No Retreat, No Surrender - El Espartano Alvaro Arbeloa Manager Thread

As a Villa fan for decades, I know some administrators that work for the club, and it is well known that Emery makes his squad of players watch extensive video footage of the opposition and highlights of previous matches. How would that go down with certain members of our squad?
Emery won't be coming to Madrid.

 

Why, sounds a bit like throwing out the baby with the bathwater to me, no club has won more European trophies than us in the last decade and we are amongst the top teams that have won the most trophies overall, it would be nice to win every year but that's just not going to happen, especially in La Liga, unlike the Bundesliga and Ligue 1, even Man City has mostly dominated the EPL recently, without being able to take that dominance to Europe

As for the narrative that "players don't like to do this and players don't like to do that" not sold on any of that hearsay, although i guess it's possible for one or two, certainly not the entire squad, what i do believe is some of our players just aren't as good as we'd like them to be....

 

Logged in to basically say this.

Xabi wasn’t the problem, neither was Arbeloa.

It starts at the top.

 

The poor squad construction and planning has done more damage to this team than any manager could.

 

It seemed that you are talking about Ancelotti.

 

Not sure what's his current contract but I fully expect Brazil to flop in the WC, so he might be available.

 

Scaloni is a better option than the likes of Poch, Mourinho etc. Was part of Super Depor so knows the league well. Apparently a good man manager as well.

Scaloni has stated that Carlo Ancelotti is the coach he most admires and that he tries to emulate his coaching style with Argentina.

https://www.tycsports.com/seleccion...i-es-su-gran-referencia-como-dt-id560774.html

 

I was joking, but Ancelotti would probbaly be out of brazil after the World Cup.

 

Argentinian manager and Vinicius? Not a chance.

 

So we should base everything on a underperforming player who had a problem with everyone and will possibly be on his last contract year?

 

This is a shout actually.

 

We already did. Borderline impossible anyone takes him at this point. Best case scenario is he runs down his contract. But that will mean a whole year of drama, clashes and consequently losses, and if we lose too much, manager gets chopped here. We pretty much tied ourselves into a knot.

 

The club's tone and stance on Junior will change dramatically if he doesn't renew in the summer.

 

what we are seeing here — two absolute turd seasons, arguably two of the worst this century, back to back — is the culmination of a total lack of big picture planning and vision and years of basically centering the club’s entire transfer and squad construction strategy around one player

and if that wasn’t bad enough it was always obvious that one player would not fit with our existing diva/best player

and if that’s the approach to squad construction then it is hardly surprising that the club’s leadership creates an environment where the players are entitled, uncontrollable, and unmanageable


Florentino Perez is one of the greatest figures in the club’s entire history. But Father Time comes for everyone and he was also incredibly fortunate to begin with during some of his best years (better to be lucky than good)

I have seen absolutely nothing to suggest that this board is capable of righting the ship

its time to build a coherent footballing institution instead of throwing spaghetti at the wall every summer

 

I wonder if Florentino's current stance is due to what happened with the CR7 generation initially.
We dropped a huge check and signed stars in 2009, and won nothing until the league in 2011 if I'm not mistaken....although we were up against an incredible Barca at the time.

We kept making tweaks until it finally clicked starting with Mourinho. At the time, the club hadn't won a UCL in a decade.

We last won it in 2024. Florentino could be thinking it's a similar situation. We signed Mbappe/CR7...and won nothing for a couple of seasons (even with a much better squad than this one), then things started moving positively....therefore no need to panic...the squad is young, they'll figure it out.

Not saying I agree with the approach, but I see the logic. The club could be thinking there's a lot of talent, you just need the right manager and 2-3 tweaks to the squad to bring the best out of everyone....

Football is strange.... we really could be just 2 or 3 starters away from this whole team looking completely different.

 

Arbeloa was out saying that RM's LaLiga title record has been poor because of refereeing.

Truly disgusting rhetoric.

 

The refs are bad, aye, but to just come off two trophyless seasons and complaining about the refs is just poor optics. We should look inward.

 

I agree with your sentiment, partially.

We spent big and bet on the future in 2009 and then began to tweak squad spots slowly building an institutional mentality. The key here is to make the right transfers. You need to consistently upgrade positions (which we do not do) all the while building around true superstars (I will again argue that Mbappe and Vini are not true superstars that we had in 2010s). I think you're right that we're doing a similar strategy but we aren't upgrading in a meaningful way or quickly enough.

@4x4 has claimed that Vini is the Robben, and I think we're starting to see enough evidence that is in fact his level. We need to move these type of players along to see positive direction in terms of mentality and style of play. We aren't doing that because the landscape has changed from the 2010s when that project began. City and PSG have changed things drastically.

 

Great point about the Robben analogy. He was very good...but we needed absolute elite tier 1 in Cristiano.

Now we have some good players, but that's all they are for now: good ...but nowhere as good as we were sold.

Back to needing a couple of top 1% guys.

 

who’s the top 1% guys out there?

 

Rodri for one. Olise, João Neves and Vitinha, Barella, Bastoni, Kane, Yamal, Saliba, Haaland, Nuno Mendes...

Tough market for that level I know...

 

If I was in charge of squad planning, I would look to bring in a dynamic winger, a passing midfielder, Joselu 2.0, and a Carreras on the right that can fill in at CB. Our kid out at Osasuna, Bernardo Silva, Borja Iglesias, and Foyth would be my picks for these reinforcements. Freshen up the squad by selling/loaning squad players that haven't kicked on like Fran, Brahim, Gonzalo, Ceballos, Franco, and decide on a coach then make a decision about our attackers, namely Vini, Nico Paz, and Endrick.

Alaba definitely gets released, I would also release Carvajal tbh. He is not much help on the field anymore, and I question his leadership value given how this season is going. Rodri could be a great signing for our midfield just because of his personality, not sure what that would mean for Tchouameni who has been really one of the few midfielders on this team that doesn't have a tactical identity crisis.

 

Isn't GG a Joselu type already? The only problem is our NPC manager doesn't have the spine to sub out either Vini or Mbappe and his solution is to just shaft him to the right wing.

 

He doesnt need to sub them. We just need to shift to doing more crosses into the box. Barca dont have to sub attackers when they sub on Araujo to play CF

 

While I mostly agree with you, I really think Gonzalo deserves another chance playing ST position and not RW/LW.