All change at Arsenal has some interesting implications

Mislintat had been at Dortmund for almost a decade, and during the last seven years have won the Bundesliga twice and come second three times – not bad in a one team League when you are not working for the one team.

Dortmund have also won the German cup twice and been runners’ up three times.  and been runners up in the Champions League.   During his spell the club recruited  Robert Lewandowski, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, Shinji Kagawa and Ousmane Dembélé.  Bayern Munich tried to pinch him to do their recruitment two years ago, but Mislintat refused to budge at that time.

Arsène Wenger said, “Identifying and developing talent is a core part of our philosophy and Sven has an outstanding track record over many years. We look forward to him taking our existing recruitment approach forwards.”

It is also interesting that Steve Rowley (who has been at Arsenal for 25 years) will continue with Arsenal in a consultancy role to Mr Wenger, Ivan Gazidis and Sven Mislintat.

The general story behind Mislintat’s decision to leave is reported as a falling out he had with Dortmund head coach, Thomas Tuchel, when he blamed Mislintat for their failure to sign Oliver Torres.  However is was Tuchel who left the club shortly after that bust up.

Mislintat will now be using all the data produced by StatDNA for Arsenal, and he’s come from a background in which he and his team use multiple video analyses of players and then go and watch them personally before making the final recommendation, so he’ll know the ropes.  He often cites the signing of 21-year-old Shinji Kagawa from the Japanese second division Cerezo Osaka as the perfect use of this standard approach.   That player was then sold to Man U for a €15.65m profit two years later.

Mislintat studied sports science in Bochum, and joined Dortmund when they were on the edge of going out of business – which shows the remarkable turn around the club has had since he arrived.

Of course any talk of Arsenal and recruitment will mean that the media will be mentioning André Santos, Yaya Sanogo, Gabriel Paulista and Lucas Pérez – but every club has numerous players who never work out.  They might fail to settle in the country, get long term injuries, have family problems, fail to learn the language or any one of a dozen things; no club gets it right all the time.

So one more piece in an increasingly complex, but increasingly complete-looking arrangement behind the manager is now sorted.  Which raises the next question – what will the man who replaces Mr Wenger do?   I can’t imagine after all this work of late in putting together a new team behind the players the club would bring in a new manager who will insist he brings in his own people behind him.

Indeed I wouldn’t be surprised if the club knows exactly who the next manager will be, and he has already been fully involved with all these behind the scene changes of late.  Time will tell.


We’re not running quite as many articles as normal at the moment as I’m on the move (currently at the airport in fact) but I’m hoping to keep Untold jogging along while I’m away.  If you want to help out and write an article during this time, send it to me at Tony@schools.co.uk and I’ll try and run it.


 

8 Replies to “All change at Arsenal has some interesting implications”

  1. ‘Of course any talk of Arsenal and recruitment will mean that the media will be mentioning André Santos, Yaya Sanogo, Gabriel Paulista and Lucas Pérez’
    If you continue to put words into their mouths in this way how can you be surprised at anything they say?

  2. Will the job of Sven Mislintat as head of recruitment
    at Arsenal be different from the one which Dick Law did at Arsenal as chief Arsenal transfer negotiator?

    Is this Mr Mislintat a prolific identifier of a potential world class or top quality talented footballer at his early age in his career to thus recommend him to his employed club for a possible signing? Okay, he has a good track record in this regard as he has at one time identified and recommended Lewandowski, Aubameyang, Kagawa and Dembele who Barcelona recently snatched to Dortmund to sign which they did. Truly, these are top quality players of Arsenal standard who would have helped the club advance better than it had in the last 5 years had it been Arsenal signed them few years back.

    But will StatDNA allows Mr Mislintat the freedom of choice to identify the kind of player he wants to see Arsenal sign which he should have and be recommending him to Arsenal to sign, but not be interfered with in his job by imposing StatDNA statistics on him to accept when doing his job to identify a youth player with hidden world class talent to Arsenal to sign? When in contract to the top quality players he has identified for Dortmund, StatDNA’s Santos, Sanogo, Paulista and Perez were more or less a failing statistics identification project StatDNA has identified for Arsenal. But only for Stan Kroenke to later turn round to take huge money in the sum of £2-3m yearly from Arsenal in the name of rendering StatDNA service for the club. Hmmm.

  3. Thanks for another great article Tony – of course Arsenal appoint someone like this and it has to be spun negatively by the wonderful British Media.

    Is it possible that Jurgen Klopp’s – in his time at Dortmund – reputation is in some ways enhanced by our new man Sven Mislintat’s work?

    Perhaps akin to Brian Clough and Peter Taylor?

    Earnie

  4. @ Polo
    22/11/2017 at 10:08 am
    The piece of rubbish you refer to is to put it mildly disgusting.

    I have read a lot of lies about Arsene this rubbish scrapes the bottom of the barrel of rotten apples.

    Who needs ‘radio talkspit’ while the Guardian has Amy Lawrence writing for it?

    Shame on the Guardian for publishing such filth.

  5. It sounds like you have some writing to do climatic. Tony will probably love to get a review from you.

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