Arteta’s problem at Arsenal; a thread (opinion)

Arteta was promoted from coach to manager of Arsenal earlier this year & the club made many changes to provide Mikel with more power over the club.

Arsenal have went with a streamlined approach, Mikel & Edu are tasked to create a new identity at Arsenal.

Arteta has already identified which players he wants to keep & which players are not part of the new identity. According to Mikel, transfer plans for January & summer 2021 have already been finalized.

Should be good news, right? I’ll tell you why it’s not right now.

Everyone at Arsenal knows which players are part of the plans and which are not.

Mikel, Edu & even the players themselves know they are not part of Arsenal’s plans.

Here the problem arises: how do you get a floundering team, with players who know they’re gone, playing well?

Arteta has limited options.

1: Use the senior players anyway and hope they don’t let you down too much

This is what we saw until this month, but they are predictably letting Arteta down. It’s gotten so bad that we’re in a relegation battle. Not working.

2: Put all your faith in young players

Young players don’t care about dressing room politics, they just want to play. Martinelli for example, will play for any Arsenal manager as long as he gets game time.

The drawback is they will get burned out (Saka) and injured often.

3: Work with what you have, hope Arsenal aren’t relegated & overhaul in the next 2 windows

This is what I believe I’m seeing now. Arteta is essentially just picking players & hoping they’ll do ok, just so he can get to January & bring in who he wants to sign

This plan sounds ok in practice, but in reality we haven’t picked up enough points up until now, to make option 3 safe. Should things not go to plan in January, Arsenal could actually get relegated, which ruins the entire process full stop.

The result of all these options will be players who know they don’t have a future at Arsenal, and therefore you get substandard performances from the same players every match.

Q: Why not just drop the underperforming players?

Because Arsenal are not exactly blessed with squad depth & unhappy players who have been frozen out will spread negativity like poison all over the squad. This is what I believe we saw at Everton as the players were arguing.

The result is a truly awful situation, where the manager has lost the dressing room but those players aren’t part of the plans anyway.

So what do you do? Sack Arteta and restart from scratch again? Or just pray you get through it and move on as planned?

Whatever Arsenal do, I hope it works out because we are in a perilous situation which could genuinely destroy Arsenal as we know it if not handled correctly. Biggest 6 months of this club’s history coming up.