Noni Madueke Came Off the Bench to Beat Nottingham Forest — and the Arsenal Winger Fans Petitioned Against Is Now the One Teammates Call

Twice Noni Madueke had gone past Daniel Muñoz on the outside, down the left touchline, the way a winger is taught to. Twice the move had gone nowhere. The third time he showed Muñoz the same line, then planted, came back inside onto his weaker right foot and hit it. “I’d beaten him on the outside a couple of times so I thought I’ll come inside and just let rip,” he said afterwards.

The ball clipped Jair Cunha, wrong-footed Matz Sels and went in. Ten minutes from time, it was the only shot Arsenal put on target all afternoon, and it beat Nottingham Forest 1-0. Madueke had been on the pitch since half-time, sent on for Eberechi Eze into a game the champions could not open. This is a player who was greeted at the club by a petition with “No to Madueke” at the top. He did not answer it with a speech. He answered it with a decision to shoot.

A game with no door in it

For 70 minutes at the City Ground, Arsenal did not hit the target once. AFP noted it was the first time since 2023 that they had gone that long in a Premier League match without a shot on target. Oliver Glasner’s Forest, in the relegation zone and still waiting for a home league goal, sat deep and stayed narrow. Mikel Arteta described what his players were looking at: “They put a Christmas tree there. There is no space to play.”

The first half was lethargic, and Eze paid for it. He was taken off at the break, and Madueke came on with instructions he later repeated almost word for word. “Hang in there, stick to the gameplan, go out there and try to attack the opposition,” he recalled Arteta telling him, and then the part that matters more: “be dangerous, be yourself.”

Being yourself is harder than it sounds off the bench. A player coming off the bench into a stuck game feels two pressures at once. One says don’t lose the ball and don’t be the reason it gets worse. The other says you were sent on to change something, so change it. Most players split the difference and change nothing. Madueke spent half an hour learning what his full-back could and could not handle. Then he made one choice and put his whole body into it.

Start some, finish some

Arteta has a name for players like him. He calls his substitutes “finishers”. The word fits the numbers: since the start of last season, Arsenal’s replacements have been involved in 26 Premier League goals, more than any other side. After this game Arteta made the job description plain. “If you are needed after 60 minutes, 45 minutes and sometimes two minutes,” he said. “We have a squad now that can deliver in moments and we have to use that.”

It is a sensible system for a club defending a title. For the player inside it, the logic is harder to live with. Madueke has started one Premier League match this season, the 2-1 win over Leeds the weekend before. Christos Tzolis arrived in the summer to replace the departed Leandro Trossard and has been first choice on that flank. Madueke and Eze have mostly been asked to come off the bench or play in the Carabao Cup. It took a Tzolis hamstring injury, picked up with Greece, to open a door.

Madueke talked about it without complaint and without pretending. “If you look at the quality of our starting XI and bench it’s absurd, so we know that we’re going to start some and finish some,” he said, “and for me it’s the same mentality every time I just want to create or score.” Then, shorter: “You know on the bench you’re ready to have an impact.”

Being ready is the hard part. Sitting on the bench is passive by design, and a player can wait through a match until his legs feel like someone else’s. The ones who last at a club like Arsenal treat the warm-up as the first half. Sky Sports put Madueke’s contribution in plain terms: his “pace, directness and willingness to take on defenders gave Arsenal a fresh dimension in the second half.”

The petition and the phone call

None of this was obvious when he arrived. Arsenal paid Chelsea £48.5m for him in July 2025, and a section of the fanbase made clear they did not want a player arriving from a London rival. The petition ran past 5,000 signatures. His performances were called inconsistent, and the doubts about his final ball never fully went away, even as he contributed 8 goals and 4 assists in 43 appearances during a season in which Arsenal won a first league title in 22 years and reached the Champions League final.

The way his manager talks about him now suggests something else was happening inside the dressing room. “Noni, look at me, a smile on my face because he is a special character,” Arteta said after the Forest game. “It’s someone that’s very much loved in and around the dressing room.” He told a story from an interview in which several of his players had been asked who they would call if they had a problem. “And some of them said Noni, which I was surprised,” Arteta said. “But I think it is a massive credit and describes the type of person he is.”

That is not a detail you can turn into a statistic. It matters anyway. A player who becomes the person teammates turn to has done it on days nobody sees: training sessions that don’t make the highlights, weeks spent watching from the bench, a petition he could not have missed. At 24, left out of Thomas Tuchel‘s latest England squad, Madueke had every reason to sulk his way through this autumn. His teammates’ answer suggests he didn’t.

Anger, in the useful sense

Arteta saw a change after the international break, and he used two words a manager rarely puts side by side in praise. “After the break, he is showing something else, another level of anger, another level of conviction,” he said, “as well as in his actions and he is becoming decisive in matches, which is what we expect from a player like him.”

The evidence is there across three matches. In the start against Leeds he grabbed his chance, in Arteta’s words, “with both hands”. In midweek against Lille, starting on the right, his more natural side, he set up the opening goal. At Forest he came on at the break and won it from the left. Arteta’s verdict on where Madueke plays was blunt. “He is a player that doesn’t really mind left or right, but he has played many more minutes on the right side. The team needs him there at the moment and he is doing well.”

The anger Arteta means is not loss of control. It is the refusal to wait for the game to come to you, the drive that makes a winger run at a defender a third time after the first two dribbles came to nothing. It is a competitive edge, and Madueke used it the right way: the frustration of a shut game became one hard, simple act.

What it doesn’t prove

An honest account needs the deflection. Arteta did not dress it up. “The only one on target we had was a little deflection and it’s in,” he said. Glasner felt it from the other side. “Giving them one shot on target, and this one is deflected, and then you lose, it feels even tougher,” the Forest manager said. Much of the talk afterwards was about Arteta’s bench as a whole, not one winger’s breakthrough.

That is fair. Madueke did not control the ricochet, and the doubts about his end product will not disappear on the strength of one deflected shot. What he controlled was the decision. A winger who goes outside every time is easy to defend against, because the full-back knows the answer before the question is asked. A winger who has the nerve to change it, on his weaker foot, with the score 0-0 and ten minutes left, is a different problem. “I came inside and saw a side of goal, thankfully it went in,” he said. Then he put the result before himself: “Amazing feeling but I feel better about the win.”

Arsenal sit second, three points behind Manchester City, and travel to Bayern Munich in the Champions League before Everton come to the Emirates. Tzolis will be fit again at some point, and the selection question will come back. Madueke cannot decide that. He can decide how he comes on. Against Forest he came on as if he had already been told he was starting.

Tags: Premier League, Arsenal, Mikel Arteta, Noni Madueke, Nottingham Forest, Oliver Glasner