Shkodran Mustafi (Out)

[MikelHadADream]

This guy was signed with the idea of partnering him with Koscielny lmao. How anyone at the club thought pairing two small, physically weak and rash center backs would be a good idea is beyond me. Its just another indication of the lack of leadership and football knowledge at the club at that time.

 

[L3T5 PL4Y]

This guy was signed with the idea of partnering him with Koscielny lmao. How anyone at the club thought pairing two small, physically weak and rash center backs would be a good idea is beyond me. Its just another indication of the lack of leadership and football knowledge at the club at that time.

Wenger repeatedly did this with his choice of players and persisted with them untill the player is either broken physically or mentally. Very annoying.

 

[BigPoppaPump]

Mertesacker was way better than Koscielny? This place.

^
Exactly my point, some people just don't know football and think pace = quality.

 

[Macho]

Mustafi is quite strong and combative tbh. Quick too, he just lacks the composure and too clumsy to ever be good for us. Ultimately a failure. I remember when we signed him a lot of the Spanish pundits were not very impressed.

Some revisionist history here though, Kos was pretty good for us. If Pump and others were saying he isn't elite I'd have said fair enough.

I just think his calamities and exit sticks in people's minds more than the years of ok/good performances. Better than Vermaelen surely?

 

[TakeChillPill]

Mustafi was as a result of our changes strategy. Wenger would always go after a very specific target. Once we started introducing statdna we had our first, second and third targets.

What ended up happening is that instead of getting our first target we ended getting our 2,3 choice.

Instead of Kante we got Xhaka

Instead of zaha we got Pepe

Instead of Kolabaly we got Mustafi

The stats maybe didn't show much difference but the reality was very much different.

I'm glad we've ditched that turd of a software.

 

[Riou]

Both Kos and Mert were good players for the club, don't need to put either down imo...they both were lesser players without the other, but that's how good partnerships work, they make each player better.

It's also possible for a player to be highly thought of by the fans of a club he played for, without him having to be a top player.

 

[L3T5 PL4Y]

^
Exactly my point, some people just don't know football and think pace = quality.

No, I'm saying Mertesacker was never better than Kos apart from being tall and calm. He was also very error prone and had horrid games. He was still a good player though. Kos was much better though.

 

[Red London]

Mustafi is quite strong and combative tbh. Quick too, he just lacks the composure and too clumsy to ever be good for us. Ultimately a failure. I remember when we signed him a lot of the Spanish pundits were not very impressed.

Some revisionist history here though, Kos was pretty good for us. If Pump and others were saying he isn't elite I'd have said fair enough.

I just think his calamities and exit sticks in people's minds more than the years of ok/good performances. Better than Vermaelen surely?

There's no way Koscielny wasn't a good player here. We just never signed him a good enough partner and were never focusing much on our defensive shape and protection from the midfield.

When we did sign Mertesacker who was really good that season both of them achieved the most clean sheets that season if I recall. You can't partner him with similar but worse players and expect him to be solid.

 

[Macho]

Mustafi was as a result of our changes strategy. Wenger would always go after a very specific target. Once we started introducing statdna we had our first, second and third targets.

What ended up happening is that instead of getting our first target we ended getting our 2,3 choice.

Instead of Kante we got Xhaka

Instead of zaha we got Pepe

Instead of Kolabaly we got Mustafi

The stats maybe didn't show much difference but the reality was very much different.

I'm glad we've ditched that turd of a software.

Wenger had nothing to do with Zaha or Pepe

and sorry to break it to you but Stat DNA is still here, think it's called something else though. Stats is back in the forefront of how we recruit again anyways, as per Edu.

 

[BigPoppaPump]

Ah, fair enough!

I think Kos was a good player for Arsenal, not a great one...he might be overrated by fans due to us not having that many expectational defensive players since the stadium move, though I can't imagine many ranking him that highly, tbh.

See if more people said this i'd be fine with it, Arsenal haven't had many great CBs so Koscielny is rated on that basis. Me personally I use to hate watching him, I can't stand a weak CB.

Koscielny is like the Almunia of CBs, he was just here so long and it never made sense. We should've moved on from him but Arsène didn't care about CBs.

 

[Blood on the Tracks]

Can't be doing with the way players like Koscielny get overrated when they're gone.

Doubt you'd find a poorer CB that made 255 appearances for us. Wouldn't have got those amount of games in any other Arsenal era.

He's lucky he was competing against the likes of Djourou, Senderos, Squillaci, Vermaelen etc for the majority of his career here instead of the likes of O'Leary, Adams, Keown, Bould, Sol, Kolo etc.

He was a fairly average CB, who for most of his career had the physical attributes to make up for his poor decision making skills / rushes of blood to the head.

The only time he looked really good was partnering Per, and that mainly tells you how good Per's leadership and organisational skills were to babysit him through games.

 

[MikelHadADream]

Mustafi was as a result of our changes strategy. Wenger would always go after a very specific target. Once we started introducing statdna we had our first, second and third targets.

What ended up happening is that instead of getting our first target we ended getting our 2,3 choice.

Instead of Kante we got Xhaka

Instead of zaha we got Pepe

Instead of Kolabaly we got Mustafi

The stats maybe didn't show much difference but the reality was very much different.

I'm glad we've ditched that turd of a software.

Jose Mourinho: "That's the way people that don't understand football analyse football, is with stats."

No truer words have ever come out of that man's mouth. Use stats to generate a list of potential players, fine. But the eye test should always be the deciding factor on whether to sign a player.

 

[BigPoppaPump]

No, I'm saying Mertesacker was never better than Kos apart from being tall and calm. He was also very error prone and had horrid games. He was still a good player though. Kos was much better though.

Koscielny was useless with every CB partner apart from Mertesacker, Per made whoever he was next to better. Koscielny was poverty with every other Cb pairing and was unimpressive for France next to Varane. He's just an average error prone player, if he wasn't at Arsenal he'd be in the bottom of Ligue 1/Ligue 2.

 

[BigPoppaPump]

Jose Mourinho: "That's the way people that don't understand football analyse football, is with stats."

No truer words have ever come out of that man's mouth. Use stats to generate a list of potential players, fine. But the eye test should always be the deciding factor on whether to sign a player.

I'm pretty sure Mourinho uses stats for every game and for transfers. Stats aren't black and white or 1+1=2, they're used to paint a picture over a long time. You have to use them within context.

 

[AberGooner]

^
Exactly my point, some people just don't know football and think pace = quality.

The thing with Koscielny was he was always having to make those last ditch tackles because he'd find himself out of position so often. I guess the heavy defeats we took in his era taints my view of him too much but admittedly that wasn't entirely his fault.

 

[L3T5 PL4Y]

Koscielny was useless with every CB partner apart from Mertesacker, Per made whoever he was next to better. Koscielny was poverty with every other Cb pairing and was unimpressive for France next to Varane. He's just an average error prone player, if he wasn't at Arsenal he'd be in the bottom of Ligue 1/Ligue 2.

That's just plain bullshit. His other Arsenal partners were clowns. We were a joke defensively under Wenger apart from spikes in form here and there during Kos' time here.

 

[MikelHadADream]

I'm pretty Mourinho uses stats for every and for transfers. Stats aren't black and white or 1+1=2, they're used to paint a picture over a long time. You have to use them within context.

Of course not, but I see people regularly on here pull up analytics and use them to compare players, or to use them as a sole justification as to whether a player is good or not. There are far to many variables in football that affect individual player stats to use them as a the deciding factor on whether to sign a player/judge a players ability.

It's where we went wrong with the Mustsfi signing.

 

[MikelHadADream]

The best way to summarise Kos and Per is if you fused the two of them, you'd get an absolutely elite defender. They both had massive strengths and weaknesses to their game, but masked eachothers deficiencies really well. By far the best defensive pairing we've had in the Emirates era.

 

[BigPoppaPump]

The thing with Koscielny was he was always having to make those last ditch tackles because he'd find himself out of position so often. I guess the heavy defeats we took in his era taints my view of him too much but admittedly that wasn't entirely his fault.

I remember one goal when Alexis scored vs us for United in the FA Cup. There was nowhere for Lukaku to pass to but Koscielny ran right at him leaving a massive gap for Alexis to run in. He would do braindead things like that all the time but no one called him out for it. I'll never understand why fans online rate him, no one from the local area did.

 

[BigPoppaPump]

That's just plain bullshit. His other Arsenal partners were clowns. We were a joke defensively under Wenger apart from spikes in form here and there during Kos' time here.

Koscielny was the lead clown tbh.