Mikel Arteta: Managerial Royalty

[Rasmi]

Again, average or not average is not the issue here. Why are you focusing on that?

People have different definition of average and I use it because @HairSprayGooners use the average and not good enough players as excuses to defend arteta.

So let me ask you again, would you straight swap Pepe, Aubameyang, Lacazatte, Bellerin & Saka with Mac Allister, Trossard, Maupay, Veltman & Alzate?

Absolutely not. It’s not even close when you write it down like that.

 

[Sweet'n'Soulful]

He had a First XI on paper that could challenge for titles *thanks to him* making some good buys in the first decade of this century but he never had squad depth for arduous long seasons to provide depth and cover for injuries. Anyway, ask yourself if you would have advocated the Wenger buys for those first teams with the limited resources he had or was that all his genius you fail to give him credit for.

Well of course it was thanks to him because he was the manager. Everything good we done on the Wenger was because of Wenger. You could apply that to why we dropped off as well though but people aren’t willing to. They instead point to things like toxic atmospheres without explaining how that is meant to interfere with a managers daily routine when he’s with the players. It’s just meaningless rubbish.All you are actually doing when you cite these reasons is giving further evidence that he was no longer the man for the job. I discount that though because, as I say, it holds no water.

 

[Makingtrax]

Says the guy who completely ignores the data presented to him

I think deep down you know you’re ignoring the wider picture and trying to angle an argument of a small set of data. But even so we haven’t topped Spain once in those years you’re isolating.

 

[El Duderino]

2 weeks ago when villa beat us he said this lool. Even if the results were good I just can’t warm to the guy. He carries himself like he was this great player and great manager

Remember when literally every one in the forum bar teamsouthwest read stuff like this from Emery and were done with him?

I want Mikel to succeed but the amount of excuses made for him are incredible.

 

[Sweet'n'Soulful]

If you were Wenger Out (myself included) and are happy with what Arteta has been up to then there isn't any point having a discussion.

Not one person on this forum or anywhere in the fan base is happy with our current league position. The recent stuff is far more encouraging though, but we can’t go back in time and get back those points that we have lost so all we can do is look at our more recent points haul and take the positives from that, which is what people are doing. Some people don’t want to look at that and some people do. So some people are not open to recognising improvement and some people are. I don’t see the point in not being open to persuasion in this game.

 

[Finesse]

Again, average or not average is not the issue here. Why are you focusing on that?

People have different definition of average and I use it because @HairSprayGooners use the average and not good enough players as excuses to defend arteta.

So let me ask you again, would you straight swap Pepe, Aubameyang, Lacazatte, Bellerin & Saka with Mac Allister, Trossard, Maupay, Veltman & Alzate?

I am focussing on that for obvious reasons. Read my post again. Again you should be directing this at him if you are referring to his inference of average players. Again don't kick the ball into the tall grass with me.

 

[OnlyOne]

Any news?

 

[Sweet'n'Soulful]

I was pro Wenger till the end but I can kind of see why some people turned on him towards the end.

We'd seen everything we were going to see from Wenger, we knew how we'd set up away to big teams. We could predict the subs at the 70th minute mark. Things had become somewhat stale in general.

I think a lot of fans just became bored and frustrated after such a long tenure and wanted change, maybe change for the sake of change in hindsight. I think it's a fairly natural reaction to be honest.

Sometimes the grass just isn't greener though. That's a lesson to learn.

I will say this though. If we'd have replaced Wenger with someone like Klopp when he was available or another manager of that calibre, we'd probably not being romanticizing finishing 4th under Wenger in his latter years, the way we are currently.

I for one did not care whether the grass was greener or not and said as much on numerous occasions. It was so boring, predictable and monotonous. I just wanted to see us fail in a different way. That was excitement for me As it is, we won cup and we have been **** in the league… in two seasons... I’m kind of happy with that! Since he went we got to a final of the Europa league and won an FA Cup… Pretty eventful I’d say.

 

[Iceman10]

@Iceman10 .. Bellerin is the best we have got. Meaning as much as he is not fully adept to offer the dynamism , speed , guile of KT levels as a full back , he is better than AMN and Cedric. The way Arteta wants us to play has further exposed Bellerin's deficiency. The only full back in the club offering that kind of capacity is KT. It is what we saw Cancello and Zinchenko do last weekend. Not only do they pin down our full backs , the respective wide players in Sterling and Mahrez move around and are efficient in and out of possession.

Arteta is a young manager and made his teething mistakes. The FA Cup triumph climbed into his head and naturally so. He is human. His stance on Özil and missing out on Aouar forced him to try something different from what he planned during the summer. Relying on Willian as the tonic and trying different formations to that effect. It nearly cost him this job. We all saw it happen. He found a silver bullet in ESR when his hands were forced and since then it worked for him and the team.

I consider he is young manager and learning his trade. So I ask myself has he learned from the earlier setback? All managers do and it reflects on decisions thereafter. . From December I think he has. Willian is no longer a starter. ESR is now fully in the team. He brought in MO and is using him with ESR. There is a desire to solve the attacking nucleus and create a rhythm. Arteta has solved the defensive issue. Give credit where it is due. Now he must find the rhythm in attack and you can see signs of it. I am a big critic of Arteta but I am also objective. This is football. Now how are some of the players raising their bars to meet him half way? Auba , Laca , Pepe etc A vintage Auba would have put to bed the Benfica tie with a hattrick. Is that entirely the Manager's fault? Watch the misses and see how we carved open Benfica...does the Manager not get credit too for it?

@Iceman10 bro we are an okay squad with a very few top players , but the rest are very average and it reflects on how we play. Watch our build up and the system is there...you see what the manager wants...but in the execution , you see individual errors and deficiencies negate it. ESR and Saka always show the class and keep improving because they are individually good enough for the way we play.

You make some good points but for Bellerin I wasn’t arguing about pecking order, instead more about squad depth/rotation and squad competition. When we talk about the squad being “average” that is a vague term and I prefer to state what position in the table would be expected from this current squad, including AMN, Guendouzi, Torreira, and Martinelli (latest to be marginalised a little). My expectation has been Top 6-8, not 10th.

You bring up system and direction since December but you also point out the over-reliance on Saka and ESR. What you are saying is we need buys instead of bringing out the best from Pepe, Martinelli, Reiss, and some others. That’s the problem because that all will cost a lot of money, losing a lot in trying to dump Pepe to make way also, and Saka/ESR were already at the club pre-Arteta anyway, so they do not contribute to credit for confidence in any transfer market moves either. The only transfer move by Arteta for creative has been Willian.

The question is if there is a better way for us to get Top 6, forget Top 4. I believe there has been instead of Arteta’s inefficient use of assets and resources at his disposal. If we get back into EL/CL next season we can continue with Arteta’s way, or at least I am
ok with that. If we don’t and we have limited transfer budget as a result I think we have to go in a different direction.

 

[Makingtrax]

I just wanted to see us fail in a different way.

Oh my days.

 

[Iceman10]

Well of course it was thanks to him because he was the manager. Everything good we done on the Wenger was because of Wenger. You could apply that to why we dropped off as well though but people aren’t willing to. They instead point to things like toxic atmospheres without explaining how that is meant to interfere with a managers daily routine when he’s with the players. It’s just meaningless rubbish.All you are actually doing when you cite these reasons is giving further evidence that he was no longer the man for the job. I discount that though because, as I say, it holds no water.

The stuff around 2012-14 contributed to what I understand as a man in his 60s feeling things so much it affected his health, and in my view his job performance also. If you are saying that made him unsuitable for the job by then that is fine, but Arsène is a man who had lived a clean life and is actually pretty fit for his age. It didn’t have to be that way if a certain faction of fans were not going on about not winning PL trophies during a period he was still overachieving with the resources he had through stadium transition. I’m not talking about his final two seasons, but before that. Things like harassing the manager at a railway station cross the line, but maybe that’s just me.

 

[Rasmi]

Not one person on this forum or anywhere in the fan base is happy with our current league position. The recent stuff is far more encouraging though, but we can’t go back in time and get back those points that we have lost so all we can do is look at our more recent points haul and take the positives from that, which is what people are doing. Some people don’t want to look at that and some people do. So some people are not open to recognising improvement and some people are. I don’t see the point in not being open to persuasion in this game.

The recent stuff is 1 win, 1 draw and 3 losses in the league with Leicester away coming up.

 

[Makingtrax]

The stuff around 2012-14 contributed to what I understand as a man in his 60s feeling things so much it affected his health, and in my view his job performance also. If you are saying that made him unsuitable for the job by then that is fine, but Arsène is a man who had lived a clean life and is actually pretty fit for his age. It didn’t have to be that way if a certain faction of fans were not going on about not winning PL trophies during a period he was still overachieving with the resources he had through stadium transition. I’m not talking about his final two seasons, but before that. Things like harassing the manager at a railway station cross the line, but maybe that’s just me.

Don’t forget shouting abuse during the match, the protests outside the stadium, vloggers abusing him on social media, planes, banners at events around the world. It shocked me, how people could behave like that with such a classy guy who’d had 20 years continuous top 4 and got these stats. And apparently this was decline. There are so many ****ing idiots about.
2015/16
Position 2nd
Clean sheets 1st
Expected goals 1st
Goals for 3rd
Goal difference 4th
Expected goals against 1st
Champions League last 16
3 previous years spending £137m, 7th in the league

I wonder has any other football manager suffered such public humiliation, after performing so well for so long!! And the clowns who did this are making excuses for being mid table.

 

[Blood on the Tracks]

Don’t forget shouting abuse during the match, the protests outside the stadium, vloggers abusing him on social media, planes, banners at events around the world. It shocked me, how people could behave like that with such a classy guy who’d had 20 years continuous top 4 and got these stats. And apparently this was decline. There are so many ****ing idiots about.
2015/16
Position 2nd
Clean sheets 1st
Expected goals 1st
Goals for 3rd
Goal difference 4th
Expected goals against 1st
Champions League last 16
3 previous years spending £137m, 7th in the league

I wonder has any other football manager suffered such public humiliation, after performing so well for so long!! And the clowns who did this are making excuses for being mid table.

I largely agree with you.

You're not some dispassionate observer though. You use analytics and data to defend your stance up until the time period things started tailing off a bit in Wenger's 18 last months or so. Then everything gets blamed on anecdotes about banners, social media etc

The plane and social media stuff are anecdotes around which you've concocted a hypothesis. There's no actual evidence that any of those things led to our decline in objective, measurable reality. Correlation doesn't necessarily equal causation.

You want that theory to be true because it wouldn't frame Wenger as being in any kind of decline.

We've all got our biases, so I'm not having a go. I just don't know why you won't admit it

 

[Macho]

Oh my days.

Whatever floats your boat and gets you through the sh*tness I guess

I was just honest with my self and admitted I don't have a clue about football and bought into the headlines at the time. This is all deserved unfortunately.

 

[Oxeki]

I don't really rate Arteta that much although I'm willing to give him a bit of time. It's clear that we're not progressing under him. What really gets to me is how some fans like Hairspray are claiming that midtable is now acceptable.

Everything that happened this season juts proves that we were all stupid to think guys like Emery and Arteta could do better than Wenger.

I'm pretty certain we'd be comfortably top four if Wenger was still here.

I remember the 15/16 season where we finished second was a bit similar to this season where other top teams were having inconsistent results but we were able to finish 2nd despite a huge number injuries to our best players and guys like Giroud doing everything possible to sabotage us

There's no empirical evidence to suggest that we've improved under Arteta. You could argue under Emery performance was just as good if not better. But the Arteta noshers will have you believe that we're playing some prime Wenger ball and that he's working with a squad on the same level to Burnley.

 

[ArtetaOut]

****ing disgrace, the whole lot of you

 

[Makingtrax]

The plane and social media stuff are anecdotes around which you've concocted a hypothesis. There's no actual evidence that any of those things led to our decline in objective, measurable reality. Correlation doesn't necessarily equal causation.

What? Of course there’s evidence. He’d been Mr consistency, never faltered no matter what the owners threw at him moneywise, top 4 for 20 years. Unheard of. He’d just finished 2nd above Klopp, Poch, LVG, Pelligrini, Mourinho. And suddenly he dropped out when the fan campaign to remove him really started in earnest. There’s your facts and evidence, no hypothesis.

To suggest that he would have declined anyway without the campaign is laughable. To suggest that all that humiliating sh!t had no effect on him or the team is beyond belief and that is most certainly what is without proof.

 

[AW49]

I mean, there’s clearly been progression since Chelsea/ESR introduction. It’s just a question of if he should be fired based on the insane squad building decisions (Willian deal/persistence on starting, no CAM addition) that led to those results in the first third of the season.

 

[Toby]

****ing disgrace, the whole lot of you

Best thing about that actually are the last two lines: manberg2, manberg3, manberg4, manberg5, manberg6, Baguette, Manberg10 and finally simba. What a nutter.