Completely agree with you. Think it's baffling at what kind of straws people are clutching to paint a picture of progress, when the matter of fact is that if you look at most on pitch performances, taking away the very benevolent lamination of that unbeaten run, the team has seldomly looked more stringent, more coherent or more distinct than last season. It's still not clear to me what Emery is trying to do here, what kind of team he wants to build. A possession side? A pressing oriented transition team? Counter attacking team? And this definitely cannot be argued away by the unbalanced squad argument.
A lot of (incoming) managers have that problem and get their ideas across and their new teams to play more distinct. Watch out for Hasenhuttl at Southampton; I don't think it'll take too long to see the first glimpses of his style. Sarri plays with Hazard as CF 'cause Morata and Giroud are ****e. Half of Hoffenheim's team is full of plumbers and he still gets them into the CL.
And as someone who is also a fan of another club and at that a lot more used to the common practice of often changing managers, I maintain the idea that you change managers cause you deem something wrong and you want to raise at least the performance short term and mid to long term the countable results e.g. league position.
Right now, I don't really see that massive upgrade in Emery in comparison to the last manager. I actually think the recent signings go a long way to explain the seeming upturn. Sokratis is better than what we had at CB before, Torreira adds unbelievably much to the team, with Aubameyang there's one of Europe's top goalscorer in the team.
Emery is definitely doing a job and a stable one at that, but up until now in my opinion it remains to be seen if he's the man to take the club further than the last manager could at the end, short or long term. And in the end, that's what counts, because that is the sole reason to change managers and thus ultimately the only way to justify someone being the manager. For clubs in "transition" there's a little added context of things going on at the club at more levels so managers should be treated with more patience, e.g. Emery and Kovac. But still, the club has to be very clear about what they deem a transition period - you don't want to end up missing out on targets and then explain it away by being in transition and using it as an apology for the manager longterm.
And before you have a go at me with "what did you expect, the league title?": No. Absolutely not. That's not what this is about. I mainly expected the new guy to have a go at the obvious tactical on pitch problems, give the team a coherent style again, a plan on how to regularly score without utmost reliance on individual moments or opposition errors, a structure to defend as a team and the introduction of a more coherent press. That's what I expected and if it took the whole season with shorter unbeaten runs, more losses and finishing 6th, that would have been okay with me, as long as I see that the coach has a clear idea of football and he gets the team to play that way. Better and more consistent performances and thus a better league position would then automatically arrive as a result of that. But right now I'm not really seeing this and that's why I'm wary and sceptical of Emery, cause by now he's not managed to address the most glaring problems this team already had under Wenger - and just stacking up on better players won't do the trick alone.
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