Five years of Mikel Arteta

The Journey has been positive and I remain behind the manager

Today marks the five-year anniversary of Mikel Arteta taking charge of Arsenal.

It has been a bumpy but overall successful five-year stint with the club and it has really surpassed my expectations for what could be possible when he joined the team at a real low point for the team.

There have been some great highs, near-miss disappointments, and lows that another manager might not have survived, but culminating in a package that has been steady progress that has put Arsenal back among the best teams in the world.

The later Wenger years were good, the 2013-14 to 2015-16 run was a team that was very good and maybe could have or should have won a Premier League but they could only manage half seasons or calendar years where they put it together and had to settle for a great run of FA Cups. The 2016-17 and 2017-18 seasons were not bad but it was looking like the end of the cycle.

Arsenal had the chance to make the bold choice with Arteta right after Wenger, but they got shy and decided instead to go with the more experienced Unai Emery.

I was not thrilled with that decision at the time, preferring that Arsenal make a bolder choice to swing for a higher upside. To be fair to Emery it was a very tough job to come into; that Arsenal team was built as a win-now team and not for the future at the end of the Wenger years and was made harder following on from a club legend.

There is also no sugarcoating it, Emery took over that team and it got worse. It had an extended period in the middle where the results were good but if you looked under the hood, it was a foundation built on sand. The team collapsed at the end of 2019 and it continued into the next season and it was over.

I didn’t intend to go an extended history lesson but it is important to have that context to see just how far this team has come and that is a major part of the Arteta story that I think is glossed over too easily.

This team had fallen hard and was in a bad place.

Arsene Wenger is a legend of this club but his last few seasons were very much ones where he pushed the team towards trying to get that last title, favoring short-term fixes and older players trying to push over the edge.

The executive group of the team was also in turmoil with a power battle with the departure of Ivan Gazidas on the heels of Wenger's departure. This led to a period where the leadership of the club was also changing significantly.

The team needed a reset, and a new vision to get the team into the 2020’s. Mikel Arteta has been a major part of that and the growth and change has been clear to see, with year-over-year improvement going from a very mediocre team to one of the best teams in the World.

It hasn’t been an easy path to rebuild this team, but it was with hindsight necessary. I was very much on the fence about if it was possible for Arteta to turn the performances around and wondered if the job was too big and too early for him at the beginning of the 2021-22 season but the club’s patience and vision have been paid back.

It has no doubt taken some luck to get here. Producing a World-Class talent out of the academy and having several of the young players that the team has brought in develop into various levels of starter quality to World-Class is never a guarantee or something that a smart team would plan on.

It has taken investment, turning over the squad that was here in the first season was a must and it was a tough task. Sometimes it is a nice reminder to see that first squad and see how far the team has come and how much better we feel about the team from top to bottom.

The team has spent big from 2020 to now, having the fourth-highest total spend and the third-highest net spend but it is hard to say that it hasn’t worked out splendidly.

The team has been completely turned over and gone from a team that was a weird misfit of talent for different visions and different timelines for competing, which was worse than the sum of its parts, to a team that fits a coherent vision and is stocked with talent. I am sure KSE would have loved to have recouped more of the spending through sales to bring down the net spend but going through that pain has put the team in a very healthy position.

The journey for this manager and this team isn’t over, the team has come heartbreakingly close to the biggest goals it has set out to achieve and the first season FA Cup is the only addition to the Trophy cabinet so far. Looking at the team from a historical perspective this is the season that we really should be expecting to add to that list of honours.

The team is still in all four competitions right now, into the semi-final of the League Cup, a favorite for the FA Cup (3rd favorite), 3rd in the League (a disappointing 2nd favorite), and 3rd in the Champions League (2nd favorite).

There is a lot to be thankful for, and a lot to look forward to. It has been a good five years with Arteta at the helm and hopefully, he can keep this team pushing on.