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Mikel Arteta: Aston La Vista To The Title?

Macho

Documenting your downfall 🎥
Dusted 🔻

Country: England
Chamberlain was so shxt. He has negative football intelligence just as walcott, never ever saw him making a good decision.
He had potential and became crap, someone with his pace and power will always have a place in football, hence him becoming a CL and PL winner (albeit a minor role and amazing luck).
 

Football Manager

Copy & Paste Merchant
Wouldn't trade Auba for any of them tbh. Auba is King.
Wouldn’t it be nice if auba could drop outside the box at times to help the play, so we are not one man down when we are trying to pass the ball around to find some space? So we can create more possession, create more dangerous chances (as we have more people helping to build up the attacking), and lead to more goal scoring opportunities for himself and for the whole team?

Benzema would operates like iniesta at times, pass the ball around, offer passing options, and occasionally make those pin point through pass that cut through the opponent’s defence. Is auba capable to involve that much in the general play? If not then we are one man down in possession (3 man down if Özil and laca are also on the pitch). We would not able to keep any possession, and we are forced to play defensively and opt for a counter attacking system. And as a result, less chances will be made as a team, and we are far less entertaining than we used to be.

The above is just the passing part (or the involvement in general play part). How about individual skills? If you don’t have that as a striker chances are you will lose the ball in one v one. If there are defenders and you do not have support yet, you will lose the ball. Look at what van persie/Firmino/benzema could do in those situations in the video. They control the ball in crowded area and maintain possession. Then more chance will be created. And we will not be forced to play defensively. Or how about if they use this skillset to create space (if you dribbled past a player, you will suddenly have so much more space to exploit) , drag defenders away so that we can create numerical superiority, create goal scoring chances when the opponent box is packed with players.
 
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Football Manager

Copy & Paste Merchant
He had potential and became crap, someone with his pace and power will always have a place in football, hence him becoming a CL and PL winner (albeit a minor role and amazing luck).
Football is mainly about brain and technique. Pace and power are good to have but it’s nothing without the IQ and skills.
 

Dj_sds -

Active Member
that whole barcelona move was rather sudden. I wonder what the reason was. What I remember hearing then was that he didnt want to stay on at Arsenal / considered himself too good for the role/club.

Got in to a fight with Steve bould if I'm not mistaken.
 

EmeryCouldnt

Established Member
Even the last few seasons were a level above what we are watching now though,

That’s the rebuild. Of course a legendary manager who had been here 20 years, built his own team, and came in with 12 years of experience was doing better than a manager who has only managed and been here for less than a year. He has to get up to speed with understanding things how work intricately at our club from the inside before he can fix them (this is true in any business).

And while Wenger’s final teams may have looked slightly better in attack; they looked way worse than the current team in defense.
 
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Pyres7

Well-Known Member
We can't really judge Arteta's football until he's had a chance to bring in a few players. He inherited this squad from Wenger and Emery, and I doubt we'll be getting champagne football out of this lot.

One or two exciting signings like Aouar, and even a couple of our youths kicking on should make a huge difference to our style.
 

scytheavatar

Established Member
Even the last few seasons were a level above what we are watching now though,

You have terrible memory, cause our football back in 2016/17 and 2017/18 was certainly not better than our current football. Lots of games back then when we look freaking clueless and uncreative in attack (which craps on the idea that playing Özil solves any problem in our team). Even back in 2015/16 we were scrapping by a lot of our games and never looked like worthy PL champions.
 

Manberg

Predator
You have terrible memory, cause our football back in 2016/17 and 2017/18 was certainly not better than our current football. Lots of games back then when we look freaking clueless and uncreative in attack (which craps on the idea that playing Özil solves any problem in our team). Even back in 2015/16 we were scrapping by a lot of our games and never looked like worthy PL champions.

This. When people look back they only remember the few good moments. There were so many games in which our football was dire. People forget. It’s a psychological problem.
 

Xanth

Active Member
You have terrible memory, cause our football back in 2016/17 and 2017/18 was certainly not better than our current football. Lots of games back then when we look freaking clueless and uncreative in attack (which craps on the idea that playing Özil solves any problem in our team). Even back in 2015/16 we were scrapping by a lot of our games and never looked like worthy PL champions.

I disagree, especially with 15/16. In that particular season, we were creating better chances than the other team or outshooting them in almost every game and actually had quite a few unlucky results because of the likes of Giroud and Walcott not finishing well. Even in the following two seasons when we won, more often than not we did it convincingly. I can count on my fingers the number of games we've won convincingly since Wenger left. The quality of football has definitely regressed since then. We never looked like a proper upper midtable team under Wenger even at his worst.
 

Tomb Bombadil

Active Member
that whole barcelona move was rather sudden. I wonder what the reason was. What I remember hearing then was that he didnt want to stay on at Arsenal / considered himself too good for the role/club.
Moneymoneymoney - he told that last may:

Alex Song has admitted he left Arsenal for Barcelona in pursuit of more money and did not care about his lack of playing time.

"During my entire time at Arsenal I couldn't even save £100,000, while people thought I must be a millionaire, Song told Toronto Raptors basketball star Pascal Siakam on Instagram Live.

"When Barcelona offered me a contract, and I saw how much I would earn, I didn't think twice. I felt my wife and children should have comfortable lives once my career is over.

"I met Barca's sporting director, and he told me I would not get to play many games.

"But I didn't give a f*** - I knew that now I would become a millionaire.

"I'll always say that a 20-year-old who drives a Ferrari is a poor man, as at that age he's not yet achieved anything. But a man of 50 who drives a Bentley is a man to be respected." :clap:

At least an honest answer.
 

Macho

Documenting your downfall 🎥
Dusted 🔻

Country: England
https://theathletic.co.uk/2128061/2020/10/14/arteta-different-to-guardiola-arsenal-manchester-city/

Since Mikel Arteta took charge at Arsenal, the comparisons with Pep Guardiola have been as constant as they have been inevitable. For some, they remain master and apprentice, guru and devotee.

However, Arteta is already showing himself to be more than a mere clone. Guardiola helped open the door to a coaching career, but the younger man is now finding his own path.

Drawing parallels is understandable: there are undoubtedly similarities in the two men. For starters, they are both sharp thinkers — and sharp dressers. They share an intensity, a magnetic charisma that makes them natural leaders. They are products of the Barcelona system and their teams share certain key tactical points: they both attack in five channels, and frequently defend in five channels too. Arteta has recently made use of a back three and Guardiola deployed a similar system in his early days at Manchester City. He has returned to it several times since, most recently for the Champions League tie against Lyon.

But if there is a clue as to how the two men differ, it can be seen in the role Arteta assumed while working alongside Guardiola at City. With Guardiola looking after the big picture, Arteta was charged principally with working with individual players: improving Raheem Sterling’s movement, Fabian Delph’s positioning or Leroy Sane’s end product.

And so it was: Guardiola the ideologue; Arteta the problem-solver. Guardiola’s brilliance speaks for itself, but his rapid ascension through the coaching ranks meant he never served as an assistant. He has always had to consider the next game, the grand plan, the vision. Arteta has enjoyed the freedom and opportunity to focus on the tiniest details. It’s there that he excelled. “People always ask me about training under Pep, but the things I’ve learnt from Mikel Arteta…” Sane once marvelled.

Asked about his then-assistant in September 2019, Guardiola told the Telegraph that Arteta “has an incredible work ethic, and he has a special talent to analyse what happens, and to find the solutions”. And find solutions is precisely what he has done in his short time at Arsenal.

It should be no great surprise that there are differences between Arteta and Guardiola, given the considerable discrepancies in their respective playing careers. Although Arteta followed Guardiola through Barcelona’s La Masia academy system, he never broke into the first team. Despite being promoted to train with the first-team squad at 16, the pathway to senior football was blocked. “Pep was 29 and captain,” Arteta said in Lu Martin and Pol Ballus’ book, Pep’s City. “Then there was Xavi queuing up behind him. Imagine! I knew that if I wanted to get any game time, I’d be better off developing my career elsewhere.”

Arteta was only 18 when he joined Paris Saint-Germain on loan. When he impressed during a UEFA Cup tie against Rangers, the Scottish club began negotiations to sign the young midfielder. Arteta spent two seasons in Glasgow, winning the Scottish Premier League title and the Scottish League Cup. After a brief spell with Real Sociedad, he returned to Britain, spending six seasons with Everton and a further five with Arsenal.

It left him with a deep appreciation for British football — at one point, Arteta was even prepared to “half go to war” to fight a FIFA rule that prevented him from accepting an approach from Fabio Capello to represent for England at international level. “I’d say Pep definitely has a healthy respect for English football,” says one Arsenal staff member. “But Arteta really loves it. It’s where he spent most of his playing career. It’s part of who he is.”

When Guardiola first brought his vision of football to the Premier League, he had the feel of a missionary attempting an unwelcome conversion process. He had, of course, gained experience outside of Spain as a manager in Bayern Munich with Germany, but the nature of the physicality is different in that league. “In Germany the players run with the ball much more, there’s a lot of racing up and down the pitch with and without the ball,” explains City fitness coach Lorenzo Buenaventura. “Here in England, there’s more physical contact.”

Arteta knows that from first-hand experience. Perhaps that has played into his choice of defensive midfielders. In the summer of 2018, when Manchester City were seeking a new holding midfield player, their primary targets were Jorginho and Frenkie de Jong. The aim was to acquire someone even more adept on the ball than Fernandinho, to further emphasise City’s strength in possession. Over the course of the next 12 months, those top targets joined Chelsea and Barcelona respectively. Ultimately, City and Guardiola went for Rodri — a player who is better at resisting the press than instigating it. Guardiola’s focus was resolutely on what his team would be capable of in possession.

Meanwhile, Arsenal’s new midfielder, Thomas Partey, is a more natural defender — stronger in the air and the tackle. In Rodri’s final season at Atletico Madrid, he was averaging 56.7 passes per game with a pass completion rate of 91.1 per cent. In 2019-20’s Atletico side, Partey averaged 46.8 passes per game with a success rate of 83.4 per cent. Although Arteta maintained an interest in Chelsea’s Jorginho, Partey was his first choice to play at the base of Arsenal’s midfield as much because of what he does off the ball as on it. There is a stylistic difference between these two players that illustrates Arteta and Guardiola’s diverging attitudes to the physical nature of the Premier League.

Guardiola does not take kindly to the suggestion he lacks pragmatism. In December 2016, he insisted during a press conference that he is “so pragmatic”, in the sense that while the common definition of the term involves giving the opposition the ball, sitting deep and inviting pressure, his idea of playing it safe is to have the ball and keep it as far away from your goal as possible, which certainly makes sense.

So it’s a question of semantics, but it’s fair to say that Arteta’s approach at Arsenal so far has been more in keeping with the traditional English definition of pragmatism. That’s in part down to resource: it’s easier to play the football you aspire to when the owners give you such extraordinary support. It is perhaps not so much about pragmatism as about flexibility; from day one at City, there has been a dogmatic adherence to Guardiola’s footballing ideals, with only a handful of occasions where they have not dominated possession.

For his part, Arteta has been clear in the past about his preferred way to play. In his final season as a player, Arsenal’s website asked him how a Mikel Arteta team might line up. “My philosophy will be clear,” Arteta said. “I want the football to be expressive, entertaining. I cannot have a concept of football where everything is based on the opposition. We have to dictate the game, we have to be the ones taking the initiative, and we have to entertain the people coming to watch us.”

It’s difficult to argue that Arteta’s old vision has been realised at the Emirates Stadium. Understandably so: Arteta inherited a team in 10th position. Most of the Spaniard’s landmark victories have come when his team has set up in a relatively deep block, playing on the counter-attack. At the back end of last season, Arteta’s Arsenal beat Liverpool, Manchester City and Chelsea in quick succession, all while never having more than 40 per cent possession.

Guardiola has never taken charge of a team languishing in mid-table. The problems Arteta has faced — and the pragmatism required to work through them — would be new to him.

As Arteta put it in September before the match against Liverpool at Anfield: “Sometimes it’s what you want to do as a coach, and sometimes it’s what you are allowed to do with the levels of players and performance that top teams can do against you.”

“Mikel knows the ultimate plan for this team, he knows where he wants to end up,” suggests an Arsenal staff member familiar with the Spaniard’s plans. “That doesn’t mean you walk in on day one and immediately make that happen. If you look at what was inherited, there were a lot of things Arsenal weren’t doing right — basics. A sign of a good coach is someone who can separate what they want from what the team needs.”

Arteta has nevertheless sought to instil some fundamentals. In fact, one difference between the way the two teams play is that Arteta’s Arsenal seem even more wedded to playing out from the back than Guardiola’s City. It’s early days in the 2020-21 Premier League season, but Arsenal currently have 32 per cent of their possession inside their own defensive third. City have just 17 per cent — and the numbers bear out over the previous campaign too.

There are multiple reasons for this. The main one is that Arteta is still in the process of implementing playing out from the back — by enforcing it, he is attempting to make it second nature for his players. He is creating habits.

Guardiola’s City are not always as consistent in applying this short-passing strategy. In their title-winning campaigns of 2017-18 and 2018-19, City occasionally took advantage of the fact players cannot be offside at goal kicks by deliberately positioning their front three behind the opposition defence. With Ederson’s superb long passing, and astonishing 80-yard range, he was frequently able to find them. The tactic served various purposes, enabling City to stretch the play, bypass the opposition press and sometimes even create scoring chances. Arsenal fans will have painful memories of Claudio Bravo employing the tactic to release Sergio Aguero in the 2018 League Cup final.

The divergence in strategy is also explained by the fact that the two teams are at different points in their development. City’s evolution provides evidence that if you become good enough at playing out from the back, teams will stop pressing you, granting you more possession higher up the pitch. After Leicester City’s recent win at the Etihad, Brendan Rodgers admitted he had asked his side to concede ground “We are normally a high-pressing team but against a team of this quality, we wanted to deny them space,” he said. “We knew we had the players to break out and exploit the spaces.” It may seem counter-intuitive, but the time Arteta is spending developing Arsenal’s ability to play out from goal kicks may ultimately help grant them more territory.

This weekend, Arteta’s Arsenal will travel to the Etihad to face Guardiola’s Manchester City. Arteta’s pragmatic approach will surely be in evidence again. These are two sides at different stages in their different evolution, with very different expectations — and with two different men on the sidelines.

Guardiola and Arteta’s experience and records are incomparable, so perhaps it’s time to ease off the comparisons. With the work he’s doing at Arsenal, the younger coach is swiftly establishing his own identity. Arteta is steadily emerging from the shadow of his mentor.
 

Macho

Documenting your downfall 🎥
Dusted 🔻

Country: England
^ Good article for those of you who think Arteta is somehow a master tactician after a couple years of running bleep tests for Guardiola's team. Mainly @Football Manager who seems to think this.

This article backs up my belief that Arteta is his own man with his own ideas. Hopefully he carves out his own equally impressive legacy in management.
 

Jason Jace

Active Member
^ Good article for those of you who think Arteta is somehow a master tactician after a couple years of running bleep tests for Guardiola's team. Mainly @Football Manager who seems to think this.

This article backs up my belief that Arteta is his own man with his own ideas. Hopefully he carves out his own equally impressive legacy in management.
Not all of us has the subscription, pls post it here If you can
 

Football Manager

Copy & Paste Merchant
^ Good article for those of you who think Arteta is somehow a master tactician after a couple years of running bleep tests for Guardiola's team. Mainly @Football Manager who seems to think this.

This article backs up my belief that Arteta is his own man with his own ideas. Hopefully he carves out his own equally impressive legacy in management.
I’ve said that they are different at this point. Arteta have players that are much less capable on the ball. Of course we will be outplayed in possession. Therefore Arteta go for the system that get the best out of these average players. Arteta has said he want us to play entertaining football. I’m sure that with the right players, we will play quite similar to how pep’s team is playing now under Arteta.

For now, I do see a lot of similarities in how they apply positional play in their system (one is applying it to a more attacking philosophy, and one is applying it to a more defensive setup). How they divide the pitch into grids, to pre-instruct the players to occupy in which grid relative to the ball and teammate position. What movement they should make in certain situations, when they should move, when they should stay in their original position to occupy their original grid......
how they use these to create superiority in numbers (overload). They break down their general philosophy into many many small pieces of information and instruct the players to follow them step by step. Every positioning, every movement are well calculated. These are the main similarities. And this is what a modern tactician is all about. Arteta employs a defensive philosophy because of the poor players we have, they are bad on the ball and will never succeed playing in a possession based system.

Maybe in terms of leading our team forward in a broad sense/management style......pep and Arteta might be quite different because of their different background/experience. But what I only care is tactics. Tactics is what a head coach should focus on and it wins you games. Other aspects can be look after by other board members. In terms of tactical knowledge, they are quite similar.
@Macho
 
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