Mikel Arteta shared some thoughts on the strain of the schedule.
**Arsenal**are fighting on four fronts, facing **Burnley**tomorrow in the Premier League after booking a Carabao Cup quarter-final place with a 2-0 win over **Brighton**in midweek. They are also three for three in the Champions League and look forward to kicking off their **FA Cup**campaign in January.
Summer signings have helped manage the load as injuries have affected numbers, but the manager does not feel that football is inevitably heading in a direction where drastic action needs to be taken.
“We don't do anything special, and thank God we have it because we have five or six players out, big players out, and we are having to use other kinds of solutions, and the team remains competitive. So, it's very necessary. I don't think you get away at that level with anything else other than that.
“Every decision that we make in terms of a fixture has to be guided by two main things, I think: players' welfare and then supporters. That’s it, and the rest has to come very, very far away from that, and we should never forget that principle. That’s the only thing I will say.
“I hope we don’t [see teams pulling out of competitions.] If we have that big piece of paper with those two principles there in front before we make any decision, all of us in our industry, we won’t get there. If we don’t and we just ignore that, then anything is possible.
“If we look after the players' welfare and our supporters, I think we're never going to get to that point and that's it. We have to close the window there, we cannot open that window, it has to be closed.
“It's our most precious value; we have the best league in the world and we cannot just open any window for anything just to lose that because we don't respect that and we forget what we are made of and what makes this game and this league special. If we respect that, I'm sure we're going to be fine.”