Arsenal fans defend ‘arsehole’ Mikel Arteta as manager of ‘Tottenham in red’

Editor F365
Arsenal boss Mikel Arteta
Mikel Arteta looks dejected during a match.

Arsenal fans want everybody to know that they are happy with Mikel Arteta. But are they cosplaying? Rival fans not sure.

Send your mails on all subjects to theeditor@football365.com

 

Arsenal under Arteta are pretty good actually
What has happened to football discourse in this country? ‘I’m sure he’s a really nice guy and super swell to work with but a title winner? We’ve seen close to zero evidence.’

Arsenal were literally 1 point off the title last season. We were a few points off the season before and now a couple of injuries and a bit of bad form and suddenly we are a laughing stock whilst sat in second with a points tally to get us to around the average needed to win a title in the Premier League era (87 btw).

We were mocked for challenging for top 4. We were mocked for being s*** under Wenger, Emery and early Arteta. We are now mocked for finished second and I’ve not doubt we’ll be mocked if we ever win anything. It’s genuinely hilarious.

So f*** it, keep on mocking us. I’m as frustrated as the next Arsenal fan we cant get the title but I bet there are 17 teams in the League who would happily swap their current position for three second-place finishes. Winning games makes you a happy fan and coming second means you win a LOT of games. I love not getting beaten 8-2 by our rivals. I love the atmosphere we have at the Emirates now. I love the “what transfers will make the difference” instead of “we’re s*** sign 11 players”. I will keep on supporting my team because I love Arsenal. I’ll even support our Ashtray. And that’s ok. If the Arteta era at Arsenal makes you a sad fan, you need to reevaluate your life.
Rob A (I mean, I might take Iraola though, can we talk about Bournemouth instead please?) AFC

MORE ARSENAL COVERAGE ON F365…
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👉 Title ‘turning point’ sees Arteta reach Arsenal ‘ceiling’ and enter the same ‘tier’ as Ten Hag
👉 Ornstein gives Arsenal hope over transfer for player ‘Mikel Arteta loves’ after Villa draw

 

…Some absolute brutal mails today about Arteta that I wish I had seen after we beat Spurs, not today. Just shows how fickle people are.

‘I’m sure he’s a really nice guy and super swell to work with but a title winner? We’ve seen close to zero evidence.’

If the only evidence that he is a title winner is him literally winning the title then fair enough, he’s definitely not as he hasn’t. He came extremely close last year and we were close enough the season prior. I’d say the best evidence that he can win a title is the fact he came 2nd to arguably the best team in PL history.

Seeing other mails complain about our attacking depth, which is fair to a point. We went into the season with two players for each of the front three positions and with a lot of them being versatile; RW; Saka and Sterling. LW; Martinelli & Trossard. ST; Havertz and Jesus. Nwaneri has also deputized as the backup for Saka. I thought this would be fine but nearly all of these players bar Saka have regressed. It wasn’t unrealistic to expect good seasons from them. This team scored more goals last season and I’m pretty sure the season before than the 03/04 side that went unbeaten. There are goals there in this team.
Dion

 

…I haven’t written in for a while because, in the main, I haven’t felt the need to. There is never any point in responding to Stewie any more as he is just a useful foil for the mailbox to tickle Arsenal fans, in spite of him forever contradicting himself. No, I feel now is the time because I think a lot of people have been missing the main point about the Premier League. It is unbelievably competitive now. Like, crazy levels.

I don’t think Arteta is in any way culpable for the tricky season we are having. The year before last we accidentally competed for the League when we weren’t ready to do so. City, rightly put us in our place while there was little alternative competition.

Last season, we’d improved but City had the experience and cheatiness to get them the consistency they needed to avert our challenge. This was exacerbated by the dip in form that Arsenal, like most clubs, experience during a lengthy League season. This season we haven’t bought additional forwards, which I don’t think anyone has mentioned yet? However, we did buy some more strong and promising midfield and defensive cover. I seem to remember a clamour from some quarters to buy Zirkzee. And previously we were embarrassed by being outspent by Chelsea for Mudryk. Both may end up being great in the long run, but not for this season.

Arteta, in my mind, wanted Sesko and Williams as they were the only two players he felt would elevate our attack and compete with what we have in Havertz and Martinelli in particular. Attacking options are hard to come by and before anyone mentions Palmer, who’s to say he would have wanted to come to Arsenal, or that City would want to sell him to us? We don’t know what goes on behind the scenes, especially when Arsenal are now seen as competition to City. Wait, did I just say we’re seen as competition to City? I think I did. Not sure I can remember saying that for a while.

Now this brings me to this season. I am not sure if anyone has noticed but there are some seriously good teams in the League now. Newcastle with their interesting investments coming to fruition. But wait, they were beaten yesterday at home by… Bournemouth. What the actual eff? How brilliant is that?

And Brentford nearly drew with Liverpool until Nunez remembered he is allowed to score. And looking elsewhere in the League, Chelsea had a resurgence, Brighton are never terrible. Spurs can cause an upset occasionally. Man United look better with Amorim. City aren’t exactly poo plop now. Villa are in form and we were 2-0 up against them before they put in two excellent finishes. And I haven’t even mentioned Forest! Sorry if I missed anyone but the point I’m making is that the League is the most exciting and competitive it has been for a seriously long time.

And guess what, Arsenal are second still. Ok, potentially 9 points behind Liverpool, but who’s to say we don’t land Sesko in January? And we don’t recall Vieira to give us another option? Or even bag Williams too? What then?

We are just as likely to drop points this season as anyone else. I personally don’t think Liverpool are as good as the run they’ve been on. Salah has put in extra effort to secure a move or a better final contract. Clearly Alexander Arnold is unsettled. I can see us each dropping points before the end of the season, particularly with any games against the teams I mentioned earlier.

It’s all to play for. Any sane and long term gooner is not even remotely calling for Arteta to go. The League is ruddy difficult to get. Not only the coaching and the money, but a large slice of luck involving injuries (or lack of) and the form of your rivals. I’m going to enjoy the rest of the season and hope we put a decent run together. It is far from over and we are in a transfer window. Let’s just wait and see, there are fun times ahead.
JazGooner

 

Enough about Villa already
I see the site is awash with Aston Villa content after Saturday night’s game. I don’t know if you can spare any more pixels to cover the claret and blue, when really you should probably start giving Arsenal a mention, but I’ll be quick.

Nobody seems to have any time for Lucas Digne in England, despite him now being France’s first choice left back, but it’s fairly clear now why he’s seen off Forest’s Moreno and Dodgy Accounting’s Ian Maatsen to be Villa’s number 1 left back. I thought he was excellent in the second half. As was Tielemans but that’s to be expected really, had he found his range with passing and shooting a bit earlier in the game and we’d probably have won that. Ideally a 30-yarder pinged off the ref so we could have got a replacement on who was any good, but you can’t have everything.

Obviously had we won, Rob Hawthorne probably would have resigned on air. The idea that two English teams in the Champions League facing each other, when one has beaten the other twice in just over a year, should elicit such a tiring David v Goliath narrative is baffling when looked at with a clean pair of eyes, but that’s how the media works now I suppose. All content has to be Big 6 focused because that’s where all the consumers are; clearly we should not consider why the consumers only take an interest in six teams and ignore the other 86 – something that didn’t happen 30 years ago – but just be quiet and consume.

Occasionally, someone suggests those six teams should go all in and form their own little clique, selling TV rights to Not Sky and giving player interviews to Not Newspapers; but apparently this is A Bad Thing, and we must think of The Football Pyramid/ Grass Roots/ The 92/ Stoke City/ The Children/ etc. Until the suggestion goes away again of course, at which point we should immediately stop thinking about all those things, and 100% of coverage must revert to the normal 6 teams who most of us don’t give a shit about.

Someone most of us do give a sh*t about though is Mikel Arteta, who is an arsehole. I don’t know if Arsenal supporters have invested so much psychological graft into pretending they weren’t trying to get him sacked a few years ago that they’re now locked in a faux cosplay #heneedsmoretime personality; but for heaven’s sake, just get rid of him and put him out of our misery. There are hundreds of better and less horrible people who could manage the club, just go and get one of them.

Obviously spending money is becoming the main problem with Arsenal, but that needn’t be a big deal. A quick note that the Villa midfield for most of the game on Saturday – Kamara, Bogarde, Tielemans, Ramsey – cost a grand total of £0. Obviously this is not including injured captain Megabucks Meatball (£2.7m) and Not Andre 3000 (£50m), but an average of less than £9m per player for a Champions League midfield is alright going isn’t it?

Last thing: seeing as I’m writing a very badly structured snarky rant, a plastic scouser writing about how they’re not one of those annoying Liverpool fans who think This Means More, and then going on to explain why This Means More, is as Liverpool as it gets. Yes, we need City to stop winning the league, and if Arsenal win it we’d all have to abandon the internet for several years, so a Liverpool win is probably the least bad option for the neutral.

But for the love of God make this rubbish stop. What does ‘This’ mean more than? When Leicester won the league? When Blackburn won it? Barcelona used to be ‘More Than A Club’; the only way that is true now is because they’ve turned into a multinational money laundering operation, they might as well paint més que una dona on the seats for all that it means in 2025. There’s a reason you don’t support Tranmere, there’s a reason you don’t support Chester, there’s a reason you don’t support Wrexham and there’s a reason you don’t support Everton – you just want to be on the side that’s winning, as a wise man once said. Fine; you do you, I don’t care. But don’t start preaching that it’s because there’s a purity to your soul that makes your support of a football team different to everyone else’s.
Neil Raines

MORE ARSENAL COVERAGE ON F365…
👉 Arsenal surrender inexplicable as Liverpool handed title by Arteta’s biggest liability
👉 Title ‘turning point’ sees Arteta reach Arsenal ‘ceiling’ and enter the same ‘tier’ as Ten Hag
👉 Ornstein gives Arsenal hope over transfer for player ‘Mikel Arteta loves’ after Villa draw

 

Arsenal just a Tottenham in red
I don’t contribute my thoughts often here, in fact I’ve only written once in the past to discuss some views about ETH at the relative start of his tenure. I remember, at the time, people were going crazy over how ETH had to go since he was already one and a half years in, and the team kept on being inconsistent. By no means am I writing to defend ETH, and he definitely had to go since a change was obviously needed, but how the tables have turned!

I think it’s about time we point out some things that would make an unfortunate read for a certain Mr. Arteta.

Arteta arrived in December 2019, it’s his 6th season with the club, and the 5th full one. What does he have to show for it? 1 FA Cup won with the squad of Emery, with the pre-season preparation etc of Emery.

He keeps using excuses like injuries, lack of squad depth, and anything else that he can cling on for each specific instance.

Which team has no injuries in professional sport? I remember when City had injuries and lacked squad depth, people criticized Pep saying that he should have bought enough players to have a full squad and how it was his fault that it didn’t happen. He certainly has the money available for it, so he failed to do his job properly and assemble a squad that would be able to cope with injuries, suspensions and other setbacks. Arteta should be considered equally culpable of that.

Also, it seems amazing how other clubs, most notably MUFC and Chelsea are being made fun of in the media or by other fans, for now being “mid-table clubs” because they don’t win titles or challenge for the EPL consistently. Again, MUFC and Chelsea have won more titles since Mr. Arteta was hired, and they’ve also been through managerial changes, which we could argue disrupted the stability and continuity while Arsenal are stable in the meantime, and should, in theory, have kept on progressing and at least caught up if not surpassed two mid table clubs’ trophy hauls.

On Saturday, we were served a masterclass of how to not challenge for a league title from one contender, and how to keep it together and get the job done from another. I’ll leave it up to you to decide which team is which.

Someone even said that Arteta may not be at the top tier manager list, like Pep etc, or even at the second tier with Klopp and co, and instead he belongs in the third tier along ETH and Rafa Benitez. But we seem to forget the main thing that matters at top level professional sports. The latter two have won multiple titles in different nations. Once again, what has Mr. Artera achieved so that we can be considered at the same level?

Bad luck was mentioned too. Have you ever seen Real Madrid not winning a title for 5 years and the fans being okay with it because the manager was unlucky?

Let’s put things straight, and remind ourselves that Arsenal has not won the league in 20 years and counting, (prob 21 by May).

I’d like to remind people that SAF has retired, so he’s not here dominating the league anymore. What has changed for Arsenal in the meantime? Not much, just the team that dominates them now wears blue.

I guess the conclusion is that the general attitude and the fans’ tolerance to failure is what separates truly elite clubs from pretenders. Arsenal is nothing more than a Tottenham in red in the last two decades and long may it continue! Sorry not sorry!
Alex MUFC Greece (It’s fun not being the talk of the town every now and then).

 

FFS FSG
I was watching MOTD on Saturday night, and I was fascinated to see Ashley Williams declare that Liverpool’s squad is easily the strongest in the Premier League. It’s just his opinion, obviously, but surely all football wisdom up to this point suggests that this should not be the case?

The squad is pretty much unchanged from last season, Chiesa being the only addition, and obviously he hasn’t made much of an impact so far. Liverpool have been the best team in the league, and so far, they are the best team in the Champions League too. Obviously, this is subject to change, and there are plenty of twists and turns to come, but how can a club that has not spanked tens/hundreds of millions in the off-season have got better, when conventional wisdom suggests that squads need constant and fairly relentless improvement?

This isn’t the first time they have done this – I think the year they won the league, they didn’t do any significant transfer business in the preceding summer, but the difference there is that they had just won the Champion’s League, and this was a team that was reaching its peak (not that FSG weren’t criticised by all and sundry over that summer).

And going back to conventional wisdom, isn’t it the case that a new manager will come with a wishlist of players to build the squad in his own image? Has an elite manager ever joined a club with a whole pre-season and not signed anyone (apart from a cheap punt)?

FSG get a hard time from many a Liverpool fan (although I wouldn’t think many of them have actually been to Liverpool), and of course, had this season been a big step backwards (I think that most fans would have taken a cup run and a place in the top four as the season started), then these voices would have got louder, but obviously, things are going remarkably well.

Obviously we all know about FSG, Billy Bean and Moneyball, and it’s hard not to conclude that they clearly have some sort of plan here with regard to what they spend and who they buy, and what has been achieved so far this season is remarkable. Obviously they have spent a lot of money in their time there, I am not suggesting otherwise, but they have also had periods where the chequebook has remained firmly shut, presumably because they couldn’t get the people they wanted. This is pretty unprecedented, but it’s clearly very deliberate.

And when you look at how much a team like United has wasted over the last ten years, maybe they have a point. Money burns a hole in the pocket in football, but not at Anfield at the moment.

Contrast this with Arsenal, for example. Arteta has done a solid job (and who knows, they may yet come good but it seems increasingly unlikely), but he is a strange hybrid of Mourinho and Wenger (except without any actual success thus far), and the squad is still unbalanced. As much as he has taken the team forward (and he clearly has), it is starting to look like he isn’t going to make that final step. I think he’ll have next season, and then he’ll be pushed out if he fails to win one of the big two again. And if this is the case, it will be down to the squad and how they have spent their money.

There has been a lot of chatter of Liverpool being better off without Klopp, and whilst his time there had perhaps run its course, this is his team tearing it up, this is what he built, and Slot must be counting his blessings about what he has walked into. And actually, I think his more tactically astute and cerebral approach is getting more out of them that Klopp’s beautiful chaos would have done.

When FSG took over the club (paying around £300m if memory serves), the team was possibly at its lowest ebb for decades. The two cowboys had taken them close to administration, the squad was unbalanced and full of average (at best) players. They learned lessons the hard way (Charlie Adams, anyone?) and it took the appointment of Klopp to push the team forward, but now the club is valued at more than £4bn, the facilities are greatly improved, the stadium is much bigger, and the team is being hailed as the best in the World right now, despite the fact that it is fighting against clubs who are (apparently) much richer, spending hundreds of millions every year.

What more do people want FFS?
Mat

 

End of the Salah days
Well well well, Salah demanded the moon as part of his 450k a week contract, and has been brought back down to earth by his inept performances the last few weeks. 33 in May.

Maybe those in the know, you know … actually know about contract negotiations.

As a fan for decades , I’ve seen the best come and go from Anfield. Let him go for free in the summer. No one’s bigger than the club.

We can spend that £350k a week on the wages of a cab and a striker instead.

UTFR
Poor Scouser Tommy, Barbados