Declan Rice Leads the Premier League in Assists After Arteta Told Him He Could Do More

The ball went right, to Noni Madueke, and Declan Rice went with it. He went round the outside on the overlap, into the channel a holding midfielder is usually paid to guard, not to attack. He drilled a low ball across the face of goal, and Kai Havertz arrived at the far post to finish it.

That was the only goal. It gave Arsenal their first league win at Liverpool since Mikel Arteta was still playing in their midfield, and it put Rice top of the Premier League’s assist chart. None of his assists has come from a corner or a free kick, which is strange for a player whose right foot made its name on dead balls. Rice is not just playing well. He has turned into a different footballer, and he traces the change to a conversation with his manager before a ball was kicked.

The honest conversation

“I think the manager had a really honest conversation with me at the start of the season and still thinks I can do more in this shirt and for this club,” Rice told Sky Sports after the 1-0 win.

That is not a normal thing to say to the player Rice was in the summer. He had just won the title as the spine of Arteta’s side, and he had arrived from West Ham United in 2023 for a fee of £105m, a British record at the time, to be exactly that. Most managers would protect a player like that, keep him in the role and leave him alone. Arteta told him there was more, and Rice could have taken it as an insult. He took it as a job.

He has not said what “more” meant. His numbers do. Rice has five assists after nine league games, all of them from open play, one more than Pascal Gross and Evanilson. He has already matched his whole league tally from last season, with the clocks barely turned back. For someone who learned the game as a screen in front of a back four, that is a change of habit, not a hot streak. A defensive midfielder learns to check over his shoulder before he goes forward. Rice is now the one who goes forward and leaves the cover to someone else.

The right foot, without the dead ball

There is an irony in where the assists are coming from. The rest of Europe first saw what Rice’s right foot could do in April 2025, when he scored two direct free kicks against Real Madrid in a Champions League quarter-final. Arsenal’s title run was built on the same kind of craft. They scored 25 goals from set pieces on the way to the championship, the weapon of a side coached to win the small battles.

This season the dead balls have dried up. Ezri Konsa’s goal against Everton was Arsenal’s first Premier League goal from a set piece, and Arteta admitted the team had been “disappointed” not to score sooner from them. The service had to come from somewhere else. Much of it has come from Rice, running with the ball rather than standing over it.

“We all know his right foot,” Havertz said afterwards. “Today he was there, brilliant overlap and perfect cross. For me it was an easy tap in.” He went further: “Ninety percent of the goal belongs to this man.” The goal took Havertz to 46 in the Premier League, past Ilkay Gündogan as the competition’s highest-scoring German. He spent his post-match interview giving the credit to someone else.

A miss, then the run

One detail is easy to lose in the replays. A minute before the goal, Rice tried a shot from outside the box and sent it high and wide. Players respond to that kind of miss differently. Some drop deeper for the next few minutes and play it safe. Rice went straight back up the pitch.

The move that followed started with a mistake at the other end. Alisson Becker’s pass to Jérémy Jacquet left the young centre-back no chance of keeping the ball, Arsenal won it and moved it right, and Madueke and Rice combined. Rice said the overlap was planned. “We spoke about overlaps before this game and I spoke to Havertz about attacking the box with real aggression and he was there,” he said. Planning a run is one thing. Making it at Anfield, at full speed, with the crowd on top of you and a miss still fresh, takes nerve.

Four days after Fleetwood

The setting made it count for more. Arsenal had come to Merseyside straight from one of the worst nights in the club’s recent history. On the previous Tuesday, a side with nine changes drew 1-1 at League Two Fleetwood Town and lost the penalty shootout 5-3, a result that made Arsenal the first reigning Premier League champions to be knocked out of the League Cup by a fourth-tier club. Rice did not play. He had to watch it, then lead the response.

The response was a performance built on suffering. Liverpool had more of the ball, took 17 shots and sent 33 crosses into the box, and not one shot was on target. It was the first time Liverpool had finished a Premier League home game without a shot on target, and David Raya did not have to make a save. Before kick-off Arsenal had lost eight of their previous 13 league visits to Anfield and kept one clean sheet in 27. Rice, who had created the goal, then spent the rest of the match helping to protect it.

“This is what this stadium does to you,” he said. “It just creates waves and waves after attack and you have to sustain it.” Arteta talked about his players “just loving the mission”, and about how a game “can take you to really bad places, but four days later you have the opportunity to do something really historic”. Fleetwood was the bad place. Anfield was where they got out of it.

What he is not saying

Rice would not get carried away about the table. The win sent Arsenal three points clear of Manchester City at the top, with 24 points from nine games, eight wins and one defeat. Asked whether this was a big moment in the title race, he said no. “I’ve learned that the table you can only take it seriously in February, March,” he said. That sounds like a player who has been through a title race and knows how long the season is. He also knows that one good Sunday in the autumn decides nothing.

It also points to what is happening to him. A player who has won the league and believed he had arrived would talk about the result. Rice talks about the next job and about a conversation in which his manager told him he could still improve. The defining trait of this season, so far, is that he has not treated the top as somewhere to stop. He is an England regular and a champion, and he could have kept doing what made him. Instead he is still adding to his game, and the overlap at Anfield is the clearest proof yet.

The fixtures keep coming. Arsenal travel to Slavia Prague in the Champions League, then host newly promoted Hull City. Teams will now prepare for Rice going forward from midfield, and he will have to keep finding new ways to hurt them. Arteta has already told him that he expects more.

Tags: Premier League, Arsenal, liverpool, Mikel Arteta, Declan Rice, Kai Havertz