It’s a difficult question that many clubs face at some point. Is their manager getting the absolute most out of what they have at their disposal, or might another gaffer be able to get more out of them?
It’s the kind of quandary that is usually only properly answerable in hindsight, once the new manager comes in and either takes them backwards or pushes them to new levels. There’s a few Premier League clubs who need to try and find an answer nonetheless at the moment
Is Eddie Howe simply working with a squad that can’t bear the toll of Champions League football alongside their domestic duties, or is this season another indication that he cannot build on a successful season at the highest level? Is Arne Slot out of ideas, or working with a squad in the middle of a transitional period? The hardest one of all to answer, though, is Mikel Arteta at Arsenal.
Mikel Arteta needs to prove he is Arsenal’s man for the long term
There is zero doubt whatsoever that Arsenal are in a much better position now than they were when he arrived in 2019. The Gunners had just finished fifth, sixth, fifth again, and came eighth in both of Arteta’s first two seasons in charge. Ask Manchester United – and Liverpool before them – just how hard it is to get out of that kind of slump.
But since narrowly missing out on the top four once more in 2021/22, Arsenal have been perennial title contenders. This season will mark their fourth straight top-two finish.
The problem, of course, is that if their recent slump continues against Manchester City on Sunday afternoon, their record might well end up reading second, second, second… second.
There comes a point where that is just not good enough anymore, and Arteta stands at that crossroads now.
Arsenal were top for all but three weeks of the 2022/23 season until they lost to Manchester City in late April. They were at their most forgivable in 2023/24, when they won all but two of their last 18 games but still missed out to a near-flawless City. Last season, they just never really turned up at all, failing to win more than three games in a row at any point of the Premier League campaign.
Two exhausting near-misses to a treble-winning City side, followed by a disappointing season, is totally understandable. Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool followed the same trend just a couple of years before, and you won’t find many Reds fans with a bad word to say about the German.
The difference, though, is that Liverpool actually got the job done in the middle of it all. After running City close in 2019 and finishing second with a record 97 points, they came back even stronger and romped to the title.
Arteta does not have that goodwill in the bank yet, and he is on a knife-edge now as to whether he earns that recognition or starts to feel like a perpetual nearly-man who just cannot get his side over the line.
There are already neutrals and even some Arsenal fans who feel that Arteta’s style of football is the reason for that. They are extremely well-drilled and have had the fewest obvious flaws of any side in the Premier League this season, but can also come across as unduly conservative and tense. If they lose to City on Sunday, that lack of ease will surely be cited as a major reason once again.
The difficulty is that at this point, it’s hard to tell whether Arsenal have spent the majority of the season at the top of the league because of Arteta or in spite of him.
The main case for the defence is that Arsenal have lacked a prolific centre-forward this season, with marquee signing Viktor Gyokeres on just 12 league goals – respectable, but not incredible.
That runs throughout the side. Bukayo Saka has just six league goals. Gabriel Martinelli, Noni Madueke, Martin Odegaard, Gabriel Jesus and Kai Havertz have just six between them, in no small part thanks to injuries.
In light of that, perhaps Arteta’s approach makes sense: squeeze the most out of games by being controlled, being tight, being hard to beat, making the most of dead balls, and sharing the goals around.
The best blueprint for that was Jose Mourinho at his peak in his first spell with Chelsea; midfielder Frank Lampard was their top scorer in both 2004/05 (13 goals) and 2005/06 (16) as they claimed back-to-back titles.
The case against Arteta is that the paucity of regular goalscorers may well be because of the manager’s approach.
All of those players we named have been much more prolific in previous seasons, for starters; even accepting that some of them have lost long spells to injury, their drop-off in output is noteworthy. One or two having a more modest season could be put down to individual form. When it’s a whole squad, you look at the manager.
There are also plenty of examples, including a few in recent history, of sides without an obvious talisman who have excelled nonetheless.
For three years in a row from 2019/20 to 2021/22, the Premier League champions’ top scorer was a non-striker who scored fewer than 20 goals: Mo Salah for Liverpool (19), then Ilkay Gundogan (13) and Kevin de Bruyne (15) for City. Yet nobody accused those sides of lacking attacking intent.
As ever in football, the means will be justified by how it ends. If Arsenal see their title push out, none of those criticisms will matter very much, because it will all have worked.
Another runners-up place, though, and you would not blame Arsenal if they had a good, hard look at Arteta and wonder if lightening the leash even just a bit might have made the crucial difference. We might only be talking about a handful of points in the end, but at the very top end of the table, that is massive.
There are managers who win things, and those who just set up the next boss to take things to the next level. There is no shame in either, but Arsenal have been banking on Arteta to fall into the first category.
That City game will go a long way to telling us whether that faith has been well-placed.
