Napoli vs Arsenal Head-to-Head: Three From Four, But Naples Waits

Arsenal have been to the summit and slipped off it. Mikel Arteta's side lost the 2026 Champions League final to Paris Saint-Germain on penalties in Budapest, 1-1 after extra time and 4-3 from the spot, and now they start again — on the road, in the loudest building in Italian football. Napoli vs Arsenal opens the 2026-27 league phase on Wednesday 9 September at the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona, and the history between these two clubs is short, sharp and almost entirely one-sided. Almost.The clubs have met four times in competitive European football. Arsenal have won three of them. Nobody has ever drawn. That last stat is the strange one. Across two Champions League group games and a two-legged Europa League quarter-final, neither side has ever scored in a match where the other side also scored. Somebody always wins to nil. Wednesday's hosts play at the same ground they did in 2013 and 2019 — the Stadio San Paolo was renamed the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona in December 2020, after the death of the man who defined the club. Rafael Benítez brought a genuinely frightening Napoli side to north London on 1 October 2013 — Gonzalo Higuaín, José Callejón, Lorenzo Insigne, Marek Hamšík — and got picked apart by a player who had been an Arsenal footballer for barely a month. Mesut Özil swept in a volley off the floor, then teed up Olivier Giroud for the second. 2-0, and Arsène Wenger's team looked like the group's most complete outfit. Napoli, meanwhile, had already lost their opener at home to Borussia Dortmund. Group F was quietly becoming the hardest section in the competition, and nobody had quite noticed yet. This is the one Napoli supporters remember, and it still stings. On 11 December 2013, Napoli needed to beat Arsenal by three clear goals to go through. They got two. Higuaín turned in Callejón's pass on 73 minutes, Mikel Arteta — the man in the away dugout on Wednesday — was sent off three minutes later for a second bookable offence, and Callejón lifted a delightful finish over Wojciech Szczęsny with virtually the last kick. Napoli 2-0 Arsenal. Home record preserved. Season over. Dortmund's late winner at Marseille meant all three of Dortmund, Arsenal and Napoli finished on 12 points. Dortmund topped the group, Arsenal squeezed through in second on the three-way head-to-head, and Napoli became the first club ever eliminated from a Champions League group stage with 12 points — beaten by a single goal of difference. Higuaín called it an injustice. It's hard to argue. Note the correction worth making here: Arsenal did not win Group F. They finished second, and only just. Six years later, under Unai Emery — Wenger had left in May 2018 — the two clubs met again in the Europa League quarter-finals, and this time there was no drama at all. At the Emirates on 11 April 2019, Aaron Ramsey opened the scoring before Kalidou Koulibaly turned Lucas Torreira's shot into his own net. 2-0, and a tie that should have been alive was already tilting. In Naples a week later, Napoli needed an early goal and never got near one. Instead Alexandre Lacazette ended it before the interval with a free kick from roughly 30 yards — the sort of strike Declan Rice would replicate against Real Madrid six years on. 1-0 on the night, 3-0 on aggregate. Arsenal went to the semi-finals, then lost the final 4-1 to Chelsea in Baku. Dries Mertens, Insigne, Koulibaly, Kalidou's Napoli — one of the club's strongest squads of the era — did not score a single goal across 180 minutes. Some databases list five meetings and a goal tally of Arsenal 7, Napoli 4. That's because they include a pre-season fixture: Arsenal 2-2 Napoli at the Emirates Cup on 3 August 2013, where Insigne and Goran Pandev put Napoli two up before Giroud's overhead kick and a Laurent Koscielny header rescued the draw. Good match. Not a competitive one. The official head-to-head is four games, and the competitive goal record is Arsenal 5-2. The historical record is one thing. Current form is a different conversation entirely — and it is not close. Arsenal are the reigning Premier League champions, having taken the 2025-26 title with 85 points to end a 22-year wait. They have won all four matches this season: 3-0 against Manchester City in the Community Shield, 3-0 against Coventry City, 1-0 at Aston Villa, and a 2-1 comeback against Chelsea at the Emirates, which was the first goal they had conceded all campaign. In Europe the numbers border on absurd. Arsenal have won 12 consecutive Champions League league-phase matches, including all eight last season, and are unbeaten on matchday one of their last nine European campaigns — seven wins, two draws, with the last opening-night defeat coming against Dinamo Zagreb in 2015-16. Napoli arrive carrying scar tissue. They finished 30th in last season's league-phase table with just eight points from eight matches (two wins, two draws, four defeats), never came close to the knockout rounds, and lost the Scudetto to Inter by 11 points. Massimiliano Allegri replaced Antonio Conte on 3 July on a deal running to 2029, and his start has been uneven: a 2-0 win at Genoa, then a 2-1 home defeat to Como, then a genuinely painful 3-2 loss at Inter in which Napoli led with eight minutes left. Two straight Serie A defeats. A new manager. Europe's form team walking into your stadium on matchday one. Both squads are carrying damage, though Napoli's is more central to how they want to play. Under the 36-team format, the league phase isn't a formality — it's a seeding exercise. Finish in the top eight and you skip the knockout play-off round entirely, which in a season this congested is worth more than the points themselves. Drop results early and you spend December chasing a bye you can no longer reach. For Arsenal, that's the practical argument. The emotional one is simpler: three seasons under Arteta have produced a quarter-final, a semi-final and a shootout defeat in the final, and the only way that sequence resolves is by winning the thing. Starting away in Naples is a test of whether last season's away-day resilience travelled into this one. For Napoli, this is about proving that 30th place was an aberration and not a ceiling. Beat Arsenal and last autumn's questions disappear overnight. Lose, short-handed, at home, and they come straight back. How many times have Napoli and Arsenal played each other?Four times in competitive European football — twice in the 2013-14 Champions League group stage and twice in the 2018-19 Europa League quarter-finals. They also drew 2-2 in a 2013 Emirates Cup friendly. Have Napoli ever beaten Arsenal?Once. Napoli won 2-0 at the Stadio San Paolo on 11 December 2013 through Higuaín and Callejón, with Arteta sent off. It wasn't enough to save their campaign. When did Napoli and Arsenal last meet?18 April 2019, when Lacazette's free kick sealed a 1-0 win in Naples and a 3-0 aggregate victory in the Europa League quarter-finals. Who manages Napoli in 2026-27?Massimiliano Allegri, appointed on 3 July 2026 on a contract to June 2029, replacing Antonio Conte. When is Napoli vs Arsenal?Wednesday 9 September 2026, kick-off 21:00 CEST / 20:00 BST at the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona.The head-to-head favours Arsenal, the form favours Arsenal, and the market favours Arsenal. But the one time Napoli did beat them, it came in this stadium, against a team that thought it had the group under control — and it took Arsenal a further six years to visit Naples again with anything to prove. Arteta's side have spent three years getting incrementally closer to a trophy that keeps moving. Allegri has been handed a squad built for a Scudetto and asked to make it function in Europe, where Napoli have never really belonged. Both projects are, in different ways, running out of patience. For the full Champions League matchday odds, predicted line-ups and league-phase analysis, Tips.gg has the complete breakdown. Ninety minutes at the Maradona won't settle either question. It'll tell you plenty about which one is closer to an answer.