Mikel Arteta, First-Team Manager

[theHotHead]

So what? What we did with Wenger 30 years ago has no bearing on last season and where we are as club.

The entire club is f***ked and that's why we've gone from top 1-2 to top 8 over the last 20 years. Even master Wenger with 30 years experience dropped us down to 6th and Emery briefly kept us around there until completely collapsing in the final and his second season.

Regardless of manager this club needs huge work to stop the slide and that's why this window has been incredibly disappointing for me. I cannot believe Xhaka and Bellerin have not been sold, preferably along with Willock and AMN but the latter two can be useful at least. We also needed a CM on top of Lokonga (Fekir / Aouar) but that doesn't look likely at the moment and it does seem Ben White has affected our other business after all.

If Arteta is wank, he's wank and will be sacked soon enough. If he's not then hopefully it comes together this season and we see an improvement at least back into the top 6. As I've said before, I think more is unrealistic without big signings.

Either way it's hard to give a f**k about Arsenal these days anyway. Thank god for American Football.

Well Wenger signed Bellerin, Elneny, Xhaka, Lacazette and Auba. All of the underperforming players are Wenger players.

I know people like Elneny but the reality he isn't good enough to be anything other than fourth choice at best which is why I include him in that list.

I can';t believe the 3 players highlighted are STILL here, I mean FFS

[Goonerred]

So what? What we did with Wenger 30 years ago has no bearing on last season and where we are as club.

The entire club is f***ked and that's why we've gone from top 1-2 to top 8 over the last 20 years. Even master Wenger with 30 years experience dropped us down to 6th and Emery briefly kept us around there until completely collapsing in the final and his second season.

Regardless of manager this club needs huge work to stop the slide and that's why this window has been incredibly disappointing for me. I cannot believe Xhaka and Bellerin have not been sold, preferably along with Willock and AMN but the latter two can be useful at least. We also needed a CM on top of Lokonga (Fekir / Aouar) but that doesn't look likely at the moment and it does seem Ben White has affected our other business after all.

If Arteta is wank, he's wank and will be sacked soon enough. If he's not then hopefully it comes together this season and we see an improvement at least back into the top 6. As I've said before, I think more is unrealistic without big signings.

Either way it's hard to give a f**k about Arsenal these days anyway. Thank god for American Football.

Well Wenger signed Bellerin, Elneny, Xhaka, Lacazette and Auba. All of the underperforming players are Wenger players.

I know people like Elneny but the reality he isn't good enough to be anything other than fourth choice at best which is why I include him in that list.

I can';t believe the 3 players highlighted are STILL here, I mean FFS

I know it's unbelievable, Mustafi would be on that list too if Arteta had had his wish.

[theHotHead]

It doesn't matter what Emery did in his first season - that has nothing to do with what was actually handed over to Arteta.
You can't ignore 19/20. That was when the handover actually happened! What was handed over was a team who had taken 23 points from 18 matches and were in crisis.

Right now were are in better shape than when Arteta took over. Not by much mind you.
But we have improved.

Come on Jay, don't try to dismiss the key points of the argument because you know it defeats your point. Thjere are many similarities which I think makes the comparison as apples to apples as you can get:

- Both managers had a full season
- Both of those full seasons followed taking over a team in turmoil
- Both managers spent £70M on players (I could argue Arteta ended up with gross £140m worth of players)

Emery out-performed Arteta on a level playing field Jay, what happened in 2019-20 has no bearing whatsoever on this. In fact, its even more of a damning indictment of Arteta because Arteta had over half a season to get familiar with the players before the start of his full season !

[Salibatelli]

I think Emery has been shown to have outperformed Arteta if we compare both of their spells, he also beat him over two legs in the EL, more conclusive evidence, that was a big tie for me, Arteta needed to win that give the horrible season we’d had.

Emery was deemed not good enough, so clearly Arteta isn’t either since he’s been worse, I don’t think there’s any genuine doubt about that.

[Santi]

Well Arteta won a trophy in his first 6 months and Emery won f**k all, so if you want to make such basic incomparable arguments then we can. Btw pointing out that a 15+ year seasoned manager beat a 2nd year manager over 2 legs by 1 goal doesn't really give you a strong argument.

This is what annoys me about this forum, it's just a constant slinging of specific stats to suit either side of the argument and yet it goes on for days going nowhere.

End of the day we've had shit for the last 6 years or so at least:

Wenger - once the complete and utter monsieur GOAT Arsenal manager, slowly but surely making more and more excuses as we fell down the table. Maybe some of it was right, maybe he did actually do a good job to keep us top 4 for so long but at the end of the day he was faltering and had to go. He also had enough responsibility at the club to be blamed for bad signings and therefore our slide. Few FA cups helped delay the inevitable.

Emery - first season was utter dogshit football from the off but the results were keeping him going until the top 4 choke. Had he not f***ked that up or embarrassed us in the EL final then we'd have been back on track pretty quickly. In the end it proved that he was just shit and the second season was a travesty.

Arteta - looked decent albeit not spectacular from the start, seemed to make us a bit more solid with 5 atb and guided us to another FA cup in his first season of management, a good achievement but not one to dwell on. More than his predecessor had done at the club despite 15 years experience. Second season was pretty shocking from the off and really he could've been sacked after Everton in December, scraped through that and got us playing some better stuff (by fluke or recognition who knows) in Jan/Feb before reverting to average at best football for the final 3 months.


Now does it really f***ing matter whether any of them are better than the others? We've gone from 30 years experience to 15 years experience to no experience. Of course there are going to be differences, other clubs don't stand still and players move on/get older/stop performing (looking at you auba) so trying to compare Arteta to Emery is futile imo. All we should do is look at the entirety of last season and say 'that wasn't good enough, how do we improve?'.

The board have decided that the manager can improve this team so no point bursting blood vessels over it, he will be the manager for at least the first 10 games I'd imagine. Now we just have to focus on this season and how we can take maximum points with the manager, players and staff we have.

Given the current state of those 3 items in place, my view is that our realistic best (including no Europe) is 5th place in the league. Regardless of last season or seasons 20 years ago, I would deem that a good season because it's the maximum (again in my view) that we can achieve league wise. Signings, new manager, over-performing players could obviously change that but I'm fairly sure we'll get none of the 3.

[jayramfootball]

It doesn't matter what Emery did in his first season - that has nothing to do with what was actually handed over to Arteta.
You can't ignore 19/20. That was when the handover actually happened! What was handed over was a team who had taken 23 points from 18 matches and were in crisis.

Right now were are in better shape than when Arteta took over. Not by much mind you.
But we have improved.

Come on Jay, don't try to dismiss the key points of the argument because you know it defeats your point. Thjere are many similarities which I think makes the comparison as apples to apples as you can get:

- Both managers had a full season
- Both of those full seasons followed taking over a team in turmoil
- Both managers spent £70M on players (I could argue Arteta ended up with gross £140m worth of players)

Emery out-performed Arteta on a level playing field Jay, what happened in 2019-20 has no bearing whatsoever on this. In fact, its even more of a damning indictment of Arteta because Arteta had over half a season to get familiar with the players before the start of his full season !

I still don't see why we should cut off Emery's last half a season. Makes no sense.
The point where he handed the keys over was the starting point for Arteta.
From that starting point - overall - we have got better.
Wenger got 6th I think in his last season - but it was a decline from where we had been and had been going on for years.

Emery got 5th and then took us into a serious decline where I think we were 4 points off relegation. That is why he got sacked.
He'd had a full season and then went into a serious decline.

Arteta on the other hand had half a season and won a trophy, went into last year and had us in a similar position near Christmas as Emery did the season before. The reason he wasn't sacked was that he had not had a full season yet, had won that trophy and by that stage was less than a year into his tenure. There were many good reasons to sack him at that point and I would not have complained. I actually thought that 7 game run of winning only 2 points warranted him getting the sack. But he wasn't sacked. It's now history.

Arteta recovered things in the last 6 months of the season.
It would be utterly moronic to sack a guy coming off a 6-month spell of winning the 2nd or 3rd most points in the PL and taking that into a new season.
Can you imagine being in a job and your boss says, hey this needs to get better. We're giving you one last chance. You then deliver and your boss sacks you anyway? That would be stupid.

If , however, he has a similar slump up to Christmas, with a full season already behind him, I would expect he will be sacked.

The Arteta bashing on this forum is ridiculous in the extreme.
Everything is turned around as being his fault except when something goes right - then it's not his achievement.
We even have Saliba and Guendouzi being heralded as world stars and a big miss for us purely because Arteta doesn't fancy them, whilst everyone he signs is labelled as rubbish or not worth it. All before a ball is kicked this season. I only hope our new players don't read any of the utter shite being posted about them from some fans...and then to top it all off these negative doomers run around accusing fans of being trolls because they don't want to slag off everything about our club.

Time to wake up HH.
I am quite prepared to engage in discussion about Arteta's flaws but I find it worthless to do so when the debate is so extreme and toxic.
In the face of that, I am only going to discuss the positives.

[starmandb]

How are we competing for the title exactly, we never get anywhere near the top teams.

Two 8th places doesn’t suggest we have a manager capable of competing.

Gorra good point

Alex Ferguson finished 11th and 13th at Man Utd 88/89 and 89/90

What's that got to do with Arsenal and the clown? I don't care about Man U I care about Arsenal being managed by an inexperienced clown.

Ferguson is one of the greatest ever to sit in a dugout what did his 11th and 13th place suggest?

[starmandb]

How are we competing for the title exactly, we never get anywhere near the top teams.

Two 8th places doesn’t suggest we have a manager capable of competing.

Gorra good point

Alex Ferguson finished 11th and 13th at Man Utd 88/89 and 89/90

Yes but SAF had already amassed 8 major domestic honours at Aberdeen, plus the UEFA Cup, plus the European Super Cup !! He earned the right to have more time.

I can’t argue with that
It’s the blunt instrument of a league position that I take issue with
The clock is ticking on Arteta but it should be on managers always
The deserving time to put things right was taken to an extreme with wenger
I would never want to see that happen again

[starmandb]

Gabriel Martinelli:

‘I lost about five months because of the injury, but I think in the end we did well. We had one of the best campaigns in the league after Christmas,’ Martinelli revealed while on international duty for Brazil at the Olympics.

He added: ‘It’s a new team, with a new coach too, but already with experience and I consider it one of the best in the world already.

‘We had good games at the end of the season, the players are confident, so we have to try to go down this same path, so we need to start the season well.’

This is why our run of form was important - it gives the players confidence.
This is exactly the attitude we need our players to have.

Meanwhile a website published an article in response to Martinelli's comments that state:

Arsenal starlet has much to learn and may regret outrageous claim

Youngster Gabriel Martinelli has made a claim about the current Arsenal squad that is likely to cause mirth in the white half of north London.

He is certainly not short on confidence. But his assessment of where the current Arsenal side stands in the footballing pecking order may need a re-think.

So its not just us that think his comments are laughable.

https://www.teamtalk.com/news/gabriel-martinelli-arsenal-much-learn-may-regret-outrageous-claim

1) that article is not referring to the point raised by our young star that our second half of the season of form has given confidence. It refers to his comment that we are one of the best teams in the world. That's actually quite a broad statement. If you take all football clubs in the work, he's correct. Probably top 25.
2) it's sad that a random website (not even and Arsenal site) laughing at one of players is reposted here. Would have been better to just accept the obvious point Hothead that a strong 5 month run of form will absolutely breed confidence. That's why every league game is important.

Bottom line is one of our young stars has shown exactly the right mindset for what we need.
I hope he doesn't listen to a word from the small minority of fans wo have become so toxic to our club.

I would say we are one of the top 15 teams in Europe at the moment
And as you say it’s absolutely disgusting that in the desire to be right
Some put themselves in the shoes of other teams fans to try to prove a point
A sweaty old Spurs shoe
For shame

[starmandb]

Gabriel Martinelli:

‘I lost about five months because of the injury, but I think in the end we did well. We had one of the best campaigns in the league after Christmas,’ Martinelli revealed while on international duty for Brazil at the Olympics.

He added: ‘It’s a new team, with a new coach too, but already with experience and I consider it one of the best in the world already.

‘We had good games at the end of the season, the players are confident, so we have to try to go down this same path, so we need to start the season well.’

This is why our run of form was important - it gives the players confidence.
This is exactly the attitude we need our players to have.

Meanwhile a website published an article in response to Martinelli's comments that state:

Arsenal starlet has much to learn and may regret outrageous claim

Youngster Gabriel Martinelli has made a claim about the current Arsenal squad that is likely to cause mirth in the white half of north London.

He is certainly not short on confidence. But his assessment of where the current Arsenal side stands in the footballing pecking order may need a re-think.

So its not just us that think his comments are laughable.

https://www.teamtalk.com/news/gabriel-martinelli-arsenal-much-learn-may-regret-outrageous-claim

I still remember Wenger being laughed at when he said we could go unbeaten in the league for a season.

Yes
I also remember the daily mirror headline when we went to anfield in 89
YOU HAVE NO CHANCE ARSENAL
Some on here would not have taken the coach out the garage

[starmandb]

Small minority according to you and some random website most people here don’t even look at!

You may not accept it by Arsenal fans aren’t behind Arteta, most want him out and some random meaningless poll by some little known website doesn’t change that.

Yea talk has been around since he 90s, years longer than this other site you refer to.

It's a website... an opinion piece of one guy laughing at one of our players and our club. Not the opinion of 1000s of Arsenal fans, the majority of which think Arteta deserves to be in charge for the coming season, not an Arsenal player.

Once again from one of our PLAYERS. A young star.

"We had one of the best campaigns in the league after Christmas,

We had good games at the end of the season, the players are confident, so we have to try to go down this same path, so we need to start the season well."

Bravo Gabby, Bravo! Attitude spot on.
Couldn't have said it better myself.
Don't listen to the small minority and keep that attitude.



Some of you so-called Arsenal fans need to check yourself. You're entrenching yourself more and more by the day to the point now where you are joining in with a journalist (wouldn't be surprised if he was a Spurs fan) laughing at one of our young stars because he has a positive attitude.
The attitude Martinelli is showing to the world is EXACTLY the attitude we want our players to have.

Yeah trouble is Arteta doesn’t pick him lol!

As for your 1000s of fan comment, it could be 10 fans or 50 fans, they don’t tell you how many people responded, but also the people who tend to read that site are probably very pro everything Arsenal which obviously influences the result.

I mean who has a bad season and two 8th places and is then is happy with the manager?

It’s ridiculous to be honest, at any other big club he’s had got the sack a while ago and for good reason, Arsenal and some Arsenal fans seem to be the exception.

Apart from the 31 times when he did pick him

[DiamondGooner]

The sooner this half wit leaves us the better. I saw Xhaka and Elneny on the pitch and I lost my shit!!!

We're over half way through the window and there wasn't one change in the starting line up to last years players.

Couldn't believe my eyes.

That's why I wasn't celebrating Lokonga or Tavares, because Arteta hasn't bought them in to be 1st team starters ............ meaning that the only player we bought that improves our starting 11 is White.

On top of that instead of replacing the likes of Bellerin and Xhaka who have been whoring themselves out across Europe trying to get out of the club, the nut ball Arteta offers them contract extension with more wages than they were on!!!!!

This starting 11 finished 8th and we've not improved on one player, not one!

I even said White barely counts because we were supposed to have Saliba anyway, so all we've done is bought another CB because Arteta refuses to use the one we already bought.

Its complete madness ............

Playing the same way, same formation, same starting 11 .........I just can't with this guy.

[theHotHead]

I'll have some of this My posts in red

Well Arteta won a trophy in his first 6 months and Emery won f**k all, so if you want to make such basic incomparable arguments then we can. Btw pointing out that a 15+ year seasoned manager beat a 2nd year manager over 2 legs by 1 goal doesn't really give you a strong argument. Arteta won a trophy, but is also responsible for putting us 15th at Christmas and our first non participation in European competition for 25 years, so clearly that load of shite cancels out the good of the trophy. Emery with a shit team/squad beat Arteta over 2 legs and guess what, Emery won the Europa League with a shit team as well. Levels.

This is what annoys me about this forum, it's just a constant slinging of specific stats to suit either side of the argument and yet it goes on for days going nowhere. The stats I provided in my comparison are not cherry picked stats, I don't need to cherry pick stats when the full season of stats are there for both managers. the best comparison is the full season stats for both managers, they both only have one to choose from.

End of the day we've had shit for the last 6 years or so at least:

Wenger - once the complete and utter monsieur GOAT Arsenal manager, slowly but surely making more and more excuses as we fell down the table. Maybe some of it was right, maybe he did actually do a good job to keep us top 4 for so long but at the end of the day he was faltering and had to go. He also had enough responsibility at the club to be blamed for bad signings and therefore our slide. Few FA cups helped delay the inevitable.

Emery - first season was utter dogshit football from the off but the results were keeping him going until the top 4 choke. Had he not f***ked that up or embarrassed us in the EL final then we'd have been back on track pretty quickly. In the end it proved that he was just shit and the second season was a travesty.

Arteta - looked decent albeit not spectacular from the start, seemed to make us a bit more solid with 5 atb and guided us to another FA cup in his first season of management, a good achievement but not one to dwell on. More than his predecessor had done at the club despite 15 years experience. Second season was pretty shocking from the off and really he could've been sacked after Everton in December, scraped through that and got us playing some better stuff (by fluke or recognition who knows) in Jan/Feb before reverting to average at best football for the final 3 months.

I agree, all 3 managers were shit.

Now does it really f***ing matter whether any of them are better than the others? We've gone from 30 years experience to 15 years experience to no experience. Of course there are going to be differences, other clubs don't stand still and players move on/get older/stop performing (looking at you auba) so trying to compare Arteta to Emery is futile imo. All we should do is look at the entirety of last season and say 'that wasn't good enough, how do we improve?'. It does matter because you are standing there arguing the point in favour of Arteta, I am arguing against Arteta. If it didn't matter you wouldn't have chosen to argue for Arteta. We who argue against Arteta, for the most part, want consistency, if Emery's performance was not god enough that it warranted him getting replaced the same standard should be the case when judging Arteta, he too should be replaced.

The board have decided that the manager can improve this team so no point bursting blood vessels over it, he will be the manager for at least the first 10 games I'd imagine. Now we just have to focus on this season and how we can take maximum points with the manager, players and staff we have. It makes no sense why they would give this support to Arteta but not to Emery. Emery was a proven manager with trophies to prove it, Villareal are back in the CL next season, meanwhile Arsenal won't even be in the Europa League. Kroenke backed the wrong horse.

Given the current state of those 3 items in place, my view is that our realistic best (including no Europe) is 5th place in the league. Regardless of last season or seasons 20 years ago, I would deem that a good season because it's the maximum (again in my view) that we can achieve league wise. Signings, new manager, over-performing players could obviously change that but I'm fairly sure we'll get none of the 3. I think top 4 is perfectly achieveable, given the lack of distractions and the fact Man U have an even worse manager ... and I still don't rate Chelsea.

[theHotHead]

The Arteta bashing on this forum is ridiculous in the extreme.
Everything is turned around as being his fault except when something goes right - then it's not his achievement.
We even have Saliba and Guendouzi being heralded as world stars and a big miss for us purely because Arteta doesn't fancy them, whilst everyone he signs is labelled as rubbish or not worth it. All before a ball is kicked this season. I only hope our new players don't read any of the utter shite being posted about them from some fans...and then to top it all off these negative doomers run around accusing fans of being trolls because they don't want to slag off everything about our club.

Time to wake up HH.
I am quite prepared to engage in discussion about Arteta's flaws but I find it worthless to do so when the debate is so extreme and toxic.
In the face of that, I am only going to discuss the positives.

I don't agree, I don't think it is extreme at all. Ok, so you have one or 2 who didn't give Arteta any leeway, they didn't want him and everything he did they jumped on, I don't need to name names. but the majority of others were fans like me who either gave Arteta their support from the beginning or who were won round by our improved performances and, of course the FA Cup win.

So it has not been the case of fans with an agenda ganging up on Arteta, or being unfair, for the most part he got a fair shot from most of us, but we got fed up with his stupid mistakes, stupid decisions and arrogance. We went through it with Wenger, we went through it with Emery, now we went through it with Arteta, aint nobody got time fo' dat !

How you can say its extreme is a mystery, even Ozim as negative as he has been since he joined the forum at least makes fair and reasonable arguments against Arteta, they are generally balanced arguments. You cannot in all honesty say that 80% of the comments that are negative are not balanced Jay. You only say its extreme because there are so many people who do not see what you see and want him gone, doesn't make the arguments extreme. It becomes toxic when people cross the line but, show me a forum that discusses any topic that has a clear divide of opinion that doesn't get toxic and I will show you a fake forum !

Arteta is the manager, he is not just a head coach, so decisions on many things Emery was not responsible for Arteta is responsible for !! It is therefore right that he gets the blame for most things. I know some posters won't give Arteta credit for the good things - I am not one of them, because from the beginning I have said our issues are NOT the fault of the players, so the manager is responsible for the good and the bad in my opinion. but I am not going to praise the manager for stuff he hasn't done.

[Nuggets]

I'll have some of this My posts in red

Well Arteta won a trophy in his first 6 months and Emery won f**k all, so if you want to make such basic incomparable arguments then we can. Btw pointing out that a 15+ year seasoned manager beat a 2nd year manager over 2 legs by 1 goal doesn't really give you a strong argument. Arteta won a trophy, but is also responsible for putting us 15th at Christmas and our first non participation in European competition for 25 years, so clearly that load of shite cancels out the good of the trophy. Emery with a shit team/squad beat Arteta over 2 legs and guess what, Emery won the Europa League with a shit team as well. Levels.

This is what annoys me about this forum, it's just a constant slinging of specific stats to suit either side of the argument and yet it goes on for days going nowhere. The stats I provided in my comparison are not cherry picked stats, I don't need to cherry pick stats when the full season of stats are there for both managers. the best comparison is the full season stats for both managers, they both only have one to choose from.

End of the day we've had shit for the last 6 years or so at least:

Wenger - once the complete and utter monsieur GOAT Arsenal manager, slowly but surely making more and more excuses as we fell down the table. Maybe some of it was right, maybe he did actually do a good job to keep us top 4 for so long but at the end of the day he was faltering and had to go. He also had enough responsibility at the club to be blamed for bad signings and therefore our slide. Few FA cups helped delay the inevitable.

Emery - first season was utter dogshit football from the off but the results were keeping him going until the top 4 choke. Had he not f***ked that up or embarrassed us in the EL final then we'd have been back on track pretty quickly. In the end it proved that he was just shit and the second season was a travesty.

Arteta - looked decent albeit not spectacular from the start, seemed to make us a bit more solid with 5 atb and guided us to another FA cup in his first season of management, a good achievement but not one to dwell on. More than his predecessor had done at the club despite 15 years experience. Second season was pretty shocking from the off and really he could've been sacked after Everton in December, scraped through that and got us playing some better stuff (by fluke or recognition who knows) in Jan/Feb before reverting to average at best football for the final 3 months.

I agree, all 3 managers were shit.

Now does it really f***ing matter whether any of them are better than the others? We've gone from 30 years experience to 15 years experience to no experience. Of course there are going to be differences, other clubs don't stand still and players move on/get older/stop performing (looking at you auba) so trying to compare Arteta to Emery is futile imo. All we should do is look at the entirety of last season and say 'that wasn't good enough, how do we improve?'. It does matter because you are standing there arguing the point in favour of Arteta, I am arguing against Arteta. If it didn't matter you wouldn't have chosen to argue for Arteta. We who argue against Arteta, for the most part, want consistency, if Emery's performance was not god enough that it warranted him getting replaced the same standard should be the case when judging Arteta, he too should be replaced.

The board have decided that the manager can improve this team so no point bursting blood vessels over it, he will be the manager for at least the first 10 games I'd imagine. Now we just have to focus on this season and how we can take maximum points with the manager, players and staff we have. It makes no sense why they would give this support to Arteta but not to Emery. Emery was a proven manager with trophies to prove it, Villareal are back in the CL next season, meanwhile Arsenal won't even be in the Europa League. Kroenke backed the wrong horse.

Given the current state of those 3 items in place, my view is that our realistic best (including no Europe) is 5th place in the league. Regardless of last season or seasons 20 years ago, I would deem that a good season because it's the maximum (again in my view) that we can achieve league wise. Signings, new manager, over-performing players could obviously change that but I'm fairly sure we'll get none of the 3. I think top 4 is perfectly achieveable, given the lack of distractions and the fact Man U have an even worse manager ... and I still don't rate Chelsea.

Makes a lot of sense to me, some people just can't see this clown is taking us anywhere, by some miracle we won the FA cup but what has he done since? ...besides, take us out of Europe for the first time in 25 years.