, including a brilliant 5-1 win at Crystal Palace on Saturday.
Gabriel Jesus scored a brace in that win, adding to his midweek EFL Cup hat-trick against the same opponents. The Brazilian forward has now scored five goals from 10 shots (50%) in two appearances after previously scoring just once from 41 shots (2.4%) in his previous 33 games for the club. He will now be aiming to score in three successive appearances for Arsenal for just the second time and the first since April 2023. Mikel Arteta will be hoping he does so, because Jesus holds the record of never losing when scoring in a Premier League game (61 games – W56 D5).
Kai Havertz is another who scored for Arsenal in that 5-1 win at Palace, and he’ll be looking forward to another game in London. Each of Havertz’s last 10 Premier League goals have come in capital, the longest such run by an Arsenal player since Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang between December 2019 and September 2020 (11).
The Gunners were dealt a blow in the first half of Saturday’s win, however, when the talismanic Bukayo Saka limped off injured. Arteta confirmed on Monday that Saka will miss “many weeks”, so the Gunners will have to cope without their leading chance creator across all competitions in 2024-25 (57), while he’s been involved in nine more goals (22 – 9 goals, 13 assists) than any other Arsenal player.
Saka’s absence means he’ll join Ben White, Raheem Sterling and Takehiro Tomiyasu on the sidelines for the Gunners, but there is a chance that Oleksandr Zinchenko may be welcomed back into the squad for this match.
Kieran McKenna’s Ipswich head into this meeting following a heavy home defeat by Newcastle United at Portman Road on Matchday 17.
That 4-0 defeat was their latest miserable result at home, but an away trip might not be such a bad thing for the Tractor Boys. Both of their league wins this season have come on the road, at Spurs and Wolves, while they have collected twice as many points away (8) as they have at home (4) in 2024-25.
Sitting two points from safety ahead of MD 18, the Opta supercomputer isn’t confident of Ipswich’s hopes of avoiding relegation back to the Championship. Following the weekend’s action, they were relegated in 76.9% of current season simulations – only lower than Southampton’s chance (97.8%).
The news that Arsenal are unbeaten in their last 41 Premier League home games against promoted sides (W36 D5), winning the last 12 in a row, won’t give Ipswich any more confidence. The Gunners have the chance to go within one game of the Premier League record for this statistic, held by Chelsea (43 unbeaten games between 2001 and 2015).
McKenna will be buoyed by the news that Liam Delap can return to the squad following his one-game suspensions versus Newcastle. He has been influential for the Suffolk side this season, scoring twice as many goals (6) as any other player in the Premier League for them.
Arsenal vs Ipswich Head-to-Head
This will be the first competitive meeting between Arsenal and Ipswich since January 2011, when the two sides met across two legs of the EFL Cup semi-final. After suffering a shock 1-0 first-leg loss at Portman Road, the Gunners reached the final with a 3-0 victory at the Emirates Stadium in the second leg two weeks later.
In the league, Arsenal are unbeaten in their last 13 league games against Ipswich (W10 D3) since a 2-1 away loss in September 1984, a game that was played just four months after Ipswich boss McKenna was born.
Ipswich are winless in their last 11 away league games against Arsenal (D4 L7), losing the last four in a row. Their last such victory was in August 1979 (2-0 under Bobby Robson).
Arsenal vs Ipswich Prediction
Arsenal are heavy favourites for this game, winning 84.2% of the 10,000 pre-game simulations by the Opta supercomputer.
Ipswich picked up a shock win just 5.8% of the time, but a draw would also be a brilliant result for the relegation-threatened club – that result was played out in exactly 1-in-10 simulations ahead of kick-off on Friday.
Arsenal vs Ipswich Opta Prediction
Opta Power Rankings
The Opta Power Rankings are a global team ranking system. They assign an ability score to over 13,000 domestic football teams. This score is on a scale between zero and 100, where zero is the worst-ranked team in the world and 100 is the best team in the world.
Ahead of kick-off on Friday night, here is the Opta Power Ranking for both sides.
Opta Stats Hub Premier League
Subscribe to our football newsletter to receive exclusive weekly content. You should also follow our social accounts over onX, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook.******