We look ahead to Wednesday’s League Cup clash with our Arsenal vs Brighton & Hove Albion prediction and preview. Can Mikel Arteta’s side keep firing?
Arsenal vs Brighton: The Key Stats
Arsenal triumphed across 90 minutes in a convincing 66.8% of pre-match simulations by the Opta supercomputer.
The Gunners have been knocked out of the League Cup by Premier League clubs in all nine seasons since 2016-17.
Brighton’s Diego Gómez has scored five goals across his two games in the competition.
Mikel Arteta will hope Arsenal‘s roaring start to the season translates into League Cup success when they host Brighton & Hove Albion in the fourth round.
Arsenal opened up a four-point lead at the Premier League summit with Sunday’s 1-0 victory over Crystal Palace. Eberechi Eze netted his first top-flight goal for the Gunners against his former side, firing in a lovely strike from a half-cleared Declan Rice set-piece.
That has been a fruitful method of scoring for Arsenal this term, with 11 of their 16 Premier League goals coming from set-pieces. That means that 69% of their goals have come from such situations, and that proportion is the highest by a team in a single Premier League campaign.
Most set-piece goals - Premier League 2025-26
Arteta’s side have also won all three of their UEFA Champions League games in a brilliant start to the 2025-26 campaign.
They now turn their attention back to the cup in Wednesday’s clash at the Emirates Stadium.
Port Vale, perhaps expectedly, provided little challenge as Arteta’s side swept into this stage with a 2-0 victory in the last round. Eze and Leandro Trossard were both on target in that game at the League One side.
But Arsenal have struggled against fellow Premier League sides in this competition. They have been eliminated from seven of their last 10 League Cup home ties against top-flight opposition.
The Gunners, who last won the League Cup in 1992-93, have also exited the competition at the hands of Premier League rivals in all nine seasons since 2016-17. They were comfortably beaten 4-0 across two legs in last season’s semi-final against eventual winners Newcastle United.
That record may soon alter, though, given Arsenal’s winning streak extended to seven games across all competitions with their hard-fought win over Palace. Arteta’s men also dispatched Atlético Madrid 4-0 in the Champions League in midweek.
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Brighton have certainly enjoyed this season’s competition. Having beaten both Oxford United and Barnsley 6-0 en route to this stage, they are the first team in League Cup history to win back-to-back games by at least six goals.
The last Premier League team to score 13+ goals before the quarter-final was Arsenal in 2012-13, and the last to score 14+ was Middlesbrough (18 in 4 games) and Southampton (15 in six games) in 1996-97.
Central to their free-scoring run has been Diego Gómez, who has five goals in just two outings in this competition. The 22-year-old netted four against Barnsley, including two spectacular strikes, to become the first player to score four goals in an away game in the competition since Júlio Baptista for Arsenal against Liverpool in January 2007.
Fabian Hürzeler’s side were 4-2 losers at a resurgent Manchester United at the weekend, however. Late goals from in-form Danny Welbeck and Charalampos Kostoulas were not enough to cover for their defensive fragilities.
The loss at Old Trafford ended a five-game undefeated streak across all competitions, including impressive Premier League wins over Chelsea and Newcastle.
Hürzeler will need a response if his side are to get past high-flying Arsenal, though he will be without Adam Webster, Jack Hinshelwood and Solly March for the trip to London. Joël Veltman, Brajan Gruda and Kaoru Mitoma will all be assessed late on to see if they are fit enough to feature.
Arsenal’s team news remains unchanged, with attacking quartet Noni Madueke, Martin Ødegaard, Kai Havertz and Gabriel Jesus all out as longer-term absentees. Arteta named an unchanged Premier League lineup for the first time since September 2024 against Palace, but will likely ring the changes with a rotated side for this cup fixture.
Arsenal vs Brighton Head-to-Head
Brighton are winless in each of their last four meetings with Arsenal in all competitions (D2 L2), since a 3-0 Premier League away win under Roberto De Zerbi in May 2023.
Both league games last season ended in a 1-1 draw, despite Arsenal having Rice sent off shortly after half-time in their meeting at the Emirates.
That leaves Arsenal with only one win from their last five home games against Brighton across all competitions, losing three times (D1).
The Gunners’ drab run against Wednesday’s visitors also includes a 3-1 loss in the third round of the League Cup in 2022-23.
Arsenal vs Brighton Prediction
The Opta supercomputer strongly favours the home side as Arsenal triumph across 90 minutes in a massive 66.8% of 10,000 pre-match simulations.
Brighton are afforded a 15.0% chance of victory in normal time, while the draw is more likely at 18.2%.
Arsenal vs Brighton prediction - Opta supercomputer
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 this weekend, here is the Opta Power Ranking for both sides.
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