Arsenal lost 2-1 to Everton yesterday and if you LOVE irony I’ve got some for you!
You remember how I warned you about Arsenal’s defense being on the verge of collapse? Well, it has collapsed, just not in the way that I said they would.
Instead of conceding goals the normal way, by conceding a bunch of good chances for the opposition, we’ve gone back to conceding goals through ill discipline and errors. We have actually tightened up the defense from a “shots” perspective which should be good.
Meanwhile… up front, the place where most folks want to see Arsenal improve, has improved in the last 4 games! But there, again, indiscipline has cost Arsenal dearly: Xhaka’s sending-off has cost us 3 points, at least.
All of which is to say that even the best plans are undone by two own goals and two red cards!
If you need math to show the difference: based on shot positions for and against, Arsenal had a 65% chance of winning against Burnley, the Own Goal reduced that to just 37%. Against Everton, we had a 55% chance of victory which was reduced to just 18% with the Own Goal. Ugh.
But results are king in football. No one wins promotion on expected goals or probability alone, you need to get actual goals, actual points, and actual wins.
The question for Arsenal is how?
Arteta seems to believe in his current formula. That means Willian starting, a double-pivot, and 3-5 defenders at all times. In recent weeks we have at least started to get away from long crossing and instead are trying to get into the half-spaces, run the channels, get behind the defense, play drag-backs, and create chances in good areas. These are all statistically good concepts and I feel like if Arsenal supporters can just show a little bit more patience – and Arteta can hold his nerve – we could bear some fruit soon. Though.. another part of me thinks we need to not hold nerve and go straight for the rebuild, right now.
Starting Willian week in and week out is a huge symptom of the problems. As an aside, I don’t like the metaphor that there are “deep problems” at Arsenal. That implies that the players (the roots) are the only and real problem. The problems start up in the canopy where Kroenke’s laissez faire ownership has allowed rot to set in and modeled behavior for everyone at the club.
If Kroenke’s ownership style is to hire someone to do the work for him, why is it a surprise that the guys he hired to do that (Wenger, Gazidis, Sanllehi and now Edu) offloaded their responsibilities to others? If your director of football’s plan for player recruitment is to ask an agent who he should buy, that’s complete neglect in my book. Yes, you have to work with agents, they are a necessary evil, but using agents as your main recruitment strategy isn’t accidental evil, it’s malum in se.
Kroenke is very media savvy. Here in the States what he does is set up a team to do “pretty good” and that means “getting into the playoffs”. That is usually enough for American sports fans who are often gluttons for swill. And because of profit sharing, franchises, salary caps, and a college draft (where you get players for free, who have strict limits on their contracts), American sports are extremely profitable. As long as you do that mediocre amount to keep fans interested and give them hope that the team will be pretty good, you make money.
Football is more precarious. It requires care and feeding. The football leagues are littered with broken owners who made just a few missteps. If the owner can’t be directly involved, and maybe they shouldn’t be, they need to be diligent about picking top quality people to run the club for them. On the surface, picking guys like Sanllehi and Edu to run the club might make sense but if you did any digging, you’d see that Raul is a tool of agents and Edu is wildly inexperienced. And because of the owner’s missteps, there have been a lot of problems piling up.
The first, and biggest problem from a business standpoint, is that they have burned up all £150m worth of “dry powder” that Wenger had saved. They did that in just three years. They then refinanced the stadium debt but that was just to free up working capital and get out from under the requirement that “the wage bill can’t be more than 50% of income”. They then spent that working capital on a host of expensive, and it turns out not too great, older players recommended by agents.
Instead of learning the lessons Wenger taught them for the last 22 years (rarely buy over 30, rarely work with agents, try to promote from within, sell players who are unhappy even if it means a loss, build a team structure from the ground up, and PLAY THE ACADEMY PLAYERS) we have this.
It’s maddening to think that three years ago, most Gooners thought we just needed a coach to organize the defense and a DM. Two years ago we thought we just needed a wide man. Now? We “just” need our third technical director, who will “just” clean out 10 contracts or more, an owner who will pay for this clear out and “just” buy a whole new squad, and “just” help instill a root-to-canopy adjustment of our “culture” – with some folks insisting we “just” need a new coach as well.
And the external pressures are growing.
Sky announced massive, £575m, losses from COVID. Clubs are hemorrhaging money as well. The gods (accountants) only know what the losses will look like at Arsenal this year. And the TV markets are only tightening. What happens when NBC can no longer afford to carry the EPL in the USA and other markets fall apart? It feels like COVID is causing a systemic collapse of the way we have all done business (consume!) for the last 40 years.
Back to Willian as my canary in a coal mine… Arsenal are saddled with his absurd contract for three years. At best (I argued) he would provide some much needed creativity in year one and then drop off after the next two years but that too has proven to be a fugazi. The manager feels like he has to pick him because his job is on the line and, sadly, he’s still our best creative option. Which says more about our creativity than it does about his ability or passion for the game. And the worst part of all of this is that the way that we are going about all of this is absolutely eviscerating the value of the club and the young players.
Meanwhile, Arteta has made some bold choices and has played some young guys quite a bit – Saka and Nketiah, Willock and Maitland-Niles. He’s been rewarded with those selections but still insists on these duds. I think it’s time he doubles down on that bet.
The way that Arsenal play in the Europa League tells me that Arteta is a good coach and yet the conservatism in his approach in the League suggests that he’s inexperienced. The older players are abusing his confidence. Xhaka’s red card cost us three points; Pepe has been abject; the performance of Willian this season has been diabolical. Edu says that Willian needs time. Willian has played over 200 matches as an adult. He needs time, but what he needs is for time to go in reverse.
Arteta needs to stop selecting Willian. Give Reiss Nelson a run. Give Willock a run. Give Azeez a bunch of starts. Play William Saliba. Play Smith-Rowe FFS! Drop kick Xhaka and all of these half-ass duds. Play football the way it is meant to be played: fun, youthful, invigorated, pressing, attacking. We may lose a bunch of matches but that’s already happening. We may even hurt the confidence of some guys but what hurts more: losing heavily in a match or never even being selected while Willian does his imitation of football? The upside of playing youth far outweighs any downside.
We can’t buy our way out of this mess. At least, I don’t think we can, not with Kroenke. It doesn’t matter if Kroenke greenlights Aouar (or whatever) in January – that feels like it would be papering over the cracks as they say in England. We need to jettison the bad apples and start finding our way by playing a cohesive unit of young players who were brought up loving Arsenal. With Arsenal in a relegation battle, what have you really got to lose?
This has been pretty obvious for several matches now. And yet he persists in selecting Willian. I hate to bring up the O-word, but I’d think you’d get at least as much effort from Ozil, plus better passing. I’m pretty much done with Arteta if he keeps playing Willian.
Sadly, Nketiah doesn’t look like the answer either. Hopefully Martinelli and Balogun can do better.
Depressing to see Pool and Utd go out and score 7 and 6 respectively. In one match they score 75% of our total output from the season. The attack really can’t get much worse.
Tim
You make a great case for how far the club has really gone downhill both on the pitch and from a business stand point. I understand the idea of dropping all the underperforming old guys and going with youth everywhere. However, that would truly indicate the club and the manager have given up and it would be interpreted as nothing more then a way to save and make more money. Some fans might be happy at first but not even Arsene was able to build a club based on his academy players during the early project youth era and I don’t believe the current crop of youth is as good as the one from 2005-10 and I don’t think our current coaching staff would do a better job of turning the current youth into PL players then Arsene could in 2005. Perhaps an even bigger problem is the league as a whole is much more competitive from top to bottom then it was in 2005. No doubt we are struggling right now but the end result of a project youth 2020 very likely be relegation which would truly be a disaster.
There seems to be some sort of miguided pride of ownership Arteta has for Willian. He invested club funds in the guy and excluded Ozil from the roster, so he’s trying to prove a point by continuing to play him. An experienced manager knows that not all of his transfer choices will be winners, just as not all academy kids will make it at the top level. He desperately needs to cut his losses.
Yesterday I was struck by AMN. He is a confounding player. He shows excellent athleticism, great defense and hustle. Then he throws the ball in so poorly that it starts a break for the opponent. His miscues are of such a grand magnitude that they burn the eyes. Still, I like him and his penalty taking such that I don’t want to part with him.
There may be some green shoots in attack but I doubt MA can turn this thing around. KSE is damned if they give him transfer funds – given what he’s chosen so far – and damned if they don’t, because expecting this same squad to get better is lunacy. I’m on team “blow it up and rebuild”, but I doubt the club has an alternative ready. so this is us for a while.
Amen.
I said here over two years ago that the way forward for us as a club was to become more like Dortmund, more like Ajax, and focus on being the Premier League gateway club for some of the brightest talents. Once in a while we’d catch lightning in a bottle and win a trophy or two, do an Ajax and make a CL semi-final even, but for the most part we’d enjoy watching top talents grow and compete.
That’s why getting rid of our scouting department was exactly the opposite of what we should be doing and a betrayal of the tradition Wenger started unearthing talents like van Persie, Fabregas, Eduardo, Koscielny, Sagna, Adebayor and others that got elevated from the lower leagues or mired in the youth systems at other clubs to become real players for us.
I am going to give Arteta the benefit of the doubt and say that Willian was NOT his idea. Willian was too convenient a signing in my mind – an aging client of Edu’s agent buddy, best friends with Luiz. I’m also going to say Soares was not his idea – he’s barely played the guy.
If TV/streaming rights go belly up, we won’t be the only club to suffer.
I fail to understand the Kroenkes… you’d think they want to maximize ROI. Sitting 15th, with revenues set to fall because of poor performance and yet, one of the highest wage bills in the league and having spent a lot of money on transfers, most business owners would be taking a hard look at the decision makers that sign underperforming players to bad deals. Sanhelli and Fahmy were sacked and I’m sure Edu will be gone very soon. That’s where I’m placing my hope right now. Unless January is a surreal and spectacular clearout of the squads malcontents and underperformers, he has to go and we need a new experienced director – Rangnick, Monchi, Luis Campos – or go find whoever is deputizing to Michael Edwards at Liverpool right now and see if he wants a head job.
As ever thanks for the insights, especially that there are some green shoots. I was beginning to despair about a relegation fight!
Also noticed the new feature of up/down voting the comments and it only shows the net position! Atleast there are no brawling here unlike many other sites.
The first rule of “7am Kickoff Fight Club” is that you don’t talk about “7am Kickoff Fight Club”
I would be fully in favor of tanking the rest of this season if there was something to gain such as the early draft choice in American sports. If Auba gets back in form and if we could get another goal scorer in the next transfer window we could still finish in the top 1/2 of the table and who knows about a deep Europa league run or another FA cup. I know that may seem overly optimistic but we can’t just throw up our hands and give up.
I am all for dropping Willian and I suspect he would not have been in the line up if Auba was playing. Unfortunately, Willian was the only player on yesterdays starting front 6 players who has scored more then 6 goals in their entire PL career. That’s not just this season with Arteta but that includes the entire careers with every manager they have ever played with. Willian has 37 career PL goals and the other 5 forward players have scored a grand total of 12 PL goals in their entire careers.
once again, bill, fake argument. willian has more league goals than the others because he has more premier league minutes than all of them combined. that’s not to mention that he’s played in teams that have won multiple trophies to include two premier league championships and other cup competitions while the guys you’re comparing him to have not.
once again, most of us aren’t unhappy with the stats, we’re unhappy with the football.
Additional to Josh’s point – Just read that Willian has played 890 minutes in the league this season contributing ZERO goals and ONE shot on target.
plus, players who score goals, score goals and players who don’t score goals don’t. It’s a basic tautology.
Astonished you used the term Fugazi with zero reference to the band. Shut the Door or I’m so Tired were right there. Unless you wanted the predictable Waiting Room.
The struggle is that this team is being beaten playing the drabbest paint drying football this side of Fat Sam. Fortunately he has returned to take that crown back, but screw it start bombing the full backs on again going full Wenger ball. Whatever. Pragmatic grind out results is dire.
I love that you used “malum in se” in this post.
Maybe Arteta should just give up on managing the team in PL matches and stick with working with the kids for Europa League glory.
Just draw a chalk outline of a wolf and be done with it. Or perhaps a drawing a doormat may be more in keeping with this team’s character.
Did we really beat Manchester United at Old Trafford a couple of months ago or was it a dream?
Boy there’s a lot to unpack here:
Be very surprised if there are any additions in January. The money isn’t there. SwissRamble did some recent analysis of Co-vid impacts on football finances. Doesn’t make for pretty reading. There’ll be no fans in stadiums this season. Additionally we’re at risk of losing significant sponsor income (the Adidas and other deals have performance clauses). We may even lose Adidas and other key sponsors as more clubs overtake us.
There’s no doubt there have been attempts recently to vary our attack and our possession and shots stats are up but that’s most likely because Spurs, Burnley and Everton deliberately let us have the ball as we’re impotent in attack.
When we disbanded the scouting network it was explained by Edu as a move to data centric scouting. Clearly the jury’s still out on that one. The Luiz extension and Willian 3 year contract were widely reported as Arteta sanctioned decisions supported by quotes from the man himself. Personally I think agents’ influence are the least of our problems.
Completely agree that three years ago we were all calling for better coaching. If you look at Leicester, Spurs, Southampton and Everton you can see the improvements their coaches have made. All of them are performing at a higher level than expectations 12 months ago. Of the clubs with managers appointed within the last year or so we are the significant outlier. Our squad is a top 8, possibly top 6 squad. If we were 8th or 6th in the league at the moment we wouldn’t be debating starting all over again. If any of our traditional rivals were in our current position they would either have replaced the manager or be in the process of doing so. I’d argue that much of your post is borne out of frustration at how our standards as a club have slipped and the lack of action to stop the rot.
Stan is worth 8.3 billion dollars. That there isn’t money is utter garbage. Even from a capitalistic standpoint investment makes sense EVEN when you consider how much money the ownership org has allowed to be wasted through their lazy stewardship.
From the basic standpoint of ownership they have money regardless of what the ‘books’ say. In a deflationary market as we are seeing that allows the club to leverage that spending power to pray on more distressed clubs to pry away talent they might not otherwise be able to.
Now whether the Kroenke’s do that who knows. If they allow it will they green light the right players to improve the team. Probably not! But hey whatever. 8.3 billion pissed in the wind. Proff that if you have money you make money regardless of competency.
I’m not a fan of the Kroenkes but this idea that they have $8.3 billion laying around in some bank account – and that they should be just willing to open up the spigot and spend it on football players – is absurd.
There is nothing wrong with a sustainable financial model and we shouldn’t be pining for billionaire owners who will come in and spend their own money on players as part of their personal vanity project. The issue is that they’ve mis-spent money thus far on bad transfers and high wage packets to under-performers.
Exactly Jack. We’ve spent £300M since Wenger left. And what do we have to show for it?
Willian is getting a heap of bad press. I hope it either shames him into pulling his finger out or asking his agent to ‘get me outta here!’ (Ha!)
The thing about the young players is that few have taken their chances. Martinelli and Saka have. Eddie, Willock and ESR have not.
Europa Willock is nothing like EPL Willock, a lightweight, tactically not switched on, albeit energetic presence. Smith-Rowe will be playing for West Ham in 2 years. Azeez and Balogun look the real deal. Reiss is all smooth intelligence, clever runs, and has a knack for being in the right place; but he is very easily knocked off the ball. If he hits the gym and bulks up, he’ll be a really good player. Saka is there on merit. Like all good players, he slows the game down in his head, and his decision-making is frighteningly good for a youngster.
Tim’s right about energy. Look how Martinelli unhinged Chelsea and the great little man, Kante, by running at them. But what else can they offer? If the seniors are not absorbing Arteta’s tactics that well, will the juniors be any better? Arteta is in job-saving mode, where a coach tends to be more risk-averse. In any case, he has shown us by now that he’s not sold on giving youth free rein. If he had been he’d have kept Guendouzi (still a yute man), and integrated and registered Saliba. He’s the kind of coach who buys Willian, and trusts in Xhaka.
So youh, yes. But the right ones. Move on Xhaka and Laca. Give us some more Reiss, Willock, Balogun and Martinelli.
Agree with everything here, Claude, with the exception of ESR. I have assumed he is not quick/athletic enough to make it in the PL but he continues to impress me every time I see him. I’m not sure he will make it for us in the PL, but I’m also not sure he won’t. He has a natural ability to play attacking football – finding open teammates and open spaces. He may not be as switched on defensively as you would like, but that can be learned. The ability to create threat in the final third is much more difficult to teach,imo.
Agreed, LA. I thought for the short while he was on, ESR made a difference. Not a big difference, but at least something to build on. He moves into space and “shows” for the ball in attacking situations. At the moment we have a team that are basically “hiding”. And no, he hasn’t been given much of a chance. He’s been out injured for the best part of a season and before that he was out on loan.
I was reading an update about Daniel Ballard on Arseblog News. And I realized, the silver lining is that all of our youngsters will be able to get championship experience next season.
And Willian, all I could see him do in the last match was pick the ball on the left, run to the right and pass it to the wing, and vice-versa. It was maddening.
The best, penetrating analysis of Arsenal’s malaise.
Tim, your analysis are usually on a high level, but here the three paragraphs about the Wenger parallels and the “justs” are one of the best summarization I have read recently.
i am not sure why we think the current group of academy players has any better chance to make an impact in the PL then the other highly rated youth who have come thru the ranks in the last 15 years. The group of players that Arsene put together in 2005-10 highlighted by players like Bendtner, Merida JET, Afobe, Aneke Gibbs etc etc etc was considered the deepest most talent and deepest group of youth players on any club in the world but none of them really made an it as PL players . If Arsene couldn’t turn them into impact players at a time when the league was not as strong and deep as it is now I am not sure why we think the current group will be different. Saka looks like a good player. I suspect the ceiling for Nketiah, Willock, Nelson ESR Maitland-Niles, Ceballos is bench depth at West Ham or NewCastle.
But… Fabregas (signed as a 16 year old), Wilshere (injury history notwithstanding), Bellerin, Vela, Gibbs (was a very functional LB for a time), Walcott (bought as a 17 year old), Song was a pretty good DM for a while, Coquelin was underrated… there are a good number of academy kids who actually came good. And while Wenger was good for giving these players a chance, one thing about Wenger is that he expected players to be didactic and learn for themselves – or fail. That may have worked a generation ago, but younger players now need more personalized instruction to grow and succeed.
I think Nketiah is back-up striker material or needs to be part of a striking pair with a bigger more physically robust partner that he can feed off of. But Willock, Nelson, AMN, ESR… they’re still too raw to say they’d be bench material at West Ham or Newcastle, that’s unfair.
I’ve also seen enough of Eddie to say he’s not good enough to make real impact. Not enough burst, not enough strength, not enough savvy in movement. Very lacking in hold up. Serviceable player, but nothing more.
I think you’re being a bit pessimistic there. I’d think at least one or two of Willock, Nelson, ESR and AMN is likely to start reasonably frequently for someone in the PL. Just take a look at Iwobi, who started and played just fine against us. Don’t think he’s any better than any of the current crop. He just has good coaching and a coach willing to give him minutes. Same with Fofana at Leicester. He’s starting at a top 4 team. Either we completely botched that evaluation, or we’re not doing the younger players any good(maybe both).
As far as Willian goes, I could care less what he did in past seasons at Chelsea. If we’re going to use that argument, we should be playing Ozil instead. Or have bought Cesc. Heck, Iniesta is still playing, maybe we should go in for him? The point is that we’re paying Willian quite a lot to do the square root of F*$k-all. I get it, there was some possibility that he’d provide something based on prior stats. But he hasn’t, and all playing him now does is show a failure to learn and lead.
A little more on “malum,” for fellow nerds: The fruit that Adam and Eve eat in Genesis is not specified, but the ‘apple’ tradition started in the early Roman church because in Latin “malum” can refer both to ‘apple’ and ‘evil’.
Over the last 15 years there have been dozens and dozens and dozens of academy players the fans rated highly and many appeared to be as talented or more talented then the current crop and they had Arsene Wenger as their manager. How many of those players developed into players who were good enough to be regular first 11 starters for Arsenal or any team in the league? The answer is very few.
Anything can happen but based on a large sample size of historical evidence from the last 15 years the likelihood is that most of the current group of academy players coming thru now will probably end up playing in the championship or as squad players somewhere if they catch on with a PL team.
We actually have a good record, lol. Especially compared to other clubs. Our problem, especially lately, is holding on to these players because we keep buying in 32 year olds and giving away playing time from the youth.
Come on, dude.
https://www.transfermarkt.us/arsenal-fc/jugendarbeit/verein/11/plus/1/galerie/0?wettbewerb_id=gesamt&option=0&art=0
You’re not wrong. But it is the same with every competitive team sport. For every kid that makes it, there are 20 who don’t. That is the law of averages, and it isn’t applicable only to Arsenal, or football. Even La Masia, the famous Barcelona academy, is subjected to the law of averages, even if theirs is higher. Not everyone who comes out of Clairefontaine is an Mbappe, or even a successful player.
Willock, Nelson, ESR are the ones who did break through, in a manner of speaking. Benik Afobe, Chuba Akpom, Jay Emannuel Thomas did not. Others have found success in other leagues. I think the fans live in hope rather than expectation, and don’t really believe that the kids will come through en masse. But sometimes the first time you lay eyes o a kid, you know he’s special. Anyone who saw Fabregas balling at 16 knew right away that he was the real deal.
IMO, Saka is the best of this bunch, and makes good decisions on the ball most of the time. Nelson has a good game brain and positional awareness… the coach seemed to like and favour him when he arrived a year ago, but he appears to have fallen out of favour. Willock’s box to box play is promising, his finishing is good, and his overall game can be developed… right now he’s raw and doesn’t play with his head up enough. I don’t know what folks see in ESR, except an insanely good engine. Is Balogun the back-to-goal centre forward we’ve cried out for? Early signs are good. But they are a small sample of what has passed through and is passing through our academy.
Guy I’d like to have seen make it? Our own Tom Cruise (not THAT one…Thomas Daniel Cruise, 29, released by Torquay a few years ago, left football in his mid-20s, and started studying Accountancy). His story is more the norm than the exception.
Jack.
Correct me if I forget someone but the best starting 11 players that have actually grown up in our academy ranks in terms of success in the PL would probably be Wojo GK. Gibbs LB miquel Ignasi and Kyle Bartley CB Bellerin RB
midfielders. Wilshere Seb Larrson Alex Song. Front 3 Iwobe, Nik Bendtner and Benik Afobe. I am sure that I am forgetting someone but that group of players would struggle in the championship.
The point is expecting of a group of academy players to develop into players who can be regular Arsenal first 11 difference making PL players is just not likely to work.
I see you don’t actually know who our academy players are/were.
Just dealing with recent grads (people playing right now), you’ve got
Szczesny keeper (starter for Juventus)
RB – Bellerin, CB – Issac Hayden, CB – Bartley, LB – Gibbs
RM – Maitland-Niles, CM – Willock, AM – Eberechi Eze, LM – Saka
CF – Donyell Malen, SS – Serge Gnabry
Please at least do a little homework if you’re going to shit on a bunch of players and the Arsenal academy.
As for your straw man that it has to be 11 academy players, please stop. No one is saying 11 academy players, but we shouldn’t be starting garbage like Willian and Xhaka when we have players who we could UNDENIABLY improve by playing them. Players that we will end up selling like Gnabry and Malen if we don’t play them.
Take a break, Bill.