AFTER twenty-two without needing to hire a new manager, Arsenal now find themselves hiring for the second time in 18 months. That isn’t surprising. Managers tend to have short shelf-lives nowadays and Arsenal is a club mired in sporting recession. The Gunners allowed Wenger to continue too long and for rot to set in and then repeated the error with Unai Emery.
Most Arsenal fans, I think, accepted that the club might need a few bites of the cherry before they found the ideal candidate. In dithering over the dismissal of Unai Emery, the club’s top brass has allowed an unnecessary crisis to brew. Now they find themselves in a very vulnerable position as they scour for an Emery successor.
The market for managerial talent is depressed. Klopp and Guardiola are settled and the number of elite clubs currently outnumbers the number of elite managers. Real Madrid and Barcelona have struggled to identify the perfect coach, as have Bayern Munich. Juventus settled on the slightly unwieldy appointment of Maurizio Sarri.
Jose Mourinho will receive a salary worth £15M a year as #thfc manager which is nearly double what his predecessor Mauricio Pochettino earned. [Daily Mail]
— Hotspur Related (@HotspurRelated) November 20, 2019
Chelsea and Manchester United have opted for the club legend route, while Spurs jumped into bed with Jose Mourinho on an ill-advised contract in terms of length and salary. Tottenham were desperate and Mourinho was able to leverage their desperation. Arsenal find themselves in much the same position now, in need of a coach in a depressed market-place.
Mourinho capitalised on Spurs and Pochettino and Allegri will likely wait until the next super club is desperate enough to offer them the world. Brendan Rodgers has already leveraged his position and put the willies up Leicester enough to get himself a new contract and a pay-rise. Players and their agents have been putting football clubs goolies in a vice for years and now we are seeing managers do much the same.
After years of poor recruitment and with a third consecutive season outside of the Champions League looking likely to bleed into a fourth, Arsenal are desperate. This puts them in a very delicate position. They simply must get the next appointment right having allowed the Emery project to drift into total disrepair, but the resource available to them is shrinking.
The club had made a series of panicked decisions in recent years in an attempt to quickly spend their way back into the land of milk and honey. They broke their transfer record for 29-year old Pierre Emerick Aubameyang and gave 29-year old Mesut Özil an eye-watering new contract in the same week in January 2018. It put Arsenal in a ‘must-win now’ position and instead, the decline has deepened.
@Aubameyang7 ready to quit @Arsenal as he pulls out of contract talks. If he doesn’t want to sign, sell him and move on!!!! #arsenal #afc #aubameyang #arsenalfc #gunnersxtra pic.twitter.com/M1K9201EuC
— Gunners Xtra (@GunnersXtra) December 7, 2019
Arsenal left tens of millions on the table when they mismanaged the contracts of Alexis Sanchez, Aaron Ramsey, Mesut Özil and even Danny Welbeck and Jack Wilshere. During the summer, the recruitment committee threw their car-keys onto the poker table with the £72m acquisition of Nicolas Pepe. Even before that, Arsenal have chased their losses in an attempt to return to the top table.
Their failure to buy an outfield player during the summer of 2015 necessitated a busier summer window in 2016 and, in their panic, the Gunners sanctioned over £50m worth of expenditure on Shkodran Mustafi and Lucas Perez. In short, Arsenal have spent good money after bad and succeeded only in making the malaise worse. Now is a time for cool heads as the club lines up their next manager, but the vultures are circling.
✍️ Brendan Rodgers has signed a new five-and-a-half year deal with Leicester City which will run until 2025#LCFC pic.twitter.com/BXVKfMsqW1
— Unibet (@unibet) December 6, 2019
Rodgers must have indicated some level of interest in the Arsenal position to convince the Foxes to pony up. An interim appointment like Rafa Benitez would make some sense, but his buyout is extortionate and he would be very unlikely to accept a short-term contract. If Arsenal wanted him- or someone like him- they would almost certainly have to award a longer contract than they want to, which all adds up to another severance package.
The club has fallen into a spiral of chasing its losses and they need to break that pattern somehow, but it’s difficult to see how they can from this vulnerable position. They need to make this appointment work, but its slim pickings on the market unless Arsenal is prepared to take another expensive risk. This is an exceptionally difficult situation and we are about to see what Raul Sanllehi and co are made of.
