The 2020 State of the Cannon

Another season has come and gone, and it has by far been the strangest one we have weathered in recent memory. Three managers, training ground bust-ups, players frozen out, relegation fears, a global pandemic, and somehow, silverware. The 2019-20 campaign was a ludicrous dramedy of a season. But now, with the squad going on vacation and the club starting to make moves in the transfer market after some internal changes, the dust is settling. And we find ourselves at a convenient interval to look back on what has transpired and evaluate where we are as a club. It is not too far-fetched to say this season started in Baku. Or rather, in the days after what happened there. Unai Emery and the Gunners sputtered into the Europa League final against Chelsea on the back of a calamitous implosion in the Premier League. In their final six matches against Watford, Crystal Palace, Wolves, Leicester City, Brighton, and Burnley, Arsenal collected only 4 points from a possible 18. It was a dismal run of form that saw them end the season in fifth, one point behind Spurs. Despite having the easiest run-in of any of the top six sides, Arsenal failed to qualify for the Champions League through domestic routes. Winning the Europa League final was the only option.

But this was supposed to be fine. Unai Emery was reportedly a guru when it came to the Europa League. He had won it three times before with Sevilla, after all. All consecutively, in fact. So Emery’s failure to coax even two wins out of his team against midtable opposition in the run-in was tolerated. However, the Spaniard’s magic touch was nowhere to be found as Arsenal were trounced 4-1 by Chelsea, who had already qualified for the Champions League. To add insult to injury, Olivier Giroud scored the opener for Arsenal’s West London rivals. Arsenal had twice gotten within touching distance of a return to the Champions League and managed to blow it both times.

The reason the 2019-20 season should be treated as starting with the disappointment in Baku is straightforward. This is the moment when the Arsenal hierarchy made a decision that largely determined the results of this season. That decision, unfortunately, was choosing to stick with
Unai Emery. After seeing him squander two golden opportunities to return the club to the Champions League, Emery was still backed instead of being dropped for a bolder, more progressive head coach. Raul and the Kroenkes concluded that whatever Emery’s vision was, it was the way forward. But try as they might have to prop him up as their guy, it was the beginning of the end for Unai Emery. He had lost the players, and the resulting performance in
the final lost him many of the fans as well.

But the disappointments of the previous campaign subsided and were replaced with hope for a better outcome this time around. For all the negativity the 2018-19 campaign had ended with, there was promise in the air around the Emirates. It felt like a new chapter was beginning. Adidas, taking over from Puma as the club’s kit supplier, released a home kit that paid homage to those from the early 90s with a classic collar and a color combination of red, white, and navy blue. David Luiz, Kieran Tierney, William Saliba, Gabriel Martinelli, and Nicolas Pepe were signed. Dani Ceballos was loaned from Real Madrid. Everton were somehow convinced to sign Alex Iwobi for £40 million. Josh Kroenke famously (or perhaps infamously at this point)
instructed fans to “be excited”. The “This is Home” advert put out by Adidas in July of 2019 expertly depicted Arsenal as an institution, too big to fail. Perhaps we bought into that idea too much.

Because fail we did. Emery’s general game plan seemed to always involve taking on more shots than a frat star on his 21st birthday and hoping Aubameyang would score at least one goal (which of course happened frequently enough to work several times). And when things didn’t go according to that plan, the true hilarity ensued. Against Liverpool, Emery’s galaxy brain strategy was sitting back and letting Liverpool, the favorites to win the title, do what they do best. Alexander-Arnold and Robertson were allowed to streamroll up the flanks and bombard crosses into Arsenal’s penalty area for 90 minutes while Aubameyang and Pepe were stationed upfield in case a counter was on. Liverpool won 3-1, with the Gunners’ lone goal coming from Lucas Torreira. After drawing a very winnable North London Derby, Emery saw Arsenal concede THIRTY shots to Watford and blow a two-goal lead. Within four weeks it had become evident that Arsenal were picking up their league form right where they had left it in the 2018-19 season. Emery was able to string together enough positive-ish results to hold fans to a tame disquiet. A 3-2 win against Aston Villa here, a 1-0 victory versus Bournemouth there, and a 1-1 draw against a pre-Bruno Fernandes Manchester United ensured that at least some fans would remain patient with him. But the signs of inevitable collapse were there. Shaky-at-best defending, buckets of chances allowed, little to no chance creation, and an over-reliance on one player — you know, the classics. Slowly but surely, the abysmal performances became louder than the 22-game unbeaten run in the previous season that Emery’s last backers would cite as a reason to keep the faith in his final weeks.

The walls came crashing down during the Palace match. Arsenal had just blown another two-goal lead when Granit Xhaka was subbed off for Bukayo Saka. As Xhaka slowly sulked off the field, he was met with a cascade of insults and boos for wasting precious seconds his team could have used to win the match. After a horrendous opening few months to the season, much warranted criticism, and many unwarranted threats against him and his family, the treatment by fans that night was the straw that broke the Granit’s back. He taunted the fans with a hand cupped to his ear and then told the crowd to f*ck off. Xhaka was consequently stripped of the captaincy and would not play again during Emery’s tenure. But the damage was done. The club had come apart over Emery. The trust of the supporters was gone, the atmosphere had become depressingly toxic, and the quality of football had reached an all-time low. It’s rather fitting that Unai Emery looks like a low-budget Dracula, because by the time he left he had sucked the life out of Arsenal Football Club.

The Palace match triggered a seven-game winless run, plunging Arsenal into relegation form. Not seen since the days of George Graham, it was a run of form that saw Emery desperately turn to Mesut Ozil, whom he had shunned for practically the entire season, in search of salvation. However, it was a measure that wouldn’t reverse his fortunes. The streak culminated in a 2-1 defeat at home to Eintracht Frankfurt. A Daichi Kamada brace to overcome Arsenal’s one-goal lead saw Emery summarily sacked the next day. The bad man was gone. However, the aftermath of the Spaniard’s departure revealed just how deeply the rot had set in at the club. Stories broke about how players openly mocked the manager for his indecision over captains and broken English, about how inept Emery was at motivating and communicating with the players, about how he wasn’t the unanimous decision Arsenal had insisted he’d been but instead a last-minute alternative to Mikel Arteta, who had emerged as a frontrunner to become Arsene Wenger’s successor during negotiations for the job. It also became known that Raul had advocated for giving Emery a contract extension in the midst of Arsenal’s dreadful start to the season.

So we were left with what felt like an empty, hollow husk of a club. The players didn’t seem to care anymore. The execs had been outed as having shafted a former club captain with years of tutelage under Pep Guardiola and Wenger in favor of a coach whom 15 minutes on Google would have told you was not up to the task, all because his agent was friends with Raul. The captain entering the 2019-20 season was reportedly pushing to leave during the January transfer window. Champions League football next year was but a pipe dream. Freddie Ljungberg would be allowed a crack at the head coach job, but after a few weeks it was quite clear to see that he wasn’t ready for it.

And then, Arteta arrived. In the dead of night, Vinai Venkatesham and Huss Fahmy were seen leaving his house in Manchester. Four days later, he was watching Arsenal earn a draw from the stands at Goodison Park, having been confirmed as Arsenal’s new head coach. From the moment he walked into London Colney, you could tell. The way he warmly greeted everyone he saw, the way the club’s most senior staff seemed to follow him through the halls instead of the other way around, the way he was already calculating how to begin the job at hand. This guy was an Arsenal manager. Arteta’s inaugural press conference would complete a rather perfect first impression. During the presser, he spoke about sensing the club had lost its way. He laid out exactly how he intended to change the energy of the players at the club and earn their trust. And he also began demanding that the club, not just the players, adhere to what are now known as his “non-negotiables”. Right from the beginning, Arteta did what Unai Emery had never been able to do. He made it clear that he meant business.

In the 28 matches since Mikel Arteta took charge, there have been ups and downs. The players still failed to create many chances in matches, and lacked the creative ability to break teams down. The chances they did create weren’t taken frequently enough. Individual errors continue to cost the team a large amount of points. Most of all, several players in the squad showed their ceilings are too low to compete at the highest levels of the game. These issues came to bear in losses against Chelsea, Olympiakos, Brighton, Manchester City, Spurs, and Aston Villa. But the improvements on the pitch were undeniable. After 18 months of constantly changing formations and personnel, there finally was consistency in the team’s style of play. Players knew and understood their jobs and executed them, staying organized and maintaining clear structure. And suddenly, Arsenal seemed capable of defending again. Against Liverpool, Manchester City, and Chelsea, they were able to hold on to leads and secure important victories. However, the biggest difference in the squad after Arteta took over was the simple fact that they seemed to care again. Players that couldn’t be bothered in the fall were running their socks off. There were smiles on faces and a genuine camaraderie among the squad. Even many of those who are likely to leave this summer were entirely committed to Arteta’s vision. They had been quickly molded into fierce competitors, fighting harder for wins than they previously had under Emery. This is even more impressive considering that a little over two months into his tenure, Arteta had been forced to adapt to a shutdown of the Premier League caused by COVID-19, which he contracted himself just before all footballing operations were halted. During this pause (and almost a flat-out cancellation) of the season, the new coach had needed to figure out how to work with his players virtually instead of face-to-face. Considering the results of the season, he appears to have been successful in doing so.

Off the pitch, Arteta continued to work wonders. Xhaka was talked off the ledge and installed as one of the head coach’s most reliable lieutenants. Aubameyang was made captain and dutifully led by example. Maitland-Niles, Ceballos, and Pepe all faced brief stints away from the matchday squad due to failure to fulfill Arteta’s non-negotiables and learned to live by his prerequisites. Arteta and Bellerin convinced almost all of the players to take a pay cut to help the club through post-COVID financial straits. The Arsenal boss even inspired a change of heart in Gary O’Driscoll, the club doctor who only months ago had accepted an offer to join Liverpool at the end of the season. Left and right, Mikel Arteta convinced Arsenal Football Club to have faith in him and his project. And the few who didn’t get with the program? They have been unceremoniously removed from the picture. Mesut Ozil’s failure to register a single appearance after the restart is likely the nail in the coffin for his Arsenal career. Guendouzi has not so much as traveled with the team since the Brighton match, refusing to apologize to Arteta after grabbing Neal Maupay by the throat and taunting opposition players over their salaries. This was the second time Guendouzi’s behavior had run afoul of Arteta. Previously, Guendouzi had engaged in unprofessional conduct, including multiple reported bust-ups with Arteta and Sokratis, during the warm-weather training camp in Dubai, and was punished for those indiscretions as well. With Guendouzi sharing his happiness about going on holiday instead of congratulating his teammates after winning the FA Cup, we have likely seen the last of Matteo Guendouzi at Arsenal. But such is the established fairness of Arteta’s reign that it is Guendouzi who exits this saga as unreasonable and immature.

Through these changes to the club’s culture and instilling his philosophy on the training ground, Arteta took a team devoid of confidence and deemed uncoachable by the footballing world to an FA Cup title after just 28 games in charge. Despite being unable to help his team finish higher than 8th this season, he has inspired his players to salvage Europa League qualification at the death through an FA Cup title to improve the club’s financial outlook heading into the summer. With a clever tactical mind and a gift for convincing players and staff to lend their trust and loyalty, Mikel Arteta has had a remarkable start to his coaching career. For the first time in years, Arsenal have a figure in the dugout whom the overwhelming majority of the club can rally around. Arteta clearly has the makings of an elite manager. In a league dominated for the past few years by Klopp and Pep, that surely will count for something.

But Arteta isn’t the only member of Arsenal’s first team setup who has impressed in the second half of the season. Players like Kieran Tierney, Nicolas Pepe, Bukayo Saka, and Dani Ceballos (hopefully a part of Arsenal’s plans for 2020-21) have shown that they are just getting started. Bernd Leno, Emi Martinez, Hector Bellerin, Ainsley Maitland-Niles, and Granit Xhaka have demonstrated that they can be relied upon. Even Shkodran Mustafi has at least made himself saleable this summer. And Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang is still scoring left and right, as he has since the moment he came to the club. At the time of writing, the signs appear to suggest that he will sign a contract extension. Between the new head coach and some of the core players already at Arsenal, the future looks very bright if the proper signings are made this summer.

However, things are murkier off the pitch. Four days after winning the FA Cup final, Raul Sanllehi and Vinai Venkatesham issued a statement announcing that the club were proposing 55 “redundancies”. It was a distressing development, the pain of which would not be eased with the signing of Willian and the costs that came with it being announced soon after. Along with these redundancies it was revealed that Arsenal’s top scouts, including Francis Cagigao (the current head of recruitment who unearthed Cesc Fabregas, Hector Bellerin, and Gabriel Martinelli, to name but a few), Brian McDermott, and Pete Clark were to be let go as well. Shortly thereafter Ty Gooden, Leonardo Scirpoli, Alex Stafford, Julio de Marco, and Alessandro Sbrizzo were informed they would also be losing their jobs. These scouts had overseen recruitment in France and Belgium, Germany, Scotland, Spain, and Italy, respectively.

Because of Raul’s history of maintaining rather cozy relationships with agents like Kia Joorabchian and Arturo Canales, he and the rest of the hierarchy were quickly accused by many of capitalizing on the situation created by the pandemic to launch a takeover of Arsenal’s recruitment structure and give anyone who disagreed the boot, all under the guise of measures to ease the club’s financial distress. Given his and Edu’s perceived willingness to lean into an “agent-led” approach, this is of course a possibility. However, a more charitable (and, now that Raul is gone, likelier) view of the situation would be that Edu has been brought in to make changes to the club’s recruitment strategy and this is exactly what that entails. The modern game has seen many clubs shift to video scouting. With the plethora of data and video available on most senior players through platforms such as Wyscout or YouTube, video scouting represents a more efficient approach to identifying talent. This efficiency is likely much needed at a club that is hemorrhaging money the way Arsenal are post-COVID. At a time when football matches are closed to spectators, physical scouting is currently an area where the club would understandably feel the need to make cuts and resort to more cost-effective measures. It could very well be that this is the direction Edu wishes to take the club in. After all, Edu has previously restructured Arsenal’s scouting in other parts of the club, sacking Steve Morrow and several others and putting Per Mertesacker in charge of the youth academy in order to streamline the process of developing young talent.

It is important to remember that these layoffs, which include the scouting figures but also other club staff such as first-team rehabilitation coordinator Tim Parham, come after the squad had taken a pay cut of 12.5% in order to prevent exactly this outcome. To be fair, the executives had also taken a pay cut of over a third of their salaries in order to help the club through the financial situation brought on by the pandemic. But the persuasiveness of Mikel Arteta had been required in order to broker the pay cut agreement between the players and the executives. The players are now reportedly furious about the layoffs and before the break were trying to meet with the Arsenal executives about them. What that discussion will bring about remains to be seen.

However, a bright spot in the current corporate murkiness at Arsenal is the sacking of Raul Sanllehi. On July 1, Tim Lewis, a partner at Clifford Chance, was brought in as a non-executive director at the club. Lewis reportedly got straight to work going through the numbers in every department at Arsenal, and a month and a half later, ESPN reported that an internal investigation into the Pepe transfer was happening at the club. The next day, Arsenal announced that they were parting ways with Raul. Given the questions surrounding the signings of Pepe, Cedric, David Luiz, Leno, and even Unai Emery, as well as the lengths both Raul and Arsenal went to in assuring the public their separation was amicable, it’s not far-fetched to conclude that some
seediness had occurred at the club. At the very least, Raul and his willingness to partake in the dark arts of dealing with super agents overstayed their welcome at an institution built around doing things the right way. Raul’s departure leaves Vinai, by all accounts a great guy who loves the club, as the club’s sole director. Arteta now has the final say on transfers, elevating him to manager status even if his title does not reflect that. Given how Raul’s tenure occurred in conjunction with an acceleration of the backslide that began in the last few years of the Wenger era, this is a very positive development. In his absence remains a young core of senior figures, hopefully a sign of progressive ideas taking hold at Arsenal.

In summation, the State of the Cannon is still a bit shaky, but far from the ruinous dumpster fire most fans expected it to be at this point. An unfit head coach has been replaced with a potentially elite leader and tactician. For the most part, new players have found their feet and the older players appear at least usable again. Promising young players like Saka, Nketiah, Martinelli, Willock, Nelson, and Smith-Rowe are beginning to emerge with important roles in the first team, with others like Folarin Balogun (if he decides to stay) and Miguel Azeez right behind them. Interestingly, Arsenal are beginning to quietly sign young, promising talent like George Lewis, Tim Akinola, and Jonathan Dinzeyi. And, of course, we still have a world class striker in our starting eleven. Some of the players on the roster will bring in a tidy amount of money for the club to use on transfers that will hopefully strengthen the squad. If the rumors about who Arsenal are after turn out to be true, we may be looking at a wonderfully productive summer. Willian, a versatile player who may still be at his peak, has just arrived. But the club are also fighting to stay afloat financially in an unclear fiscal landscape brought on by the pandemic. The measures Arsenal have recently taken to combat these struggles reek of late-stage capitalism and, due to the lack of faith supporters have in the club hierarchy’s morality, have been almost universally characterized as nefarious. However, on the footballing side of things, it appears that Arsenal are at least trying to right the ship before it crashes into the iceberg that is midtable mediocrity. Raul Sanllehi has been fired after two years of power grabs, shady transfer business involving his friends, and giving super agents access to the inner workings of the club without being able to stop them from revealing it on national radio. As a result, the club is now functioning with some oversight and has given Mikel Arteta more influence on matters off the pitch. And having that man at the helm of the first team provides massive reassurance that our situation is not hopeless. All in all, things look promising once more. We are finally moving in the right direction as a club. At long last, it’s starting to feel like we have our Arsenal back.

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