West Brom manager Sam Allardyce believes Arsenal are relegation rivals to the Baggies. Arsenal have won just one of their last 10 Premier League matches and currently sit 15th in the table. West Brom are 19th, having collected seven points from their opening 14 games following promotion from the Championship.
Arsenal's miserable run continued on Tuesday when they were knocked out of the Carabao Cup at the quarter-final stage by Manchester City.
City beat the Gunners 4-1 at the Emirates as more pressure was piled on manager Mikel Arteta.
Allardyce, who was only appointed West Brom boss last week following the sacking of Slaven Bilic, held a long-standing rivalry with Arsenal and in particular their former manager Arsene Wenger in the early part of the century.
And he has once again risked the wrath of Arsenal fans by insisting they could be relegated from the English top flight for the first time in their history.
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Arteta said: "Well, when you are in this position and you have the points that we have at the moment, you have to look and be careful because we haven’t been a lot of times in this position.
"I think last year when I came in we were in a very similar position and the same talk was around the place, it is normal because we need to start picking up points and then forget about it and start to look up the table much further.
"But it is a normal thing to do when you just look at the table and get the conclusions pretty quickly."
Arsenal are back in action on Boxing Day when they welcome Frank Lampard's Chelsea side to the Emirates.
Arsenal news: The Gunners haven't been able to build on the FA Cup success (Image: EXPRESS)
Then follows two away trips to Brighton on December 29 and then Allardyce's West Brom side on January 2.
Arsenal were level at 1-1 at half time against City on Wednesday before a horrendous goalkeeping error from Runar Alex Runarsson gifted City a second goal.
Pep Guardiola's side then ran away with the match, with the result hard to take for his former assistant Arteta.
Arteta said: "A really painful moment, again.
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"When we had the best moments in the game, we conceded another soft goal and that makes it even harder.
"But still, we kept going and we had an open situation where we could've played Laca [Alexandre Lacazette] through and we missed the pass and then they scored the third goal in an offside position.