People make way too much of Emery's tinkering. Guardiola and Klopp manage the two best teams in the league. Guardiola tinkers every single fucking game. Klopp sticks to pretty much the same formation all season long. Are both of those teams significantly affected by how frequently/infrequently they change formations? Would Man City perform better if they stuck to one formation all season long? Would Liverpool be worse off if Klopp tinkered every single game? You could argue it's horses for courses.
One of the cardinal rules of football is young players are inconsistent and will cost you points. We've already seen at first hand how this affected us the first time round when we did the youth project post-Invincibles. That project also turned out to be led by two of the best EPL players over the past decade (Fabregas and van Persie), yet it was mired with inconsistencies. Sticking to one formation is hardly going to change how inconsistent these players are. One of the sticks to beat Wenger with was that he was too rigid and didn't change formations. Remember that? Every cat and his dog wanted us to play a diamond formation (obviously with a different set of players) but we've seen just how limited that formation actually is now that Emery has tried it.
I think people are incredibly harsh on Emery, because they are ignoring the fact that we have turned over a huge part of our squad over the past two years. We sold/lost a ton of old players and brought in a ton of kids and a clown to top it off. We are at the very start of a new transition, not merely continuing off from Wenger's final season. The team that Wenger left behind is a few players shorts of being brand spanking new. It's not even been two seasons since the great man left. Fans are acting like spoilt and entitled brats, demanding we look cohesive and ignoring the elephant in the room. We have made a significant number of changes to the squad, which would a) impact how consistent and effective we would look deploying any tactic/formation and b) most of the newcomers are under-24 which would also affect how consistent their performances are. This is exactly why we look worse off than last season.
