Christos Tzolis: Arsenal's New Leonidas Ready for Premier League Challenge
At Arsenal’s training ground, they do not hand out nicknames lightly. Within days of his £34m arrival from Club Brugge, Christos Tzolis had one – “Leonidas”.
Not for the beard, the bellow or the Hollywood myth, but for the way he tore through the club’s fitness tests. Over a series of gruelling running drills totalling more than a kilometre at varying intervals, the new winger finished top of the group. Other numbers from those sessions stay private. With a grin, he will only allow that they were “good”.
Arsenal’s staff saw a player turning up at Premier League champions level. Tzolis sees something else as well – the end of a long, awkward detour.
From Norwich struggles to Düsseldorf reset
This is not his first crack at English football. The last time Tzolis appeared in the Premier League, he was a teenager thrown into a relegation fight with Norwich City in 2021-22. Three starts, bottom of the table, a team out of its depth.
“The team was not ready for the Premier League and that makes it also difficult for me to adapt and to play how I could play,” he says. He is an attacking winger who thrives in sides that dominate the ball, that live in the final third. Norwich spent their season defending deep, chasing shadows and hoping for scraps on the break. The fit was wrong, the minutes limited, the development stalled.
The next year brought little relief. Only three Championship starts and a loan to Twente that never really took off. At that point, his time in East Anglia was effectively done.
So he went looking for himself in Germany’s second tier.
“In football it’s not always going up. You can have some setbacks and difficulties,” Tzolis reflects. “I learned a lot of things from this period at Norwich. That’s why I wanted to go to Düsseldorf to get the confidence back, because I knew I have the skills and qualities to score goals.
“Even though it was not the highest level, like playing in the Premier League, it’s good to play every game and have the feeling that you can score and create, and play good games.”
At Fortuna Düsseldorf he played, he scored, he created. The rhythm returned. The belief too. That season, he says, became the springboard.
“Then you go to the next level, which is Club Brugge, and I had two amazing years there because I made the decision to go to Düsseldorf and have the confidence.”
Numbers that demand attention
The numbers in Belgium back him up. Across two seasons with Club Brugge, Tzolis scored 33 times. The 2025-26 campaign turned heads all over Europe and locked Arsenal’s gaze: 17 goals and 23 assists in the league, 40 direct goal involvements – 16 more than any other player in the division – as Brugge reclaimed the title.
This was the version of Tzolis Norwich never saw: a high-volume, high-impact wide forward given license to attack, constantly involved around the box, constantly decisive.
“I feel now more ready to be in the Premier League,” he says. “For me, I did the right decision after Norwich. I developed myself, I improved a lot. I’m not the same player I was in Norwich, 100%. I feel it in my body and also in my mindset. Now it’s my time to show that I’m ready and capable of playing in the Premier League.”
A familiar stage, a very different role
There is a neat symmetry to his return. Tzolis made his Premier League debut at the Emirates Stadium, the ground he now calls home. Back then he arrived as a hopeful outsider with Norwich, trying to survive. This time he walks into the champions’ dressing room, signed to replace Leandro Trossard on the left flank of one of Europe’s most sophisticated attacks.
Life at Club Brugge, where his team routinely imposed themselves, felt far closer to what awaits at Arsenal than anything he experienced in Norfolk.
“I’m a more offensive player, and a player that plays for a team that has the ball and creates a lot of chances,” he explains. Norwich were bunkered in; Arsenal will ask him to pin full-backs, combine in tight spaces and finish moves. It is the environment he believes he was built for.
He spent the early part of this summer in Thessaloniki, back in his home city, when the call came. Arsenal wanted him. Not as a project for tomorrow, but as the concrete choice to step into Trossard’s lane on the left.
“It’s always difficult to say no to Arsenal,” Tzolis says. Other clubs asked the question, but none followed through with the same clarity. “There were some teams that talked and asked, but not concrete. Arsenal was directly the most concrete team and that made it easier for me to lock in and to say: ‘I want just to go there, I don’t want to hear anything else.’ It was an easy choice.”
Arteta’s message: don’t change
Two long conversations with Mikel Arteta settled any remaining doubt. The manager did not present a reinvention. He did not demand a new version of Tzolis. He asked for the Brugge version, transplanted into red and white.
Arteta’s message was simple: keep doing what made you unplayable in Belgium. Same movements, same instincts, same aggression towards goal.
Tzolis, who describes himself as a thoughtful person keen to soak up the cultures and personalities of a dressing room, sounds like a player who has already worked out who he is and what he brings. He models his game on David Villa – “a left-pocket player who always went for goals” – and the first glimpse of that at Arsenal came quickly.
In a 4-1 pre-season win over Girona on Saturday, he cut inside from the left and curled the ball into the far corner. Classic Villa territory. Classic Tzolis now, too.
Leonidas in red and white
The “Leonidas” tag might start as a joke in the gym, but it tells you something about how he trains and how he intends to compete. He talks about “passion and desire to win”, about giving “100% for every game, every duel”. Those are not marketing lines; they are a manifesto for how he has dragged his career back onto the elite track.
He has already lived the Premier League from the bottom. Now he arrives at the summit, armed with numbers from Belgium, scars from Norwich and a manager who has told him to trust his instincts.
Leonidas led 300 into impossible odds. Tzolis walks into a very different kind of battle: one where the expectation is not survival, but trophies. How he handles that shift will tell Arsenal whether they have simply signed a prolific winger – or the next cult hero of the Emirates left flank.
