What IF? Should Arsenal have stuck with Arteta had the League not been won?
Running the sack-or-keep decision on Arteta in a season Arsenal didn't win
After Arsenal lost back to back matches against Manchester City and Bournemouth, when Manchester City briefly had the title in their full control, it was a dark time. I will admit even though I have been extremely confident about Arsenal this season I wrestled with the doubts.
I ultimately still felt that Arsenal were best positioned to win the title. Even though the odds had slipped considerably; this team, this organization, this coaching staff, still had it in them to win out and end the long wait for a Premier League. That is ultimately how things played out and Arsenal ended the title drought. I am incredibly thankful for that and it has brought me, and the whole Arsenal fan base immense joy.
One of the big questions that we don’t have to contemplate is what would we have done had Arsenal not won the title.
Because I am myself, I still want to think about that and what exactly the process would have been had the happy path not occurred.
This is tough given that we know the good thing happened and Arsenal won the title. I know for certain that the buildup to the Champions League match would not have felt as easy going and the match would have taken on existential stakes. The shootout would have somehow been even more unbearable and the pain even more acute.
I have tried to be fair and consistent along the way here. If Arsenal didn’t win anything I think that it would have been fair to ask questions about the manager and his position. That is a major reason that I want to go through this now, I want to try and ask myself those questions and try and think through what would have been the best path for this club.
I have long said that Trophies are the goal of the club and what we want as fans but they are very poor measures of how well the team is performing. I stand by that and I think that if the criteria for keeping or firing a coach relies solely on if a team wins silverware or not you are going to end up making more mistakes than good decisions. There is so much randomness and tiny margins that can decide things that are outside of the coaches control.
I know that is the way of the world, but that doesn’t mean that it has to be the way that I analyze things.
I think the biggest things that I am looking for to make these calls are as follows:
Is the team performing below their talent level?
Have the players lost belief and they are not giving their all?
Is the manager losing his ability to adapt and coming up with new ideas?
Has the coach been able to get the most out of the players that he has at his disposal?
With regards to Mikel Arteta I think that for the most part, even if Arsenal had failed to get over the line the answers to these would have still pointed towards keeping him. There may have been a growing negative swell inside some of the fan base but they would have been wrong and the data would have backed that up.
