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But I don’t want him to go As regular readers will know, I am a supporter of Mikel Arteta. I do not want him to leave and retain belief that he can bring us to the next level. That does not preclude me from being critical at times. In fact, his style is the opposite of what I like to see in a manager. The constant gesticulations from the sidelines, the excessive exhortations to the players to play the way he is telling them, the complete reliance on tactics and the slow build-up that rarely varies. Plus our predictability which means we find it hard to break down teams and add to that the constant cards he gets along with the petulant behaviour he models for the players leading them to get sent off for testiness as well. Maybe I should be the manager, eh? I have little idea whether my concerns are shared among the fanbase as I reckon that for too many fans winning is all that matters. If we win, tickets are very hard to get, if we lose they are a lot easier. But I will go through the areas that irritate me and for sure I believe that these are weaknesses, but are they capable of stopping us getting to the next level? If it's not Arteta screaming at the players , it's Nicolas Jover The persistent animation on the sidelines is one of the biggest for me. I have always hated being micro-managed and if I was a top footballer I would not abide a manager telling me where to move, what to do, and constantly criticizing me. Looking over at the manager to see what he wants must be a huge distraction, plus it must also make players nervous that the manager is shouting at them. Unai Emery was the same at Arsenal – and his other teams , and it annoyed the hell out of me. I have to accept they are top managers but they are not top of the range at the moment. Wenger was also, eventually, very animated on the sidelines but he never liked telling players what to do, believing in their ability. The players are overcoached? The problem with Arteta’s approach is that top players cannot be told what to do. Can you imagine trying to tell Pele how to play, Maradona, Cruyff, Best, Beckenbauer, Ronaldo, Messi, Zidane, etc? To me, that means that Arteta only wants those players who can be told. That means we will not get the true greats, even if they come to Arsenal, because he will want to coach their greatness out of them. Ozil, who was never regarded as difficult at his previous clubs, became a casualty , as did Aubameyang, who was difficult. Maybe Arteta would have tried to tell Maradona how to play football? Emery was famous for saying that at PSG, Neymar was in charge not him but was that because Neymar believed in his own ability and decision making prowess on the pitch? It was one of the few places that Unai Emery struggled. I think Arteta might have the same problem if he leaves for a Real Madrid or a Barcelona. How will he cope with established superstars? Here's an idea -The managerial staff should be role models Arteta has surrounded himself with all sorts of assistants and the two most familiar to fans are Albert Stuivenberg, his assistant manager, and Nicolas Jover, the set-piece coach. They get involved on the pitch heatedly as well and have been subject to referee sanctions as well. In my opinion a manager or a coach should never get a card because the players need them to be role models. We have lost too many players to red cards over the years. Arterta regularly picks them up. He should never do so again. The players would definitely benefit. Albert Stuivenberg - also a regular on the side of the pitch Arsenal are predictable. Lately even the set-piece goals have dried up as teams figure us out. We have lots of possession and many half or quarter chances but a bad goals to chance ratio. Is that all down to not having a recognized striker? I don’t think so, even when we had recognised strikers they weren’t scoring freely. Arteta and his coaches are always shouting instructions from the sidelines forcing the players to get into shape when perhaps a quick long ball, spotted by a smart player, is the best option. Are players children or they cannot use their own foorball brain? Do tactics really win games or is it the ability of the players. The thought process of a midfielder A definite problem that Arteta has is that he thinks like a midfielder. Get the ball and keep it until it can be distributed to a colleague is the logic of a midfielder. Get the ball and try and score is the logic of a forward manager. Ask Alex Ferguson or Brian Clough, both strikers, they always wanted the team to score. Wenger was a bit of an anomaly as a midfielder as he always wanted his team to score and wasn’t too great at closing out a match. Arteta has our boys switching to defence mode every time we score. Instead of demolishing teams we allow them to come back at us. Jack Charlton (centrehalf) as a defensive manager just wanted the ball booted up the pitch at every opportunity. He wanted his teams to defend at all times even his attackers. His football vision was that of a striker Yes, when our team gel, get into a good passing rhythm, flicking the ball around with great movement we can look good, and we score some nice goals. But to get to the next level we need to be less predictable. I, for one, would love to see Arteta stay calm on the sidelines, trust in his players, get them to have conviction in their instincts, and have a freer style. He struggles with superstars? Lastly, though, it is man management. A top team will sign the top players. We don’t usually. And I would be afraid that Arteta will struggle with such players. His current top players have mostly been with him young and they respect him. If we buy an established superstar will that be a problem not an asset? Perhaps Neymar didn't want Emery to tell him how to play? These are my criticisms. As I have said, I believe in Arteta and I want him to stay. But I also believe he has his weaknesses and they are as I have outlined above. He must work to improve himself. He has to work on both his strengths and his weaknesses and get better at both. I have never mentioned in this column before that I have taught at higher level for many years in training managers for the Institute of Leadership and Management, the world’s leader in such training, and the great ones never stop learning, never stop improving, and a large part of that is being able to honestly assess your strengths and weaknesses. He must reflect honestly about himself This is Mikel’s first such job. He has done very well. Can he become a world great? I believe he must now, in this close season, take stock of who he is, assess how he can make the next steps, improve himself, and transfer those skills to the team. I feel a crucial part of that will be to let go of the habit of trying to control everything on the pitch, and instead give the players the trust and the knowledge before they enter the pitch and restrain himself to minor tweaks that doesn’t make them nervous when they are trying to build up fluency. It is what I have said to many top managers and bosses over the years. You have to train and trust your teams and give them the freedom to do it. You cannot do it for them. Unai Emery couldn't take the next step at PSG - can Arteta take it at Arsenal? Is there anyone to advise Mikel? To get him now, at this crucial juncture in his career, to make the higher step of taking an in-depth look at what he has learned so far, and what he needs to learn to get to the top. I hope he has, because I feel he may well have come to his peak and will get no further. Change is needed and it is in him that it is required. Otherwise he will always be good, but not great.

Football is dead Honestly, the 2024 Euros was the worst football tournament I have ever watched. Negative play, frightened players, lots of extra times and penalties, but most of all, I kept falling asleep every night. I kept hoping anyone would score so that it was over and not another thirty minutes of dirge. I didn’t care whether it was the team I was up for, just someone to score to put an end to my misery. Arteta is the king of the new football To be honest, that is the way football is going. Now, the objective is to squeeze the life out of the opponent, give them no chances to score, and get one or two yourself. And Arteta is the master of the new football. His statistics show that Arsenal concede the fewest chances and XG goals. You have seen the stats, I am not going to go over them again. Dead ball equals dead football? Dead balls are now key and Arsenal are the masters of them too. Outwit your opponents enough times at these and you will get some goals. Every player at every set piece goes on a different run, making it harder for the defence to mark them. The players must follow Arteta’s instructions to the letter. By getting all players to do different runs he brings the unpredictability that the old style great players would do. It also means that there is a good chance one will be in the right place at the right time to score. Does Uefa President Aleksander Ceferin care that the football is boring? I suspect that that was Kieran Tierney’s weakness, in Arteta’s eye. He would sometimes make his own decisions, take on players, or run where he wasn’t told to. That and his penchant for injuries, meant he was no longer required. If I understand correctly, reading between the lines of an interview Tierney gave, that is what Arteta wanted from him, to do as he is told. We don’t want you, Pele And it makes sense in one way. If all players follow a plan, they will know how to find each other, they will be running into dangerous positions that their colleagues know about, and they can do it without thinking. It does mean that the old style, unpredictable geniuses, would have no place in the modern game. Pele, Maradona, George Best, Hristo Stoichkov and others would always want the freedom to sniff out a chance and score a goal their way. Maybe a pass is the most logical option but that instinct to score, to beat your opponent, to have the crowd mesmerised by your aplomb, is what made those players great. You couldn't stop watching Maradona One can see it with Ronaldo at Portugal. He wants all play to come through him but that stops the other top players in the squad from showing what they can do. They weren’t good at the Euros. He doesn’t have the ability he had in his prime, but his aura stops the manager from telling him what to do. It means Portugal cannot play the modern way where all players have their roles and must carry them out, and instead have to try to find their king. It’s all over but we don’t know it? Marcelo Bielsa has come out publicly to say that football is dead. Players are overcoached and everything is predictable. You stop the opponent playing, and squeeze their options so they can’t score, and keep the ball until a scoring chance comes for you. Is Marcelo Bielsa right? "I am convinced that football is in decline," he said. "It is becoming less attractive because what made it the world's greatest game is disappearing." Bielsa is, of course famous for believing in attacking football. At Leeds, when he had top players in the Championship, they bamboozled their way into the Premier League by thrilling football that allowed players to make mistakes as long as they attacked their opponents. They scored lots and conceded lots. Defend teams onto submission, not attack His problem came in his second season in the Premier League. Leeds started losing heavily and they got rid of him in February. He refused to change his ways, to make up for the fact that some teams simply had better players than he had, and kept trying to steamroller teams into submission. He paid the price. "This sport is unique; when it becomes too predictable, it loses its charm," "As fewer footballers worth watching emerge and the game becomes less enjoyable, artificially inflating viewer numbers will eventually falter." These two quotes from him are worth heeding. I agree. The concentration on not losing, on chasing every possible margin in your favour, is bad for the game longterm. We need players we want to watch. Players who dribble past several opponents at a time but often then losing the ball is becoming increasingly rare because they are not allowed try it. Find your player is the requirement. They make the runs, you know where those runs are, and you give them the ball. A nervous Arsenal One twos, give and go, keeping the ball, going backwards, going forwards again, hoping for a mistake or a dead ball. That is modern football. Above all not making a mistake. That was the Euros but also the Champions League for Arsenal was like that. We played nervously, no matter who the opponent was. I wanted us to grab them by the throat, score goals and send them home crying. And the Premier league? Against Sheffield United we demolished them. Against Chelsea we were far better than them in the first half but it took the second half to score the goals that sent their fans home crying. After the first half, Chelsea still had a good chance if they started to play well. The game against Liverpool, as well was a good one for us. Liverpool got nothing, All stats were in our favour. Why not all the time? But in so many other matches I just wished we would turn it on. We had the better players in most matches, including Bayern in my opinion, but we didn’t unleash our attacking players. Instead it was boring, predictable, tippy-tappy football that went nowhere. Boring extra time matches seemed the norm Arteta quite rightly wants to win. He knows that there are teams out there willing to spend more money than Arsenal. He believes that the way to win is first not to concede goals. He has found a way to make his team the second best over the past two seasons. He will believe that a slight margin in his favour will bring him titles. That will not involve flair players doing their own thing. We, as fans, will have to live with a small number of games per season where we win by thrilling football. I doubt if Infantino cares about the direction football is heading Can we accept that? We won’t have a choice. And we probably won’t have a choice either at international championships either. The football will stink but when will it drive the fans away?