Claudius wrote:If we keep churning managers and executives, we are just going to make the situation worse because they'll keep blowing up the project, wasting money, destroying player confidence and leaving us bobbing about. I just hope that Edu / Arteta, two men with little track record, are the right right.
Emery was supposed to steady the ship too; instead he almost sank it. Then Arteta came in, and now we're taking in even more water. Maybe the answer isn't stability but to keep searching for quality. What have United gained from backing Solskjaer for so long? What was the point of two years of van Gaal, of three years of Mourinho? They're on a seven year streak right now where the only consistency is that they've been consistently performing like a club half their size.
There are no easy answers about when to sack a manager, and I've already said that I think Arteta has earned more time, but I do think if he had been most other people he would have faced much heavier criticism already. What we're doing right now wouldn't have been considered good enough if it had come from more decorated and experienced managers like Mourinho and Ancelotti, and you would have expected them to be on the chopping block for it.
It's precisely because Arteta is a special case that he gets more leeway. Some of it has been earned by winning the FA Cup, some of it has been extended to him because circumstances are what they are. But he's been backed by the club, he's been supported by the fans. It's up to him to make something of it in the present. Things that are acceptable, to me, under those circumstances would be to maybe struggle to assert yourself against richer teams but showing encouraging signs of improvement on the pitch.
Things that are harder to defend would be, for instance, our worst league start in over 40 years while we create and score less than the bottom-ranked newly promoted team. And just when everyone was so sure that it was impossible to plummet to the lows of last season, which was our worst in the Premier League era. Arteta is not wrong when he says that teams need to experience adversity in order to grow and be forged together, but last year was supposed to be our struggles! We weren't supposed to be back knee-deep in that shit after 12 months, and I don't think it's acceptable to find us there again right now.