Arsenal have had an excellent summer in the transfer window, and now it’s down to Mikel Arteta to mould his players into a winning team.For all that is said of the grumpiness of the football supporter, there is much to be said for optimism. It’s a fleeting feeling, but for a couple of weeks during the summer anything and everything is on the table, though it does usually come crashing back to earth once the actual players themselves take over the narrative from our own imaginations.
Arsene Wenger announced his retirement in January of the following year, and Arsenal haven’t returned to the Champions League since. A club that had become synonymous with the Champions League has been absent from the competition for five years. Unai Emery replaced Wenger, but couldn’t successfully build the team a new identity.
Both may have been considered squad players rather than regulars, but they have both previously played significant roles in title wins in the before, and to pick up two players of this calibre for £75m seems like excellent business. It doesn’t end there, either, with £30m having been spent on Fabio Vieira and a further undisclosed amount on thesigning of Marquinhos. The return of William Saliba from a superb loan spell with Marseilles is a largely unexpected bonus.
It is fairly commonly agreed that Arsenal have done good business in the transfer market, so it now becomes incumbent upon the manager to mould these parts into a unit capable of returning to the Champions League and building towards challenging at the very top of the table. With the pressures and weirdness of pandemic conditions starting to recede in the rear-view mirror, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the pressure build upon him again, should the team run into problems on the pitch.
The rollercoaster ride continued the following season. In 15th place at Christmas, they were back to eighth by the end of the season. Last season, they were bottom after three games, but fourth by Christmas. It’s become That Thing Arsenal Do. But this, like anything similar in football, is not some sort of naturally occurring phenomenon. Arsenal are not somehow genetically-predetermined to behave in this way.
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