After 16 games shouldn’t Arsenal be doing better than this?

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By Tony Attwood

An article in the Telegraph says

“Five years of Mikel Arteta have transformed Arsenal – but he must now win Premier League

“Manager has turned team from eighth-placed finishers into title contenders – but can he take next step and bring silverware back to club?”

The article then continues with talk of a secret late night meeting, ManC being upset about Arsenal’s approach for Arteta, and all the usual paraphernalia presented without evidence… which of course is the hallmark of a newspaper story about the dim and distant past with all sorts of portents along the way such as, “It was a moment that has since proven to be one of the most significant in Arsenal’s modern history.”

Except the telling of the tale isn’t quite right, because if we look at the most successful managers in Arsenal’s long and illustrious history, and measure them by win percentage (ie the simple measurement of how many games the team under the manager won as a percentage) Unai Emery is not at a ludicrously low point.

Leaving aside the short-term stop gap management spell of Pat Rice, and the much longer temporary manager Joe Shaw, (who stepped up to the role when Herbert Chapman suddenly passed away in 1934 and who managed the club for 23 games, won over 60% of those games, and took the title for Arsenal for the second successive season), the most successful manager in the entire history of Arsenal managers, measured from 1897 onwards in terms of win percentages, have been, in descending order of success, Mikel Arteta (59.22%), Arsene Wenger (57.25%) and Unai Emery (55.13%)

Which raises the question, why then was Emery sacked?   The answer was that he made one enormous error in terms of buying players – Nicola Pepe bought for something like £75m and ultimately given away.  The fact that he also bought William Saliba for around £25m is forgotten.  He also brought in Martinelli for about £6m.

But maywe we should also remember that on 6 October 2019, Arsenal were third in the League and no one was complaining much, except maybe about Pepe.  On 29 November Emery was sacked after a run of seven games without a win, concluding with a defeat to Eintracht Frankfurt in the Europa League.  The worst run in 27 years. Arsenal were eighth in the league.

And that is where they finished at the end of that season (by then under Arteta) and the end of the next season as well.  Since those two 8th finishes the final placements have been 5th, 2nd and 2nd.

But much more than that, as the Telegraph article cited above says, at its conclusion,, “More than ever, Arsenal FC is also Arteta FC.”

Which is not to say people have not been calling for him to be sacked quite regularly, first for those two finishes in eighth place, and more recently for his failure to take the club on from the second place finish in 2022/23.

But to go back to the Telegraph headline proclaiming that Arteta must win the league.  And this it seems is because “on the five-year anniversary of his appointment, there is a growing sense that Arsenal have once again reached a critical juncture.”

Ah yes, that old journalistic ploy of “a growing sense”.  Not a fact.  Not anything tangible but “a growing sense” which I suppose I share in that I have a growing sense I am getting old, which actually is a fact, and that most newspaper articles about football miss the point, which is an opinion.

The “growing sense” is always notional — invented by a journalist who has to write something, and so with nothing else to write about writes about imaginary feelings.

Although to be fair there has been some slippage as can be seen from the comparison of positions after 16 games over four years.

 

	Season	P	W	D	L	F	A	GD	Pts
3	Arsenal 2024	16	8	6	2	29	15	14	30
2	Arsenal 2023	16	11	3	2	33	15	18	36
1	Arsenal 2022	16	14	1	1	40	14	26	43
6	Arsenal 2021	16	8	2	6	21	22	-1	26

 

Arsenal are currently four points better off  than in 2021, but six points worse off than 2023 and a whopping 13 points worse off than 2022.  The reasons are simple: a far worse set of injuries this season than in either of the last two seasons, and a very difficult set of away fixtures in the first half of this season, which didn’t happen in the last two seasons.

Whether those factors are “reasons” or “excuses” depends on your sense of perspective.

To be fair to the Telegraph the writer does get some of this, adding later, “Their squad is deeper, stronger and better than it has been for arguably two decades, and their results this season have been affected by freakish red cards and a series of unfortunate injuries. The two-month absence of Martin Odegaard, especially, was a brutal blow.”

But then again as they say, “When the only measure of success is winning a major trophy, though, these smaller details become lost.”   Which of course is what happens when football commentary is run by pundits.

But “Smaller details” are indeed important – like, if Arteta went who would take over, and how long would he have to take the club to the top without their being further calls for him to be replaced.  And what happens to clubs that keep changing their managers all the time?  Hang on, I think we’ve covered that in the past….