Unai Emery

Ancelotti and Luis Enrique were also heavily rumoured(at different times) as the ‘chosen’ successors of Wenger. Not sure what happened with the former but the latter was apparently asking too much money.

That’s my fear, if on the odd chance due to lack of competition Emery jams top 4 that they’ll offer him his trigger.

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Ancelotti would have been a great choice for us and was one of my favourites, as well as Conte, to take over from Wenger.

Ancelotti has experience at the top level, he as been successful in several different leagues and has managed and won the title in the PL.
I was surprised we didn’t try harder to get him.

Conte had done a decent job at Chelsea, before he lost the dressing room, but is still a top manager that would have given us some discipline and organisation in defence, that Emery has failed to do.

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What we’re/I was stating was that there was more information available on Emery other than his record. Based on that the appointment of Emery was very poor.

We can all agree that nobody would have known what would happened if we appointed Arteta or any other unexperienced manager (it’s not about Arteta at all for me). Experience is overrated anyway. Experience without quality doesn’t mean a thing. That’s the point. The worst case scenario has come to pass anyway. Why shouldn’t they have gone for a bigger gamble? Which at least made Arsenal more interesting to follow regardless if he massively failed.

Let’s not act like Arsenal still is on such a grand level that risks like that shouldn’t be or couldn’t be taken either. We have dropped considerably.

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:arteta:

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There’s a name I’ve not heard in forever. His best contribution was his attire. Shocking everything else.

Highly rated before he made the step up lol

Internazionale is a graveyard for (up-and-coming) coaches though. Even Mazzari, after a good start, found his end there. They need strong personalities to succeed.

The thing is, he was shit everywhere he went so he wasn’t able to translate that quality to senior level and there’s every chance Arteta could be the same. He’s a total unknown commodity at this stage.

I don’t know how he’ll turn out.

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But just like with youth players it’s a given that the majority of talent in players and coaches will not make it. Should that mean they shouldn’t be given chances? I think right now there are four/five coaches in European football who can be considered great/certainties (Klopp, Guardiola, Conte, Allegri and I feel like I miss an obvious name) everybody else is going to be a gamble. Some bigger gambles than others.

I guess one question would be how many managers were successful their first 2-4 years of managing after only being an assistant - at a big club.

I’m all for a 2nd tier manager given that the first tier is very, very small and probably ungettable - other than maybe Allegri (who I am sure some would argue isn’t top tier).

Klopp is really the dream but we persisted too long with Wenger to make that happen. Surely there is a very good and interesting handful of managers in Europe that have more going for them than Arteta at this point?

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Interesting thread

The appointment might have been poor in light of this information you’re talking about. However, it changes nothing about the logic of Emery being a more logical choice than Arteta. One actually won things with different clubs and the other has virtually zero experience coaching. Factually you can not argue against this. Neither you nor Abou have given me any augments that actually refute my claims.

I am still waiting.

Telling me Emery is a terrible choice and always was so and therefore we should have gone with the unknown in Arteta instead is absolutely not a valid argument and it’s simply illogical. So unless Abou is trolling, I am still waiting.

Nothing he said and to an extent you now again say changes the fact that the facts make appointing Emery over Arteta at the time defensible.

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Plenty of evidence I’m sure, but that GF and GA analysis is kind of weak given the massive variability in those squads… one thing that is a bit surprising is the GA for all the teams bar PSG - lowest is 1.19 - that does seem to lend some credence to the fact that whatever we thought he would do to stabilize our defense was perhaps a bit of a myth.

Having said that, a better analysis would have been to look longitudinally at those teams through his term and pre- and post- numbers… obviously we have AFC to evaluate and it basically looks marginally worse than Wenger’s nadir pretty much (or equivalent if we are generous).

Positive side… we have 31 games to catch up
Negative side… they have 31 games to expand the lead

Anyway, season just started, enjoy it please.

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All this Emery v Arteta row is secondary to the one of Wenger staying when Klopp was available.
It transformed a rival and compounded us to the malaise we are in now.

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Yeah we completely made of a mess of it all by not getting rid of Wenger in the 2013-2015 period, which would’ve been so easy to do when his contract expired in 2014 after winning the Hull final.

In that period we would’ve been able to attract most of the top level managers as we were still perennial CL participants and always got to the knockout stages. We even lasted until February or March in a few title races, which would be lovely to see now :laughing:

I still can’t wrap my head around how the hierarchy at the club could’ve been so poor at planning for the future. It’s as if they thought Wenger would perform at the top level until he was 80 and everything was going to be wonderful if we didn’t change a damn thing.

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I’ve nicked the graphic from @Calum’s post in the Torreira thread.

Even more concerning than Torreira being played as some sort of wide forward (lol), is the fact that Guendouzi and Xhaka are covering the exact same space.

Why the fuck are the two midfielders at the base of our midfield occupying the same area of the pitch? No wonder teams are cutting us to ribbons when our 2 CMs aren’t standing in the right fucking place - we leave a huge hole on the right side of the pitch. It’s fucking humongous. Look at it FFS! You could literally drive a fucking 18 wheeler through there…

What the fuck is Emery telling these guys to do? The players themselves have to share the blame as well. They seemingly are not communicating well enough to cover that ground between them despite one of them starting on the right side of the base at the beginning of the game.

What a clusterfuck.

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No, it clearly wasn’t. I explained this a number of times in posts about how the upside presented by Emery (5th or 6th) was no different from the downside presented by a complete failure should it happen in Arteta.

Would Enrique, or Ancelotti, or someone else uninspiring have been indefensible over Arteta? No, because they aren’t shit like Emery. The problem was was that the even small upside you lot figured Emery offered never existed. The worst case with Arteta is pretty much exactly what has happened with Emery. Even in a disaster scenario we were never going to fall out of top 6. And make no mistake Emery’s Arsenal is a disaster scenario. So to make a hire where the best case scenario and the worst case scenario were the exact same is, well, the definition of indefensible and incompetence. **As has been mentioned, not even I could’ve imagined he’d be this level of incompetent, incompetence that makes our last season with Wenger even look preferable.

I am not good on search but I laid out this argument thousands of time.

Thinking hiring Emery was defensible is laughable, just cause you can’t accept you were dead wrong about him isn’t my problem.

@Electrifying nahhh d00d, don’t you know, Emery has a really nice body of work, he’s exceeded expectations a lot, Monaco wasn’t his fault, PSG players were dicks, INSERT more Arsenal Liverpudian delusional logic at its worst of the time HERE

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I remember us ALL laughing at Emery for being a small dicking bum when they lost to Barca, and also one year later against that Madrid team.

Later on that year he becomes our manager. I will never forgive Gazidis. Guy needs firing off into a Gulag immediately.

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