Christos Tzolis: Arsenal's New Forward with a Leonidas Mentality

At Arsenal’s training ground, they already have a name for Christos Tzolis.

Leonidas.

Not because anyone expects him to lead 300 men into battle, but because within days of his £34m arrival from Club Brugge, the new signing from Greece was tearing through the club’s fitness tests like a man with something to prove. In one brutal running drill, more than a kilometre covered in punishing intervals, he finished top of the group.

He will not reveal the rest of the numbers. “Good,” is all he allows himself, with a grin. The nickname does the talking for him.

From Norwich struggles to Bundesliga reset

This is not Tzolis’s first brush with the Premier League. The last time he was here, he was a teenager dropped into a relegation fight with Norwich in 2021-22, starting three league games for a side that finished bottom. The promise was obvious, the environment unforgiving.

The season after that, his career seemed to stall. Just three Championship starts, an unconvincing loan at Twente, and the sense of a talent drifting. When he left on loan again, this time to Fortuna Düsseldorf, his time in East Anglia was effectively done.

That move changed everything.

“In football it’s not always going up. You can have some setbacks and difficulties,” Tzolis says. He talks about Norwich as a lesson rather than a scar, a period that forced him to confront what he needed most: rhythm, responsibility, goals. Düsseldorf offered that.

“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. 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.”

The step down in level became a launchpad. The winger who left England as a fragile prospect returned to the continental stage as something else entirely.

Numbers that demand attention

The statistics from his time at Club Brugge back up the new swagger. Across two seasons, Tzolis scored 33 goals.

Then came 2025-26, the campaign that forced Arsenal’s hand. Seventeen league goals, 23 assists, and a title reclaimed. No one in the division came close to his output; he finished with 16 more goal involvements than any other player in Belgium.

This was not the kid struggling to get touches in a deep-lying Norwich side. This was a forward who dominated games, who lived in the final third, who played for a team that had the ball and expected to hurt opponents with it.

The contrast with his time at Carrow Road could hardly be sharper.

“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 of Norwich. “I’m a more offensive player, and a player that plays for a team that has the ball and creates a lot of chances.

“With Norwich we had to defend more low and maybe to have some transition moments, but that was not working. Obviously the game time was not enough as a young player to develop and that was the bad thing of the Norwich situation.”

At Brugge, the shackles came off. At Arsenal, they expect him to go even further.

Arteta’s call and an easy decision

When the phone rang this summer in Thessaloniki, where he was spending time back home, the message was clear: Arsenal wanted him as their new option on the left, stepping into the space vacated by Leandro Trossard.

Two long conversations with Mikel Arteta followed. The instruction was simple: bring the Brugge version of Christos Tzolis to north London. No reinvention. No compromise.

“It’s always difficult to say no to Arsenal,” says the Greece international. “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.”

He speaks calmly, but there is steel in the way he describes his own evolution.

“I feel now more ready to be in the Premier League. 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.”

This is not a youngster hoping to survive. It is a forward arriving with a defined identity.

A “left-pocket” finisher

Ask Tzolis who he watches, and the answer comes quickly: David Villa.

He calls the Spain great “a left-pocket player who always went for goals”, the kind of forward who lurks in that inside-left channel, half-winger, half-striker, always threatening to cut in and finish.

His first pre-season goal for Arsenal, in a 4-1 win over Girona on Saturday, could have been lifted straight from a Villa showreel: drifting in from the left, shifting the ball, curling it inside the far post. The kind of finish that makes a stadium lean forward.

Those who have worked with him talk about his edge, his willingness to run, to press, to fight. Tzolis himself calls it “passion and desire to win”, and promises to “give 100% for every game, every duel.”

At a club that prides itself on intensity under Arteta, that mindset matters as much as the numbers.

He arrives at the Emirates older, sharper and hardened by a journey that took him from relegation battles to a reset in Germany and a starring role in Belgium. Arsenal’s staff call him Leonidas for the way he attacks their running drills. The real test comes when the Premier League charge begins.