Unai Emery’s first season at Arsenal ended with a whimper. They collapsed from a commanding position in the league to finish outside the top 4 and produced a spineless performance in the Europa League final to clinch another season of Thursday night football. Murmurs of Emery Out are already starting to emerge amongst the Arsenal fanbase, but out of the cornucopia of problems that is Arsenal football club, how much of this falls on the shoulders of our head coach, Unai Emery? Let’s put recency bias aside, look back at his season as a whole, and come up with an overall grade for his first season at Arsenal. Taking over after the 22-year tenure of the statued former Arsenal manager was never going to be a straightforward task. Arsene Wenger was a very eloquent and well-spoken man, who frequently waxed lyrical about his idyllic footballing ideology. After a year of answering questions about his style and vision for Arsenal, Emery has been unable to convey what his ideal system for this team looks like. The Spanish tactician often uses abstract football phrases to describe his image of Arsenal’s football philosophy like being protagonists on the pitch, playing like Chameleons, working with ambition, build a team with personality, playing together. A lot has been said about “following the process”, but not enough time has been spent on describing what his process looks like. Think back to the first seasons of other successful managers in the premier league right now. After Klopp’s first season, it was evident that his greatest strength lied in being able to motivate his players to produce performances far beyond the sum of their parts. Guardiola’s first season told us that he was a football purist, who would adhere to his footballing principles at all costs. With Pochettino, his work with an exceedingly average squad in 2016 and miniscule transfer kitty taught us that his primary managerial trait was in his ability to coach players take their game to the next level. Just like Emery, they were unable to achieve the objectives at their club in their first seasons, but by the end of their first season each of them had one identifying principle which catapulted them to success at their respective clubs. What is Emery’s core trait that will outline his tenure? There is no particular formation he has consistently deployed over the course of the season. We have alternated between the 4-2-3-1, 4-1-2-1-2, 3-4-3 and the 3-4-1-2 formations based on availability of players and the opposition. By his own omission in his first press conference of preseason he said, "My first idea is getting better day-to-day with our players and working hard with our players, to transmit my ideas. The system for me isn’t the most important. For me, the most important thing is to be and to create one competitive team. And then, we have the quality" - Unai Emery (July 2018) It's evident that the system itself isn’t important to him, he wants the players to be able to convert information about various styles of play and game scenarios into ad-hoc adaptability on the pitch. However, instead of being like a team that can adapt on the fly, we resemble a team that lacks cohesion regardless of whichever formation we roll out with. Looking at some key statistics comparing this season with it’s predecessor provides further evidence of this lack of identity. There are very few underlying metrics which have improved during the transition from Wenger to Emery. Wenger had a ball dominant philosophy that employed an ambitious strategy designed to maximize chance creation in the final third for Arsenal. Even in the 17/18 season, the worst season of his Arsenal tenure, he produced offensive numbers that rivalled some of the best in the league. The problems were always defensive, a consequence of being open at the back and lacking defensive structure. Football calculus told us that his Emery’s rigid footballing structure should have improved our defensive numbers without heavily impacting our offensive capability. Given that the 17/18 season was the an all-time worst in-terms of the underlying defensive metrics, this didn’t seem like an astronomical task. To start things off, let’s compare the types of goals we’ve scored and conceded in the last two seasons. Goals from open-play tells an interesting tale. We’ve conceded 5 fewer goals than last season and as well as scored 5 fewer goals. Although the discipline and work-ethic instilled upon Emery’s arrival has made the team more compact, it has restricted the creative output on the attacking end. Five goals may not be significant enough to definitively indicate a drop in offensive output, but the underlying offensive metrics do support this claim. Expected goals has us at almost 8 fewer goals compared to last season(18/19 – 64.8). Further supported by the drop in big chances created(81->72), and averaging almost two fewer shots per game(6.2 -> 4.5). Remember, we’re not comparing Emery’s team to a prime Wengerball team that produced some of the best attacking football in Europe, we’re comparing it to arguably Wenger’s worst team which frequently put forward flaccid offensive performances. Add the fact that we now have two world-class strikers at our disposal, and that makes our offensive metrics even more worrying. Our goals usually come from cutbacks from wide positions or moments of clinical brilliance from our strikers. We don’t seem to have an offensive strategy that maximizes chance creation. Although our pressing and work-rate has improved, our defensive numbers have gone down as well. An average of 2 more shots conceded per game and a sharp rise in our expected goals against(48.75 -> 57.3) indicates an upturn in opportunities created by the opposition. Something doesn’t add up here, how can we be better drilled and still be worse defensively? A huge cause of this persistence of our defensive fragility is errors in key areas of the pitch. In the 17/18 season, Arsenal lead the league in errors leading to a goal with 15. Emery’s outfit in the 18/19 season retained the title of the most error-prone team in the league with 13 errors directly leading to goals. Emery and his coaching staff have been unable to weed out the rash tackling and poor individual decision-making in decisive areas of the pitch. The importance of removing these errors is corroborated by looking at the goals conceded this season from penalties and set pieces. We’ve conceded 5 more goals from set pieces and penalty situations this season, and we cannot afford to keep making errors that consistently put the opposition in these goal scoring positions. Our defensive fragility does come with the asterisk of the injuries to crucial players in defensive positions. Emery has been forced to experiment with makeshift defensive personnel and formations to accommodate for these injuries. But even so, a team with seasoned international caliber defensive personnel should not be producing the most errors leading to goal if they are well coached. Getting rid of these errors should be the first thing Emery addresses for next season. He needs to look at players who are prone to these types of players and, if these errors cannot be coached out of them, find new solutions in their position. Going forward Emery needs to find a way to bring balance to our offensive positions. The only coherent offensive performances have come when ramsey has played in the attacking midfield position behind the strikers, and he’s off to Juventus next season. He needs to find a solution for this imbalance either through the transfer market or our immensely talented youth academy. The club needs to resist the urge for signing aging big name players available in the market like Mkhitaryan, who don’t fit the system, and instead go for players who fill the gap in Arsenal’s attack even if they are less marketable. Players with promising futures who can be molded into the type of player emery needs like Willock or Smith-Rowe need to be given opportunities over clearly limited players like Elneny or Jenkinson who are not going to get any better. Jumping back to my point about a lack of identity, I believe that this is one of the main reasons for some of these worrying underlying metrics. The difficulty in inculcating a new system that allows for cohesive performances has cost us both on the offensive and defensive end. In my opinion the cause of this are the expectations built up from the 21 game unbeaten run in the first third of the season. At the start of the season you could start to see the emergence of a strategy built on a high press and playing the ball out from the back. To quote our manager himself, “The striker was our first defender and the goalkeeper was our first attacker”. However, halfway through the season, this commitment to playing a certain way seemed to shift focus to a system built around stifling the opposing team. Maybe the pressure of getting results under increased expectations was too high for Unai to risk players adapting to a specific style of play. This explains why we’ve often found mid-table teams difficult to break down. When a team allows you the lion’s share of the possession, sits back, and waits for opportunities on the counter, we look like we’re out of ideas. This is ultimately what has cost us champions league football this season. It is unfair to end any discussion about Emery’s first season without acknowledging that Emery has made us far more competitive in games against top-6 opposition. As Arsenal fans, all we did last season was complain about how we kept “bottling” big games and produce half-hearted displays. It would be hypocritical if we didn’t then praise Unai Emery for the uptick in our performances. We finished with 6 more points in top-6 matches, and Emery’s ability to create specific game plans for varying opposition is a big reason for this. Aside from the games away from home to the top two, we’ve never looked out of our depth. If Emery can build on this newfound grit in big games, that’s a huge positive to take into next season. The TLDR summary of this report card for Emery’s season is that the we’ve not actually improved too much under emery as compared to Arsene Wenger’s last season. The grade I would give the Spaniard on his first season would be a C+. While there have been some promising signs during the season, Emery has not done enough yet to fully convince us that he’s the right man for the job. Objectively, a Europa League final and 5th place in the premier league is progress, but given our favorable position in April, we should have clinched CL football. There are no excuses for Emery next season. He has now had one full season to assess the frailties of the squad. The Arsenal we see at the end of the transfer window, is the Arsenal that Emery’s tenure will be judged on. The sad truth is that a different outcome in one game (the Europa league final) would’ve completely changed the tone of Arsenal fans reflecting on this season, but such are the small margins in football. To me Emery’s appointment always seemed like a two-year plan to get back into the CL, and his position would be reassessed at the end of those two years. Let’s trust the process and hope that Emery and Raul can bring us back to the promised land. If not, all aboard the Arteta train! Arsenal Canon A lifelong gooner venting about the perils of supporting Arsenal. For another article like this check out arsenalcanon.weebly.com/home/the-kroenke-era-are-arsenal-doomed
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