Claudius wrote:
ohboy!!! wrote:
The brief for Arteta has to be to show the actual creation of a team. We have seen various formations, personnel etc to the point where we are still guessing what we will see next season.
As many have already pointed out, this also means the age the team needs to be younger, actually developing players which is the only way we are going to get out of this mess.
To be fair, his formation is settled. His biggest issue is that he came out of the last international weekend and has had to deal with massive injury / health issues around Auabameyang, Odegaard, Tierney and Luis. And that has forced him to put players in unusual positions, distorting his baseline formation. But he’s played basically the same setup since December
Agreed there have been mitigating circumstances for much of this season, starting with the cluster fuck made by the club last summer re the lack of the squad purge undermining Arteta's 'non-negotiables' & his authority/credibility. IMO all of the appointments made at the time re Edu, Arteta and Vinnai as well as the lack of any squad clearout, were made with the ESL in mind providing plenty of margin for error in KSE's typical ownership by remote model.
However, that said:
-Â we have yet to see his preferred 433 formation and roles/team composition;
-Â IMO he committed much the same error as LFC in disrupting his settled/functional midfield to cover the defence, which then had a knock-on effect to the rest of the team performances;
-Â he then doubled down on that error in the biggest games of the season and his managerial career, in that he did a Guardiola style bottle job by overthinking things (not for the first time), and being trying to be too clever for his own good in the UEL S/F, by changing the formation and player roles to something not used previously, and undoing any sort of rhythm in the team.
IMO IF KSE were looking to spend BIG in the transfer market so as to complete the rebuild, I'd not be doing so with Arteta as manager based upon the above, and that he doesn't have established creds in order to attract top players to a project at a club he has just managed to fall out of UEFA comps for the first time in about 25 years.
