It’s been a whirlwind 18 months at Arsenal under Unai Emery

I’ve been trying to think of all of the problems that have arisen at Arsenal since Wenger left. Some of them I have detailed in various 1000+ word posts here and on Arseblog but others I have struggled to remember either happening or was able to put together into a coherent single tweet/post. But today’s article in the Athletic by Gunnerblog details several of the reasons why Koscielny left and after I tweet-bragged about getting it right on this blog (Koscielny sits this one out) one of my followers recapped the various player turmoil that the club has been through since Unai joined:

I also tweeted something similar this morning after news broke that Torreira’s agent is saying that the Uruguayan is unhappy at Arsenal. That news follows on the heels of the Xhaka thing, Bellerin’s agent saying Hector might want to play in Serie A, Aubameyang’s recent Instagram story, and well.. it’s a mess here now.

Let me attempt a recap (based on the new information in the Athletic article):

  • First thing he did, Emery takes too long announcing who will be captain, angering Koscielny who was then club captain
  • Clubs spends £65m on a DM, CB, Goalkeeper, and diamond in the rough B2B MFer
  • Club revokes Ramsey contract offer
  • Unai drops Ramsey (then plays him)
  • Unai picks fight with Ozil
  • Makes Cech “play it out from the back” which was unedifying
  • Goes on a 22-game unbeaten run, many stattos claim it’s a fugazi
  • The Denis Suarez Deal
  • Rushes Koscielny back – player clearly unfit, can’t even jump
  • Loses 4th place after a disastrous run-in
  • Smashed to pieces in the Europa League final
  • Koscielny demands a trade
  • Monreal demands a trade
  • Mkhitaryan demands trade
  • Cech retires

Now we are 1/3 of the way through this season and despite the statistical evidence on the wall this summer, Arsenal persisted with Emery and things are starting to really spin out of control:

  • Dithers on naming captain (again)
  • Names five captains including supporter lightning-rod Xhaka as main captain
  • Names Ozil fifth captain (though a vote?)
  • Increased fighting with Ozil
  • Made the Arsenal attack worse (despite getting the £70m wide player he wanted)
  • Made the Arsenal defense much worse (despite buying another experienced CB)
  • Made Arsenal’s midfield worse (despite playing two and having a real DM)
  • Xhaka booed off, tells fans to f-off, looks like the player will be off in January
  • Lacazette likes post calling for Emery to be sacked
  • Aubameyang named captain, hangs out with Troopz, gives everyone who disagrees with him a middle-finger emoji a few days later on Insta
  • Torreira’s agent says he may want to leave
  • Bellerin’s agent says the player might be interested in playing in Serie A

Ripping off the bandages that Wenger used to hold the club together for 22 years was always going to be painful and some of these are growing pains, no doubt. And in fairness to the board the team composition was mostly older, overpaid, and injury prone Wenger loyalists so a clearout was inevitable. But even given all of that it’s been a whirlwind 18 months under Unai Emery.

What’s truly crazy is that I think most Gooners would still back the coach if the football was any good on the pitch. Or as Phillipe Auclair put it last season “Unai Emery has removed all of the joy out of Arsenal.” That, for me, is always going to be the metric by which I measure the club. It’s not the infighting, the turmoil, the gyre and gimble in the wabe, it’s the fact that Arsenal are in a real mess on the pitch that’s the problem.

Qq

19 comments

  1. Totally agree, this is such a Sad season, nearly as sad as not winning a game at the end of last season, just three points out of seven games and we were in champions league, it couldn’t have been an easier run in. Emery has distroyed this clubs attacking football. I’ve been struggling to watch the games it’s been so poor.
    When are the board going to act and be rid of this recreation park manager.
    It actually has made my year so far really glum, I know it’s just a game but with nothing to look forwards to, as in watching my arsenal playing bauitful football, it’s been a real crappy year so far, thank emery you boring git

    1. It’s important to find something else to tune your attentions to – Arsenal will play live for no more than 6 hours within any week, leaving you 162 Arsenal-free hours.

      Remember the 8-2? At 1-0 down, we got a penalty and van Persie took it. De Gea (in his first season in the PL) saved it, and United went up the other end and made it 2. I remember it that clearly because that’s as much of the game as I saw – from that point, we’d either get 0 points or give me reason to rewatch the full game on Arsenal Player. I turned it off and went off to do some cooking instead. Today, I’m not as traumatized by that result as most are.

      1. I was at my son’s football game. Never was I more happy to have missed an Arsenal fixture.

  2. https://metro.co.uk/2019/11/15/henrikh-mkhitaryan-takes-major-swipe-unai-emery-accuses-arsenal-boss-wasting-11162628/ Add this comment from Mkhitaryan to the growing lists above.

    There is a lot of hue and cry in the Arsenal world right now and it can be seen as a culmination of the last 18 months of our slow descent towards a possible relegation fight. The is only so much space remaining for nails to go into the Arsenal coffin. I knew Leicester would be a loss but Emery’s pragmatism kept the scoreline <9. No Arsenal fan can feel confident about our getting 9 points from Southampton, Brighton, and West Ham United matches. Man City, well just go hide the women and children for that one. Everton will be Iwobi's revenge game. Bournemouth could be an Eddie Howe audition match. Then we have Chelsea where Frank is proving sometimes an ex-player really does know how to coach.
    We are really only 18 months into the Emery journey and the club through its mouthpiece Ornstein would have you believe that the 'negativity' coming from player associations with AFTV is the problem. Come January, Emery (and Xhaka) will be gone if the results continue the current trend and AFTV will still be with us bringing us the fan's opinions on the matches and all things Arsenal.

  3. That’s quite a charge sheet. I can’t think of another manager in recent times who took a top six club and made them significantly worse in such short order. For all ManUre and Chelski’s managerial merry-go-rounds none of their appointments seemed to do set their squad back as far as Emery is heading.

    The most worrying thing is the absence of those above Emery steadying the ship. Really what do our three DoF’s do?

    1. “I can’t think of another manager in recent times…” – Moyes? To be fair to him, while he gets a massive share of the blame, it was more a combination of him and Woodward (or to put it differently, not-Ferguson and not-Gill). That’s oddly mirrored in our situation, as you allude to in your closing para: on and off the pitch, omnishambles.

      1. Ha 🙂 I gave Moyes the benefit of the doubt but he surely was out of his depth. Mourinho dragged them down but he did take them in an upward direction before imploding. To be fair ‘naffest PL manager’ wasn’t a trophy I thought we’d be winning with Arsene’s direct replacement.

  4. As damning and accurate an indictment about the coach and the club as is possible.

    I’m not the type to stay angry all the time so I tend to distance myself if only to keep my blood pressure down and that is what’s happening now.

    1. We should not use that as a bar, really. In my opinion they held themselves back for years by using us (youth-heavy, 4th-place-addicted us, not title-winning us) as the bar.

  5. You do wonder how much went on behind the scenes during Wenger’s tenure. More than we know I’m sure, the old man was smart enough to keep things in house.

    Now the new devolved regime seem more than happy to see things play out in public, even releasing some poorly judged statements of their own. They are at least partly culpable in stoking the ‘noise’ around the club.

    I would suggest this: no more blaming of fans, no more trying to shape the narrative around players and impose a stricter policy around social media usage. I’m what other company would you be allowed to like a MyBossOut post?

  6. The run-in by itself was a sackable performance. At most other big clubs it would have been, especially after the Baku disaster. Not only should we have got Top 4, all things considered… we should have come third, given the quality of the opposition and by comparison to Chelsea’s fixture list.

    Emery is not a good manager. And like many bad managers, they manage by willy waving and creating factions. I suspect that Xhaka got the captaincy through office politics. Emery p***ed off Ramsey, Ozil, Koscielny, Cech was on the way out; so there must have been that one guy sucking up to the unpopular boss telling him how great he is.

    I’ll always remember when we scored a goal in a recent game and he ran over to the bench to high-five Xhaka alone. Xhaka was in the second row. It told me that he was the boss’ boy. But by selecting a player who was not that good and didnt deserve a place in our best XI, he created trouble for himself. Trouble as in having to haul him off for the 2nd successive game. And Xhaka is a proud guy… his post match comments suggest that he has no appreciation for how bad he truly is.

    So we have a deeply unhappy camp, riven by factions, overseen by a manager who can’t “man manage”, or coach. Players will always be unhappy. You suspect for example that England would have been a tough adjustment for a Torreira, irrespective of who was manager (and irrespective of the fact that Emery is asking him to fill the Ramsey gap). But Emery seem to have exacerbated everything.

    We made a bad hire. Will the board finally admit that to itself and course correct? It’s hard for them too, because they too are complicit in the culture change. They did not have to co-sign on the Ramsey and Ozil situations. Koscielny is the coach’s call, but the men above Emery had a say in both the other situations.

    1. “he has no appreciation for how bad he truly is” – this reminded me of the passage in Nick Hornby’s “FeverPitch” about Gus Caesar. Bad as he is, he’s got to be one of the top (very tiny percent) of players in the world. That feeds the ego no end. I can’t remember where else I’ve read about the egos of pro sportsmen, but many of them are in a state of constant self-absolution when they get things wrong, because (in their own minds) how could they possibly be poor/bad/maybe not good enough?

  7. Thanks for the post Tim.

    I am 100% on board with the idea we need a new manager. However for the sake of credibility I think we have to make some attempt to see both sides of some of those stories.

    For example. There were not a lot of options regarding Kos. I assume he was past the time when there was a significant chance of re-injuring himself and even though Kos was not back to his best Emery did not really have better options so it made sense to use him. Kos wanted to go back to France and how we condone a player giving the club a double barrel middle finger and going on strike

    I don’t know if Emery was the one who made the decision to withdraw the long term high dollar contract offer from Ramsey but in reality it was the right decision

    The whole thing with captains has been a mess for more then a decade and the naming of captains has been a lose/lose proposition ever since Vierra left.

    Ozil has been utterly unproductively since the last part of the Wenger era. He was also unproductively at the end of his run with Germany. Mesut was taking sick days even during Arsene’s final year and he signed a gigantic contract almost 2 years ago but has only created 3 assists in roughly 2500 league minutes since he signed the contract. To suggest that Ozil has been trying his best to make it work and the whole issue is Emery’s fault seems highly unlikely.

    1. For credibility reasons? Come on man. Has ozils productivity declined? Yes. Barely playing for the past eighteen months will do that to anyone. I’m not particularly an Ozil fan and we were stupid to give him that contract, but to pretend that Ozil’s form is the reason why Emery has treated him like leper and routinely excluded him from the entire squad is really disingenuous. Emery supporters love to say that finally ozil is being treated like everyone else, and I’m all for that—if it were true. But it’s not. Emery has spent a year and a half going out of his way, often to the team’s detriment, to marginalize and ostracize ozil. Emery has gone out of his way to treat Ozil worse than other players. And pointing to Ozil’s contract is just irrelevant.

  8. Its almost amazing that you can say the same thing no matter what Tim’s post is about…this is pretty much all on Emery

  9. “Rome wasn’t built in a day, but it burned in one.”

    Don’t know how “real” this quote is, but seems pretty accurate.

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