Believe What You Are Seeing
When Unai Emery was sacked and replaced with Mikel Arteta, it felt like things were about to get better. The clouds over the Emirates parted and the sun came out. Arteta said all the right things: how the culture needed to change, how players needed to be completely committed in order to play for him, how he wanted to take Arsenal back to the very top where it belonged. And then he won the FA Cup, beating Manchester City and Chelsea in the process. Less than a month later, Arteta led Arsenal to a victory over Liverpool in the Community Shield. For the first time in years, the club looked to be back on the right track. The future looked bright.
That was less than four months ago. In that time, the Arteta project has unraveled like a mummy in an episode of Scooby-Doo. The palace of revisionism that many fans, yours truly included, built for the current manager is crumbling into the sea. Try as we all might have to see the brilliance in several questionable decisions Arteta has made, the chickens appear to be coming home to roost. Maya Angelou famously said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” It sadly might be time to start believing Mikel Arteta.
Let’s start with the summer transfer window. The FA Cup win earned Arteta a large amount of goodwill at the club. So much goodwill that he was promoted to manager after Raul Sanllehi was ushered out of the club. He was given a say in Arsenal’s transfer business. What did he make happen with this newly granted power? He first signed Willian. 32-year-old Willian, whom even Chelsea weren’t willing to offer more than a two-year deal. Arsenal gave him three, and £250,000 a week. It was an interesting decision given the presence of record signing Nicolas Pepe and promising young winger Reiss Nelson. But Arteta was reportedly keen on signing Willian, a player whom many in the business apparently see as a professional’s professional.
How has the professional’s professional fared? After notching three assists against an almost Derby County-esque Fulham side, Willian has achieved only one more assist since. Rumor is he’s unhappy under Arteta, and it sure looks that way on the pitch. He is practically statuesque at times, almost allergic to tracking back, and an absolute snooze fest going forward. Not to mention that Pepe’s confidence has tanked this season, culminating in a diabolical straight-red-earning headbutt against Leeds three matches ago. Arteta threw an awful contract at a guy on the wrong side of 30 (and who also happens to be a bit of a fascist). He even sacrificed the sanctity of his non-negotiables when Willian went walkabout with Salt Bae in Dubai for “business reasons” in the middle of a once-in-a-century pandemic. And all he has to show for it are 14 passes to Aubameyang in 11 Premier League matches.
Arteta followed this up with long-term contracts for Pablo Mari and Cedric. While many criticize the Pablo Mari deal, it honestly isn’t much of a scandal. David Luiz, Sokratis, Shkodran Mustafi, and Sead Kolasinac are all out of contract in the summer while Rob Holding and Calum Chambers could also be shown the exit. Arsenal will be in need of backup center-backs, so a 6’4” Copa Libertadores champion who can pass fairly well out of the back is a solid understudy. But Cedric’s deal reeks of rank amateurism. Cedric, a 29-year-old who had been on loan from Southampton but had not managed to play a single minute due to injury (sadly not the first loanee in recent history to accomplish this feat), was given a four-year deal. Later in the summer, both Hector Bellerin and Ainsley Maitland-Niles were the subject of interest from other clubs. Wolves were willing to pay £20 million for the latter, while PSG had allegedly offered £25 million for the former. An exit by one of the two right-backs was surely on the cards if Cedric had been tied down. Kolasinac was also allegedly on the verge of going back to Schalke, leaving open a backup left-back role that Cedric could play as well. And yet, at a time when the club was strapped for cash and allegedly needed to sell players to buy the likes of Thomas Partey and Houssem Aouar, the club opted to keep Bellerin, Maitland-Niles, and Kolasinac. Now, Bellerin has spent much of the season putting in substandard performances in the Premier League while Maitland-Niles and Cedric are left to beat up on the likes of Dundalk and Molde in the Europa League. It has taken the suspensions of Bellerin and Granit Xhaka to presumably allow the neglected duo to finally see the light of day in domestic competition. Kolasinac hasn’t featured lately, but no one is crying over that.
While transfer dealings are something for which Edu and the other higher-ups at the club should also shoulder some blame, Arteta also made several bad decisions more solely attributable to him. The obvious example here is the handling of Mesut Ozil, of course. The club’s treatment of the German playmaker over the last year has been less than pride-inducing. And while freezing him out was not necessarily an incorrect decision, doing so and then failing to replace his output was. To be clear, it has been a long time since Ozil was a lights-out creative force. In the 56 games he played after Arsene Wenger left, Ozil scored 7 goals and assisted 6. But after years of letting creative midfielders leave without replacing them, Ozil was the only true No. 10 left at the club. So it was questionable when Arteta shifted to a 4-2-3-1 with Ozil unregistered in the Premier League and Europa League. It was baffling when Bukayo Saka and Emile Smith-Rowe weren’t deployed as potential replacements for the German until other players could be signed. And it was downright farcical when Arteta turned to Alexandre Lacazette to fulfill that role. Ozil will leave Arsenal, either next month or in the summer, having won his war with Arsenal Football Club. He will go on to enjoy a lucrative end to his footballing career and transition to other endeavors. In the meantime, Arsenal have scored two own goals and only one goal from open play in their last eight Premier League matches. Teams are sitting back and letting Arsenal have all of the ball, knowing we can’t hurt them because we can’t create chances. Ozil wouldn’t have saved us, but he certainly would have given his teammates someone in that area of the pitch to pass to.
This unfortunate placement of culture over performance is essentially the crux of Arteta’s failings at Arsenal thus far. He began his reign by establishing his “non-negotiables” for players to follow. And for the first eight months of his tenure, he followed through on that. Ozil was out after he started bragging to his teammates about being right to decline a pay cut. Matteo Guendouzi danced drunk and shirtless at a club during the Dubai retreat, got in fights with Arteta and Sokratis, and made an absolute ass of himself against Brighton. After failing to convince Arteta and the rest of the higher-ups in a subsequent that he had learned the error of his ways, he was eventually loaned out to Hertha Berlin. So far, this makes sense.
But then Arteta decided to leave William Saliba, the heir apparent to the right center-back spot alongside Gabriel, out of the Europa League squad. Edu failed to get a loan back to Saint-Etienne sorted for the young French defender in the wake of both his parents dying. Saliba, who started in Ligue 1 last season, has now spent almost half the season playing with kids because Arteta insists he’s not ready. Saliba seems to think differently, however, and has indicated as much on social media over the last week. So now Saliba is mysteriously frozen out of the squad. In the meantime, Holding and David Luiz are not cutting it in the Premier League while Wesley Fofana looks like a revelation at the back for Leicester.
Last month, Willian, for whom Arteta massively stuck his neck out for, decided to use an international break during which he did not play to go to Dubai on business. He did not inform the club of his intent to do this, resulting in headlines galore. The whole world seemed to think that Willian had violated Arteta’s non-negotiables and would surely face harsh consequences. The only person who didn’t share that belief was Arteta himself, who stated that Willian would be dealt with “internally” and let him keep playing as soon as the Brazilian produced a negative COVID test. It was stunning inconsistency from the man who had shelved better players for less.
But where Arteta’s non-negotiables have really seemed to evaporate is in his squad selection. Week in and week out, Arteta has gone with the same group of tired, unbothered underperformers in the Premier League. Whatever Willian was brought in to do, he’s not doing it. Lacazette, while he at least tries, looks like he’s over the hill. Bellerin has seemingly forgotten how to defend and isn’t doing enough offensively to make up for it. Even Aubameyang looks a shell of himself on the pitch, and it’s not just the lack of service. In the meantime, guys like Maitland-Niles, Smith-Rowe, and Folarin Balogun are in good form and doing everything they can to get a spot in the first team. But the manager continues to overlook them in favor of more senior players who have yet to repay his faith in them, even deploying those established footballers out of position instead of getting a young player more suited to do the job. He is sending the message to players who are our future that there is no point to performing well.
Perhaps the lowest hill that Arteta has chosen to die on is his persistence with Granit Xhaka. The Swiss midfielder has been irredeemable this season. His constant backwards passing is nothing short of cowardly. He cannot beat his man, and he rarely even attempts to. He isn’t strong, quick, dynamic, or even smart. For four years, he has been nothing but a fake tough guy whose baffling resistance to accountability is emblematic of the decline Arsenal are in. And yet the first decision Arteta made was to convince him not to leave last January. Since then, the manager has propped Xhaka up as one of the main leaders of this team, continuing to pick him each and every week while Partey has been unavailable when Elneny, Ceballos, and even Maitland-Niles presented better options. That decision came back to bite us all on Sunday night when Xhaka saw fit to play-act as some pseudo-badass and wrap a hand around the neck of a Burnley player for no good reason. Xhaka’s three-game suspension genuinely might be his greatest contribution of the season. Arteta will now be forced to play a better midfield without his shambolic talisman. And if Xhaka should reappear in a Premier League starting lineup after his suspension is over, we will know there is no future under Arteta.
Most of us thought Mikel Arteta would be the one to save the day. For a while there, those hopes were vindicated. But for the last several months, he has made terrible decision after terrible decision. There is no justifying it anymore. There is no proclaiming that Willian was signed because he fit into Arteta’s highly structured system, or that Saliba must have gone against the non-negotiables, or that there is a perfectly good reason why Nelson and Smith-Rowe haven’t been given nearly as many minutes as they have earned. We need to acknowledge what is unfolding before our very eyes. Arteta is playing favorites. He is enforcing his rules inconsistently. He is floundering. And while that is not entirely his fault, so much of it was in his control. So much of it has happened before with Wenger and Emery, and could have been avoided. We are watching a manager make bad mistakes out of arrogant stubbornness, a lack of imagination, or perhaps both. It can’t be explained away anymore. That is what you are seeing. Believe it.
At the end of the day, this is not an “Arteta Out” manifesto. Mikel Arteta will probably become a very good coach, either at this club or another one. He’s shown glimpses of that during his time at Arsenal. But the case for him not being equipped for the massive rebuild job Arsenal have ahead of them is now more compelling than the case for him being up to it. There is still a path forward for Arteta. But that path requires drastic action and a rapid turnaround in results, and both occurrences are rather unlikely at this point.
The simple truth of the matter is this: Managers are allowed to make mistakes. But they cannot repeatedly make the same ones. They especially cannot make multiple bold, high-risk decisions that do not pay off. Those managers don’t stick around for too long. And unfortunately, Mikel Arteta looks to be one of those managers.
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