via @Arsenal Instagram
It is FA Cup weekend and I’m having to scour the internet to find places to watch it because America’s English football TV is as fractured as it is in the UK.
I really can’t wait for the day that Jeff Bezos or Tim Cook writes a cheque for the lot. This isn’t like Amazon killing the high street, it’s just taking the football from one billionaire and giving it to another.
The Premier League and assorted cup games is a consumer product that is in desperate need of simplifying. I should be able to buy all of Arsenal’s games, I should be able to opt-in for highlights packages on the whistle, and there should be varying levels of service where I can buy one-off games or packages that give me the big matches.
Everyone wins.
I really can’t understand why it’s take so long for something like this to happen, but hopefully, with 5G coming onto the market hard over the next year, a tech giant will rip the package from cable TV who do a very bad job when it comes to value.
The good news keeps on coming with Mikel Arteta. He told the press this weekend that he doesn’t believe in 5 captains, which is a relief, because the idea was an utter nonsense.
“The more stability we can generate with our captain and the players we have in the squad, I think the more clarity we will have to transmit to the fans what we are trying to do.
“There are many factors, some we cannot control, but at the moment everything is OK and not the time for me to change things in place because I haven’t seen real things to make the decisions.
“I have been at clubs that have four or five captains. It is more a leadership group than captains. At the end it is one guy wearing the armband and after the team picks the leaders.
“The moment they pick the leaders is when someone talks if they listen or they are looking at the roof. That is when you see.”
This is a total basic of leadership. The 5 captains idea was basically Unai Emery’s socialist wage structure. If you give 5 people the leadership, you either have a situation where everyone is fighting it out to be the biggest voice which can be embarrassing and cause factions.
‘Leadership is related to how this team leads together. The moment you start to see different groups, there are leaders in each group but they are not shared in the best common interest of the whole squad. This is what I want to avoid.’
… or the opposite, where the assumption is that someone else will take the lead and no one does (hello, last 18 months). Then there’s the factor Arteta mentioned – because the roles are not clearly defined, no one knows when or who to pay attention to.
That nightmare is AUBA. Get it? Auba > Over?
The man from Gabon seems to be the defacto choice until the end of the season and I like that. He’s one of the best sharpshooters in the world and he’s currently putting in a shift out wide for the team. I also like his prematch huddles and the post-match attitude to the fans. Not sure if that’s come from him, but it’s been noted that the players are giving away shirts and staying on the pitch longer after games.
I think that’s the thing a lot of Arsenal fans are warming to… Arteta isn’t just about the details on the pitch. He seems to look at a football club like an eco-system. Part of that eco-system is the fans. If the fans aren’t happy, it’ll be acid rain in the ground, not rays of positivity sunshine. By working hard, saying the right things in the press, showing the correct body language, and giving the fans something back after the game… he makes everyone’s job easier to do off the pitch.
I think we’re in a phase where we’re praising Arteta for doing real basics correctly, but look, why not, we haven’t had an approach like this in a long time. Arsene created a bit of an enemy of a fanbase he thought were ungrateful, Emery just didn’t have a clue what was going on and whinged about us when the going got tough. We had major broadsheet journalists pondering whether the real issue at Arsenal was indeed the fans (quite staggering you can get paid for that sort of shite analysis). Now 2 weeks into the reign of a manager who understands modern fans and it’s a different vibe, long may that continue.
The important thing we need to do as fans is ground ourselves in reality. Arteta hasn’t solved all of our problems, there are still plenty of ups and downs to come, and we are in desperate need of some upgrades if we’re to find the next level. There will be some outrageous wins, there will be some shock losses, and there will be general setbacks as we navigate this season. We just have to avoid whiplash conclusions, which I hope is possible because everyone can see what the manager is attempting to do with our great club.
The next challenge we have is against Leeds United tomorrow night. Marcelo Bielsa is a managers manager. Pep, Klopp, Tuchel and Nagelsmann will all put him in their top three list. The guy is a genius, an obsessive, and he has always made his teams more than the sum of their parts. Leeds United go to war for him, that’s a managerial trait all managers want to have. The power of persuasion. Arteta said that players who go there come away better people and better players and they always talk highly of him… which I assume is what he wants.
It’s pretty clear from Arteta’s press conference that he’s very concerned about the overall health of the squad. He needs to get some energy back into the legs of first-team players, he needs to ease injured players back, so I would imagine he’ll use this game to give a run out to players he’s not sure about.
Dani Ceballos is the player lots of people have been whispering about. Since his first few games where he was electric, he’s massively lost his focus and belief. He was player of the U21 Championship, we know there’s huge potential, so the hope is that under a manager that can coach, communicate and plan, he’ll thrive. We could certainly do with his energy and enthusiasm heading into the back half of the season.
I also wondered if Pepe would start, just to keep some momentum going, and to up his under-fire fitness levels. Bielsa, who signed Pepe from Angers when he was at Lille, had this to say.
‘Pepe is a great player with big resources and is a goalscorer,’ said the Argentine ahead of a possible reunion with his former player with Leeds set to face Arsenal in the FA Cup at the Emirates on Monday evening.
‘And he’s a player who is able to unbalance a match. Obvious skills, then you have all of these skills in one player, the value is £72m. It’s just a matter of time and after, show those skills.’
Big words that I like to read.
Right, that’s enough for today. I’ll see you in the comments a bit later, check out the latest pod if you get the chance!
Kristo
“”””””So abrahimovic is the reason wenger never won another title?
wow just wow”””””””
1000000000000000000% Yes.
He was winning them before he arrived…..
Wasnt He?
Pre Abramovich – Wengers Arsenal went 30 Games unbeaten against Chelsea.
Man City and Chelsea 8 titles nothing to do with money whatsoever.
They just happened organically.
I am arsenal fan
but this notion that we couldn’t compete for titles again because money doping is quite frankly making me look stupid to call myself an arsenal fan. It is the most dumbest excuse i ever heard in my almost 25years i have supporting arsenal
CG
before abrahimovic which of chelsea and arsenal has the most expensive squad?
Which of them has the most quality squad?
I think if Mr Wenger had been capable of utilising our own money a little bit more wisely, he would have achieved far greater success.
It was just another excuse that a few gullible folk bought into.
That’s right, folk like CG.
Graham nails it above.
Graham “””I think if Mr Wenger had been capable of utilising our own money a little bit more wisely, he would have achieved far greater success.”””” Well 58 games after Our Wenger left- and 1/4 billion spent on players- we are sitting in 10th Wenger never had us 10th. Wenger had us 90% of the time in top 4. We also played sublime soccer 95% of time Looks like spending money badly at Arsenal is worse under this Regime than Wengers. Since The Great Man has left- we ain’t improved in one aspect of the club. Not one. But reassuringly… Read more »
Hoarding record cash piles in the bank during a decade of historic low interest rates while the cost of player acquisitions skyrocketed year-on-year.
Sweet economics degree. Totally worth.
Then Wenger shit the bed and handed over £130,000,000 for Ozil’s services and let Alexis and Ramsey walk for free.
Brilliant stuff.
Jamie, Arsenal never hoarded huge pile of cash. The problem was that people with no economic sense were equating being cash reserve heavy at specific time of the year as being rich. Some of the Arsenal loan had covenants that imposed a certain level of cash to be held in the reserve. The rest was just spend during the fiscal year. Barcelona used to pay its player on a semi-annual basis rather than a monthly basis. If you looked at their numbers the day before pay day, you would have thought that they were swimming into cash. Yet one year,… Read more »
“ It is FA Cup weekend and I’m having to scour the internet to find places to watch it because America’s English football TV is as fractured as it is in the UK.”
What?
ESPN+ mate.
$4.99 a month and every FA cup game is streamed live (no Gold nonsense). They also have the UFC for anyone who needs a weekly fix of gratuitous brutality (but there is extra subscription nonsense to deal with there)
Valentin I don’t buy that one bit.
We were playing CL football year on year whilst selling our best players on the regular and usually seasons when we spend bigger we’re also accompanied by significant sales as well so net wouldn’t be that high
If you’re going to make bold claims against the widely accepted truth about how we hoarded cash you’ll need to provide more detailed evidence than just claims
And Valentin if we never had any cash like you claim, why were wenger Gazidis fizman and co coming out every single summer and winter saying we can buy super players if we want to?
Been away, now catching up on comments.
Un Na
Agree totally with your comments re PhD. The guys obsessed with Bamford (has he really been banned again?) I think it’s due to Nam being Harvard grad and himself being at Backwater College.
Starting to feel you and Norma are one and the same too..lol. Every new guise she uses, always taking the fight to your adversaries. You always backing her too no matter how obnoxious her remarks.
China1, Trump can pretend to be a multi billionaire with great business acumen man, yet his accounts show that it is not the case. Forget what people say, look at the account. Go to AST web site and read what they say. Only in 2013 did Arsenal’s budget started to benefit from the Emirates’s move and the bigger Premiership deal. If you want more easy to read numbers and conclusion read the Swiss ramble for the 2013-2014 seasons. http://swissramble.blogspot.com/2014/09/arsenal-money-changes-everything.html?m=1 “What is encouraging for Arsenal is that they are no longer so reliant on player sales or property development to make… Read more »
Arsenal sacked Emery in an very classy way Emery ta.king to Bellegue [football London ] ““I told Raul that I’d prefer the footballers to come to me individually instead of me going to the changing room and making a speech. “And they all came, apart from Lucas Torreira. He couldn’t make it but left us a message. “He was receiving a massage at that moment but all the players came. I also got messages from Koscielny and from Welbeck and I thank them all. But now is the time to go home.” It wasn’t rancorous at all, just another merry-go… Read more »
Valentin,
This is all old ground now, water under the bridge, and the situation no longer holds.
But during the period 2012-17 Arsenal was very much super-cash rich. At one point, the Swiss Ramble analysis showed Arsenal alone having more cash holdings than the other 19 premier league clubs combined. And that wasn’t just down to real estate gains. I remember Pedro regularly blogging about our stockpile of cash at the time.
Valentin,
Oh and at the time only a fraction of Arsenal’s cash horde was required by the loan/bond covenants on the stadium debt.
*Emery speaking to Belague
True, Words.
We hoarded cash, then Wenger blew a huge chunk of it on a madness summer.
Worst summer ever.
Pedro,
No need to go over all those old frustrations. All in the past now. As is Emery.
I am beginning to share your opinion that we’re on the verge of something big with Arteta. But it may well be a bumpy road along the way, at least to begin with.
Personally don’t think we will sign anyone in jan…
Why the club not accept the 10 for Michi .?
If w3 go for a loan deal why not go for a young player at cub…
Like John stones or Lewis dunk.
Good podcast Pedro, except the sound quality was very low, had to turn my media volume right up to hear it but it improved later on. Regarding player improvement I happen to think AMN and Iwobi improved significantly under Emery, and he did us a favour putting Saka, Willock, Nelson and Martinelli into the squad too. A lot of the more senior players regressed though for sure, but I think that’s more to do with their confusion at the lack of understanding of Emery’s communication and his constant tactical changes every game. It’s obvious already within 3 games that Arteta… Read more »
Pierre,
I can’t sing but my daddy didn’t shoot me!
The money problem was real till around 2010-11. From 2012 , we had a lot of money. But Wenger refused to spend because he knew his tactics are outdated and fans will abuse him if he doesnt win titles despite spending money. Hence the circus continued for few more years.
I don’t think wenger ever knew his tactics were outdated
What really is the link between arteta and wenger apart from being an ex player who favors offensive football?
I don’t see any other similarities. Arteta is very detail driven and strategic, the absolute opposite of express yourself wengerball.
Strategically they’re very very different managers
China1
People link them because Wenger bought Arteta who was an attacking mid, specifically to play in the deep lying role.
And my assumption is that people assume that Arteta’s move to coaching has to do with that switch, because lo and behold, his mentor Pep is also a deep lying mid of the same vein.
And also of course Wenger relies on Arteta in implementing the tactical direction to the squad. They have a close relation.
I don’t follow the link with pep, I think it’s a coincidence
As far as I can see he just is a former wenger signing who likes attacking football. High energy pressing, disciplined and highly organized setups etc were not wengers style
His was freeform attacking football where good players were trusted to make the best of the setup rather than detailed situationed drilling and strategy planning etc
From a managerial perspective they’re not similar at all imo
China1 Well I have to disagree. I think high energy pressing and discipline plus a high line was what Wenger always had in mind. He saw what Pep did at Barcelona and he tried to create a version of it at Arsenal. But he couldn’t pull it off. When Arsenal was moderately successful, it was because he had talented midfield generals like Arteta, Fabregas and Cazorla to implement it. Arteta is thus seen by many as the Wenger that Wenger himself wanted to become. But by then he was too old and too inflexible. The genius that we saw at… Read more »
I don’t get how people can honestly argue Arsenal was hoarding cash when the accounts clearly show that until 2014 Arsenal was making an operational loss every year but was saved by property and players sales.
As explained by Swiss Ramble Arsenal may have had cash reserve but is was still making a loss. Being cash reserve rich is not the same as being rich.
Only from 2013 was the purse open for the purchase of players. That is when mistakes were made. But hoarding cash was never one of them.
China1,
“And Valentin if we never had any cash like you claim, why were wenger Gazidis fizman and co coming out every single summer and winter saying we can buy super players if we want to?”
Gazidis lied. Colour me surprised!
Nobody was going out and tell the world that Arsenal is going to be broke for the next 10 years.
China1,
There is two aspects of coaching: the vision of the football you want and the training method you are going to use to implement that vision.
Arteta is closer to Wenger than Pep in term of vision of football. However he is closer to Pep in method of training.
Wenger was not very directive. Pep is very detailed oriented. Arteta has already say that he is not interested in possession per se. His preferred style of play is much more direct than the refined version of tiki-taka than ManCity is played.
Valentin Yes, I actually was quite nutty back then. Nutty enough to look at their financial statements. So let me get some facts straight. 1. Yes we were hoarding cash. 2. At the same time we weren’t as profitable as we wanted because the market had overtaken us. You are right to say that it was the property that kept us in the black. But it failed to generate the profits we wanted because the property was spun off in 2010 which was a global crisis year. 3. I got this feeling that cash was hoarded in Arsenal as a… Read more »
Can’t see many similarities between Wenger and Arteta’s style.
Arteta’s teams are compact defensively, Wenger’s weren’t.
Arteta clearly favours a high press, Wenger never employed this tactic.
Arteta wants the ball moving forward pretty much as soon as its in play, Wenger’s later reign was personified by the sideways pass.
Honestly, labelling Arteta as the next Wenger or Pep is fucking cringeworthy although i can see why some feel the need to do it but he’s his own man and we should be proud of that.
Dark Hei, You don’t present any facts, just personal belief. Where were we hoarding cash? The account show that every years the so called pile of cash reserve were depleted by mid years and were replenished the following year by selling more property and players. The decision to split the property development business from the footbal one was taken because of the genuine fear that the property market was going to take Arsenal down. However it was never a clean one because of the legal covenants. The lenders did not let Arsenal move loans in a uncollaterised separated company that… Read more »
God save these AKBs.
Or at least
Save us from these AKBs.
Unai,
Forget the Wenger later years. His initial years was all about power, direct attack and press. Vieira and Petit were pressing the opposition, regaining the ball and swiftly passing to Overmars/Pires on the left, Wiltord on the right, Anelka/Henry/Kanu/Adebayor scoring in the middle.
There were very few lateral passes in those teams. Our midfield was deeper because we played a 4-4-2 rather than a 4-2-3-1 that add one extra line and because none of our CBs could make the kind of Vertical passes than Luiz can.
Stop reaching Val, we were never a ‘pressing’ team under Wenger.
We were a technically gifted transitional team who used our speed, quality and higher fitness levels to hurt the opposition.
The need to credit Wenger for things that never happened is quite frankly sycophantic.
Arteta clearly takes a more organised approach and believes in winning the ball high up the pitch swiftly, none of Wenger’s teams had this.
One thing Arteta is doing well has been the message he is transmitting. Every time he has been in front of the camera he has been clear, Impressive and well articulated.
https://arseblog.news/2020/01/arteta-wants-arsenal-to-become-addicted-to-winning/
Nketiah is back. I’ve long rated him as a player and I want him to succeed at Arsenal.
However at the present moment we need defensive reinforcements.
Brighton is looking for a striker. What about proposing a swap loan deal that suits both clubs?
We get Lewis Dunk, a player approaching the peak of his career with an optional clause to buy for say £20m if he does well… with Brighton being offered the same? (Although if we could manage it I’d insert a first refusal buy back option clause for Nketiah if he does well.)
Un, at no point did I say we weren’t great defensively.
We were outstanding but lets not pretend this was because of Wenger’s footballing ethics.
What I object to is people crediting Arteta’s style to Wenger when they are clearly vastly different both from a basic organisational standpoint and tactically too. Its completely unnecessary.
Valentin,
Wenger hoarded cash, end of discussion.
Argue with Pedro about it if you must.
Ffs, Wenger’s now been credited for the high press, high line and now Tikka Takka.
I’ve heard it all.
Un, How many of our goals in those early seasons were from counter attacks? Long balls in behind or over the top for anelka or overmars to run onto? A lot. I’m with ya on this, that’s why i called early Wenger teams, transitional. We absorbed pressure and destroyed teams with power and pace. No argument on that front. Perhaps we can pull the word ‘compact’ as yes, you could probably consider the counter attacking approach to being built on a compact base but your reaching if you want to say Arteta’s quick return to formation behind the ball has… Read more »
Incredible I know but apparently Mustafi is apparently rated in the Bundesliga.
If they are open to it why not offer Mustafi plus some money (say £10m) for Jonathan Tah over at Bayern Leverkusen?
Personally, I dont think we play the “high press” consistently under Arteta. There are times in a game when we do press with intensity, but this is not consistent, especially in the 2nd half of games. Whether this is a fitness aspect, it is a possibility I think Arteta demands that the players quickly get goalside of the ball when the opposition are in possession to limit their ability to expose our defence. Aubamayang, Pepe and Ozil are not players that can press with real intensity but they can be conditioned to position themselves correctly when we haven’t got the… Read more »
Wenger relies heavily on total football. There were no real tactics or strategies other than having better players than the opposition and being fitter.
As football evolved and teams caught up with fitness, then more money started flooding in and more innovative coaches, Arsenal got left behind. Then Wenger started neglecting any kind of defensive strategies in favour of pure attacking football and we didn’t have the players to do it. Mainly due again to wengers dealings in the transfer market.
Unfortunately Wenger was a one trick pony , I wouldn’t credit any kind of style to him.
We need to test as many players as we can today. Exiting to leads at home, some it undos some of the positive vibes, is still a lesser blow than losing one of the first 11 players to an injury because of excessive load.