You sure you're not subconciously transposing this thread I made 15 years ago where I linked "Come Dancing" to the loss of Highbury? https://www.bigsoccer.com/threads/jackhammers-do-highbury.437573/ p.s. Thanks for finding that old thread about Davies, Daltrey et al. Somehow I missed it at the time. Too bad because it was right in my wheelhouse, being a die-hard Who/Townshend fan for even longer than I've been an Arsenal fan.
I was in favor of Arteta when we hired Emery. I was wrong. He's a joke. He doesn't man manage well. He doesn't prepare tactics well. He doesn't train players well. He doesn't put players in positions to succeed. He doesn't evaluate talent well. There is nothing about his management at Arsenal that would make me want to hire him for any professional football job.
How would Spurs be doing this season without Kane and Son up front , Højbjerg in midfield and their two best CBs though !?
They'd be worse off. It has nothing to do with Arteta or Arsenal though. We're not missing any game-changing players.
They literally beat City without Kane, and all the Kane downing tools drama, without Ndmobele, without their new CB who is by far their best defender, and a 20 year old player called Skipp anchoring the midfield.
I understand the desire to make excuses for Arteta, I do. But every coach has to deal with injuries and players being unavailable. We can still judge how well Arteta is doing despite these challenges. And the answer IMO is "not well". If he is incapable of succeeding without his first choice players being available, then he isn't a good coach. For anyone defending Arteta, please make an affirmative, positive argument in his favor. Don't make excuses, tell me what he's doing well. Why should I believe that things will be better even if he had everyone available?
I don't KNOW that anyone else will be better. I THINK Arteta is a below average coach, so I believe Arsenal should be able to hire someone who is better. To nibble at the bait, I like Graham Potter and what he's done at Brighton. There are no guarantees he will be better than Arteta and he might be much worse. But I would take that risk.
Management or team? They’ve made a start on the team rebuild, but it’s far from complete and it was never going to happen in a year. Whether the young players they brought in are the right ones will play out over the next two or three seasons.
It’s not making excuses for Arteta, it’s saying that any other manager in his general organizational context would be struggling. How do I know that? Because we had one of the greatest managers of all time at this club not so long ago and he also struggled within this org context for…quite a while. “Manager” is an outdated concept in football—no one person can meet the complexity and demand of the job anymore, like Wenger could in yesteryear. You need a competent core of people around the coach to manage many of the details of squad-building, and Arsenal simply don’t have that. This makes it very hard to ascertain Arteta’s qualities in isolation. I will say this: despite Emery’s reputation for competent defensive organization, Arteta quite rapidly improved on Emery’s defense and last year we were probably the most organized an Arsenal defensive unit has been since Adams was at the club. In general, this month excepting, we have played big clubs better and closer than at any time in the last ten years, which suggests Arteta is good at building and transmitting a tactical plan on a match-to-match basis. Also he seems to inspire pretty fanatical loyalty from his players, and the mood at the club seems more stable than it has been for a while. These are all pretty obvious apositive arguments for Arteta that have demonstrated themselves even despite the absolute clusterfcuk the club has been around him
Management. The problem is not this offseason, it’s last year’s. We’re still reaping the whirlwind of not selling Xhaka/Bellerin/AMN for significant fees while signing Willian/Auba/Partey
When we had the chance, Tuchel would've been better. Maybe Conte now. And the excuse of "why would they come here" is so circular to me. That's giving merit to the failures of Edu and Arteta. Edu and Arteta have failed so spectacularly that no manager is going to touch us, therefore, they should be kept? That's failing to success if I've ever seen one.
What good is the fanatical loyalty if they don't translate to fired up performances on the field? Players were fanatically loyal to Mourinho too, and their performances showed. Also, there's a bit of a variance here. For every fanatical loyalist, there is a Guendouzi. The dressing room is better than Emery, who never had the full trust of the player, I don't think think. However, no other Arsenal manager have also enjoyed the financial doping in the millions to terminate contracts of players that were ruining his dressing room atmosphere.
Players have not been loyal to Mourinho for a decade. Arteta is a few months away from breaking Mourinho’s record for time at a club before losing the dressing room. What good is the loyalty? It means when we get players that aren’t midtable, they will execute Arteta’s plan effectively because in general the players have been shown to trust him
5 crucial omissions? Who were the five crucial omissions? Saka not being ready to start at Brentford is the only "crucial omission". Partey not being available is not a massive blow. Is he slightly better than our other options? Sure. Does his presence massively improve the team? Not really. Gabriel? Again, better than who we fielded, but it is not like he massively elevates the level of our defense. Mari kept him out of the team for chunks of last season. Auba? Our strikers haven't got a sniff of a chance this season, and Auba no longer has the ability to create goals out of nothing. If every single player on our team was 100% fit and fully match sharp, not one of the games we have played so far would have turned out any differently. The problems we have stem more from the coaching and tactics, and bizarre lineups the manager puts out - and it not like he is being forced into any of this. We didn't play 3 at the back to match up with Chelsea, and then played 3 at the back when City play 4-3-3 with a false 9, and going 3 at the back put Arteta in a position to maximize the number of poor players he had to put on the pitch. He is literally doing the opposite of picking the best lineup given his squad.
It is going to be hard for someone to do worse. This is the worst start to a season of any top flight team in England since 1963. This on top of the fact that we are the highest spending team this summer, and Arteta has spent 200m since last summer (not counting the huge bonus we gave to Willian).
This is a good response. I used the word coach instead of manager mostly because I don't know which decisions were Raul, which were Edu an which were Arteta. I doubt they were all 100% behind every decision the club has made. I'd love it if Ornstein came out and said "Arteta had his doubts about (transfer move X), it was Edu that pushed it" or "Raul was reluctant to do (transfer move y), but Arteta made it a priority". I can guess, but it would make it so much easier to judge Arteta (and Edu) if we had those answers. I am not a tactical expert, and if Arteta is really masterminding a stout defense, that's what I want to hear as an argument in his favor. Personally, it feels to me like he is doing so at the expense of neutering the attack. I agree that prior to the last couple matches, he's done well to keep the club from being blown out. It's interesting to contrast that to Bielsa, who doesn't seem to care if he's blown out and instead sticks to his principles. Which approach is more likely to deliver trophies? I don't know.
Not sure I buy the argument that Arteta somehow separate from the cluster******** the club has been around him. For better or worse he’s had a strong hand in the transfer business. He wanted Willian, apparently sold him on the notion that Arsenal would be competing for Trophies and continued to play him well beyond the point when it obviously wasn’t working. He publicly lobbied for Aubameyang’s extension. He talked Xhaka into staying twice. At one point he was talking about extending Mustafi. It has been suggested that he identified Mari as a target from Mari’s association with City while Arteta was there. He wanted Luiz back the second year. I have to believe he okayed the permanent signings of Mari and Cedric. Finally, while he’s not responsible for the contracts given to Ozil and Kolasinac, his man management of those situations was not ideal.
Of course nobody can know with 100% certainty how a new coach will do, in comparison to the one we have now. But at FT of the Brentford match, I made the comment that their XI was not better than ours, and that I bet Thomas Frank could do a better job with our boys than Mikel is doing. Which is to say he's underperforming big time. And he's quickly running out of time to turn things around, before they likely pull the plug.
But that’s exactly my argument though! There’s apparently nobody at this club that is able to check a rookie coach on his transfer/squad-building decisions—that’s more than a little crazy! If you gave a gun to a baby I would hold you responsible for the consequences, not the baby. At any well-run club Arteta would not have the influence on transfers that he currently has, regardless of how good or not good he is at coaching the first team.
At a "well run club" of similar pedigree to ours, perhaps they wouldn't hire a "baby" as head coach and then quickly promote them to manager?
We can’t change the owners and we can’t move players on. The only equation we can change is the manger and the management team.