Measuring Success - The Arsenal (Emery) Barometer

Restraints of trade in the UK have long been held to be legal, but generally they cannot be for an unreasonable period. In the context of mega contracts, reasonable periods will tend to be longer than for mere mortals

The other thing to keep in mind is that if Spurs is paying out the entire value of his contract, then he is sort of on gardening leave.

Were he to take another job in the interim, then his financial loss is much less, in which case Spurs might not owe him the full 12m

So as you can see, it might be quite reasonable for Spurs to pay out 12m in return for restraining him domestically.

 

IIRC this happened with LvG at Utd

They just kept paying him full whack, unless/until he got another job to mitigate

 

Although the termination provisions are likely in the contract you sign, there does seem to be a lot of negotiation around the final terms for managers in football.

I guess because under UK employment law, simply terminating peoples fixed term contracts has a shakey legal basis?

Its not like the US where you can sack people.

 

I only play a lawyer on tv.

 

Moving Mebe's post here because I think it is a bigger topic

I find it fascinating because I nerded out on the Wehrmacht doctrine of Schwerpunkt for panzer offensives

The early Wehrmacht superiority had nothing to do with "blitzkreig" but rather centred around operational doctrine. A war of manoeuvre in other words. The key thing is that critical decision making about battlefield manoeuvre was distributed. So in other words a battlefield commander reacts to conditions in front of him on the fly, changing his axis of advance without waiting to get permission. This is what the Americans call situational awareness. It is extremely hard to defend against because even if you win your local tactical battle, you may find yourself swiftly outmanoeuvred and lacking coordination while your commanders try to understand and react.

As Jose himself manager 'splained to Neville and Carra, UK punditry is obsessed with tactical considerations (low block, possession) and often confuses these with strategic approaches, while almost no attention is paid to operational matters i.e. how well will you deliver your tactics on the pitch? It doesn't matter if you play a mid or low block if you are not compact or lack the correct orientations. According to Jose, this is usually where games are lost - at the operational or delivery level.

As Jose (and Guardiola) have pointed out, strategy cannot really be changed game to game as the games come too fast. Your already constructed your squad. You have a manager with a "philosophy". There is no time to reset - all that happened pre-season.

Rather, a manager like Guardiola, will select and explain the tactical solutions for the game. What doesn't change is the higher levels of situational awareness and strategy.

Guardiola will defeat you via positional play (strategy) & the situational awareness of the players (operations).

So you know De Bruyne will try to get into the half spaces and hurt you from there. Any manager knows this, and will adopt tactical solutions to try to stop it.

The difficulty is actually in stopping De Bruyne in real time rather than in abstract, because his awareness and intelligence is so high, and the team will work to put him into those spaces.

It is this aspect that Emery is crap at. He constantly tinkers with tactical aspects but is very poor at delivering them on the pitch (something Jose excels at even if you disagree with his "strategy")

tldr; Emery fails at the organisational and operational levels. He sends his players out with complicated tactical plans, but the players are confused, lack co-ordination, and don't appear to know how they should implement his plans. When they suffer setbacks, they quickly lose belief in his plans.

/anorak

 

Jose himself explains this in terms of "football fundamentals" and "needing to be good in every moment of the game".

The example he uses is that a team must anticipate loss of possession rather than react to it.

Emery is really bad at this organisational / executional stuff.

 

The decision to move LT forward makes no sense when we signed Ceballos to play the higher role

From the midfield enforcer to a makeshift attacker - Why growing concerns over Torreira’s Arsenal future are a mess of Emery’s own making. https://t.co/HLh3Vm82EG

— Charles Watts (@charles_watts) November 23, 2019