Every team except Abu Dhabi suffers from a couple of ruinous and/or malicious refereeing decisions so I'm including an acceptable buffer of a couple of dropped points.
Official: Mikel Arteta is the new Arsenal manager.
- Edited
Dom We should really have an xF per 90 ("expected fuckery") for each club measuring how refereeing decisions (cards, penalties, goals subject to review) are influencing xPPG.
Dom agree with @flobaba. Go week by week and look at our squad turnover versus Liverpool. It’s been quite significant. We’ve had various players coming and going due to injury and suspension all year. Relationships aren’t built on the spot. They need to be nurtured over time.
The collapse of the White-Saka-Odegaard triangle has been massive, but we’ve just never had anything constant out left this whole time.
- Edited
True we have had issues getting our best "relationships" humming due to disruptions, but Occam's razor is only getting sharper.
The simplest theory: Saka, Jesus, Martinelli, Trossard, Havertz aren't a good enough crop of forwards to win the title, even with our set piece prowess, and especially if Saka goes down.
Five out of six of our forwards are in poor to okay season long form and the only true star is now out injured.
Liverpool have Salah, Díaz, Gakpo, Núñez, Jota as well as some shot merchants in midfield. They have more form, energy and cutting edge among those forwards than us, and they set up to exploit what they've got.
Sterling and Chiesa mean we're level as far as backup signing nonentities goes.
We need another truly elite forward who can play with Saka. Granted it is hard to find a player that good, but we have one and Liverpool have one. If Salah breaks a leg we would be right back in the title race today, but then if wishes were horses …
Claudius 5 years in and plenty spent, Claude. We shouldn’t be in a situation in which the whole thing falls over when one bloke gets injured.
What are the conclusions for Arteta?
I'm still really happy with what Arteta's achieved and fully back him.
Arteta's job now is to use all of his influence with KSE and all of the available resources and knowledge to get us a truly elite forward who can play with Saka, making any judicious sacrifices necessary to get this done, all while keeping the rest of our squad signed up, content, balanced and motivated.
Edu has left us and has not been replaced, so there is no one else to carry the can. Arteta's the one.
Signing a true superstar striker is a hard task in winter, but if we haven't got our player by the end of summer, Arteta will have let us and himself down badly.
- Edited
Burnwinter based where we've come from and where we currently are - reasonably comfortable in the top 4 - I'd give him 1 more season to right the wrongs of last summer. that would mean serious acknowledgement of the shortcomings of our attacking structure, to be reflected in a recruitment drive that focuses on nothing else but improving creativity and goalscoring
if we decline to the point that top 4 becomes a skin-of-the-teeth proposition this season, I'd want him gone ASAP because regressing at such a late phase would be indicative of deep-lying, likely unsolvable problems with this managers philosophy that will only worsen with time.
- Edited
I know what I'm like: petty and impatient.
If we haven't had one or more transformative signings and we're trailing a way behind City, Liverpool or worse yet some other scrubs this Christmas, I'll have turned on Arteta.
- KSE seem generous enough to back the necessary signings
- Edu allegedly left because Arteta was picking our targets
- we "did the work" on PSR and other financial constraints last summer
- every week brings more evidence we're a player short up front
Arteta's just gotta sign us a magic man without taking his hands off the wheel. If he can't do it soon then he'll have to go. The club doesn't pay him to fuck spiders.
Burnwinter I still continue to take a glass half full view. Even with this first loss in two months. My view is that a single signing will have a really big impact on this team. A forward (left or central) who can create high value, high volume chances for himself like Isak goes a long way. We saw even with Nwaneri, despite his flaws, that decisiveness makes a big difference.
Despite the gloom, I want to shout out MLS. This kid is going to go stratospheric
Claudius My view is that a single signing will have a really big impact on this team.
Yes! I think all else (including luck with injuries and justice from referees) being equal, one more top drawer forward would mean winning the league.
But it's the obviousness of that which tells us Arteta has to get that player or get out of the way.
- Edited
Burnwinter this, this, this.
Our lack of forward options is both a reason to believe we will get better and solve many of our problems (if we bring players in) as well as a threat to Arteta's job if it doesn't get fixed soon.
Any whispers of #artetaout are pretty petulant at this stage to be honest but things do have to change this summer. My main concern on that front is that we won't have Edu's replacement in before then but the club have afforded themselves faith that they will fix the situation.
Edit: what Burnsy said in his follow-on posts.
Yeah look, hats off to the folks (I particularly recall Sicario and Qs) who insisted we were short of a top striker in summer. I trusted the process and I thought we could get away with a few quality additions and still move forward, but I was wrong.
The people who said Martinelli was going to need upgrading (particularly recall Dules and RtC saying this) were also on the right track.
We skated by with Havertz and Trossard during the second half of last season and achieved an amazing run, but they're not up to it now despite being good players. Jesus has to be sold and Sterling is irrelevant.
Burnwinter it’s always been obvious the team needed another top forward who fit the system for over a year. But one assumes these are works in progress. The balance is how do you build as quickly as possible while ensuring you get the right players. I’d like to think Arteta tried to optimise both of these as much as possible - particularly given rumours around Vlahovic, Williams, Raphiña, Sekso and others.
- Edited
The frustrating thing about all of this is that Artetas tactical systems and his coaching, both technical and motivational, are top tier. I think the structure above him is wrong. I think Edu let spending, on wages in particular, get out of hand. I think when we made decent signings we mostly overpaid for them. PSR is pretty tight at the moment and we seem to have hit a bit of a wall where we need to be much more careful about who we pay huge money to. I hope whoever replaces Edu has some better ideas for scouting and is able to get some value and catch some players before they blow up. We haven't signed a player like that since Odegaard.
Arteta mentioning the carling cup ball is different is really a novice thing to say and opens him up to all sorts of ridicule. Rival fans are relishing this.
Sicario2 - Tier 1 sorry, what the fuck did he actually say? Lol.
Claudius We tried and we seem to have pursued some reasonable targets, but it looks like we Goldilocksed our transfer strategy given we ended up with no one but Sterling on loan.
The remedy will be to land a really big target.
- Edited
Imagine if Ange or Ten Haag said that. They would be absolute laughing stocks on here for days.
Burnwinter but it looks like we Goldilocksed our transfer strategy given we ended up with no one but Sterling on loan.
Which is weird because previous years we've managed to pivot pretty well when we missed our first targets. I do wonder if Edu was already mentally checked out last summer and had his new job lined up.
