Mikel Arteta & Arsenal's ACCELERATED EVOLUTION

Hello guys, hope you are really well. Today I'm excited because we're going to be talking about something that's been on my mind all summer really, maybe even before that, but I've not necessarily found the words to articulate it. Hopefully I can do that today. We're going to be talking about the speed of evolution at Michel Arteta's Arsenal. And I'll tell you what made me think about it actually. Arsenal obviously, they've lost a defender, Jurijan Timber, to injury, serious injury. It's been confirmed now as an ACL. He's going to undergo surgery and months and months of rehab. And that has prompted questions about, well, will Arsenal enter the market again? And I say questions, prompted questions externally from you guys and internally at Arsenal too. That is a conversation they are having. This period of the transfer window, once the David Rye deal was over the line, had been kind of allocated to sales. It was all about sales. Can we recoup some money that we've spent? Can we trim the squad down? And this injury is just giving them a bit of pause for thought. And they're thinking, might we need to do something? Might it mean stopping a player leaving who might go out? Might it mean bringing somebody in potentially on loan? And there have been some transfer stories in the week. I don't know if you saw we were linked with Aymeric Laporte of Manchester City. And I made some inquiries around that. And there's no doubt that Laporte is a player that Michel Arteta really likes and who would fit with the game model that Arsenal could play at left-back, could play at left-centre-back and provide another option there and some depth. What was really interesting coming back is that there's no way by all accounts that Manchester City would engage with Arsenal on a deal like that. And I think that's really interesting because Man City are now saying that we regard Arsenal as so close to us that we wouldn't possibly sell them Laporte, who's a player who is quite far down our pecking order. Whereas just 12 months ago, in the previous summer transfer window, Man City were prepared to sell Oleksandr Zinchenko and Gabriel Jesus, who both played significant roles for them in a title-winning season, to Arsenal. And that shows you how far we've come, how quickly, and how quickly perceptions are changing in the wider football world. Before we go any further, I just want to say thanks to everyone who's watched the videos this week. We did a couple of Q&As, one about all things Arsenal, all questions from you guys left in the comments, and one about working in football media. So the journalism industry, how I got into it, how that functions, how you source stories. I think they were both quite interesting. There's going to be a third part which is going to be miscellaneous stuff about me and my life, some quite fun questions in there. I'll get that to you before long. Thanks as always for watching and do subscribe if you're not so far. We are on the incline, 100k can't be far away. If you head over to Charles Watt's channel, by the way, I spent the best part of an hour with him yesterday chatting about Timber and Raya and all these issues that come up during Arteza's press conference. So do check that out and remember to pre-order his book, which I think is going to be excellent. Today we are talking about the speed of evolution and I think one of the reasons that it comes as a bit of a shock and a bit of a surprise is that I think at Arsenal, especially if you've been an Arsenal fan for a long time, over a course of decades, we are kind of accustomed to a slower rate of change. I think Arsene Wenger was someone who thought in quite long-term cycles and Mikel Arteta, I'm discovering, thinks in much shorter cycles of time. He regenerates, recreates much faster. In the Wenger days, if someone signed a five-year contract or came to the club in their early 20s, unless they got poached by one of the big boys from Spain, you assumed they'd be there for the duration of that contract. You assumed they were here for five, ten years and probably end up leaving on a free transfer with no profit for Arsenal. This is a different kind of time scale that Arteta is operating in. How do we know that? Well, let's give you some examples and I think this is where it gets really compelling. So Arteta was appointed December 2019, I think I'm right in saying, and Chiarantini was critically important to him. First of all, he played in that hybrid left-back, centre-back role. In the following season, he was a guy on the overlap, who was the fifth lane of attack, swinging in crosses. Look at him now. That was 2021, that season ended. Two years on, out in the cold, looking for a transfer away. Pierre Emekabemiang. Arteta gave him a new contract in the summer of 2020. He was out of the team by the summer of 2021. Within 18 months, I think it's less in fact of him signing that new deal, it had all moved on. The team had evolved beyond Emekabemiang and if you ask me to this day, I believe that there was of course a disciplinary issue there, but I also think that Arteta was sensing an opportunity to move the team forward. I think that was as much part of it as anything else. Thomas Pate, we can talk about. A huge signing, an astronomical amount of money we paid in 2020, especially in a pandemic, to release him from his contract with Atletico Madrid. £40 million, £45 million, something like that. It was a lot of money for Arsenal to spend at the time. Automatic starter all last season. What happens? In the summer, we go out and spend over £100 million on Declan Rice, ostensibly to play in the same position. Tommy Asu. I mean, this is a brilliant example. Transformed our ideas of what the right back position was when he came in, in the summer of 2021. We're just two summers on from that. Does he have a place in this team? Not in the first 11, you'd have to say. Ben White at right back, Zinchenko at left back. If Timber was fit, we'd be asking where he'd get his game time. I think in the number 10 position, we've seen constant evolution. You know, we had Mesut Ozil, that obviously didn't work out. December 2020, I think, Emile Smith-Rowe came in. Within a month, we'd sign Martin Odegaard. Now we're seeing Kai Havertz used sometimes in that position. Aaron Ramsdale signed a new contract in May of last year, and yet here we are in, what, August? And he's got some huge competition with the arrival of David Ryer. I think even if you look at the younger players, say like Charlie Pitino, they kind of tell you about the trajectory of the team and how quickly this is moving. I think two years ago, we would have looked at what Pitino was doing in the academy and thinking, we've got to get this guy in the team. He's the future of the club. Now we've advanced so high, we've evolved so far that everyone's very comfortable with Pitino leaving on loan. And to be honest, I think a lot of people were relatively comfortable with him leaving permanently. Think of the despair when we lost someone like Omari Hutchison. We don't give it a second thought now because of how far we've come in such a short space of time. I think Mikel Arteta is someone who understands how fast cycles move in modern football, who's aware that just because you had a great team one season, it's not enough to say that they'll be great the following year. Look at Arsenal and what they achieved last year, and look at how many changes he's ostensibly making to that 11, 16, 18 players to ensure that we keep moving. And it's the same with the tactics. The shape, the system was brilliant last year. What we've seen in the first game of this Premier League season, a new shape, a new way of playing. You have to constantly push. Churn is inevitable. And it's such a culture shock to this club that was dealing with a manager in Wenger who I think thought in terms of decades, had this huge long-term view, this big expansive project. Whereas Arteta's project, it's like he's on a treadmill. He's always going, he's always going. I think he said we're in phase three last season, didn't he, of a five phase project. And I think those phases change by the year. I think he really, really does look at this and think, I've got a three to five year window with this group of players. Yes, they might be five or six years from their peak, but we can't guarantee that. I need to win stuff with them really probably in the next three years. I think he thinks that short term, I think he has that sort of immediacy. And I don't think he looks much beyond that. I don't think he's thinking about five years time, 10 years time. And you know why? Because that's Edu's job. Edu is there as a sporting director, something Wenger never had to take that away and say, coach, focus on the short term, focus on the now, focus on generating results while you can in this short period, do everything to win, put all focus on that. Is it, does it feel ruthless at times? Say someone like Tommy Asu, who was so beloved and was such a big contributor. Yeah, it does a little bit that he's a sub now and probably going to be playing in cup competitions. It does feel a bit ruthless. Is it for the good of the team? Is it for the good of the club? Absolutely. And Mikel Arteta, I think is a man who is in a hurry. He is in a hurry to succeed. He knows that his career is finite. If you think of the intensity with which he works, does he want to be doing that for 20, 30, 40 years? Maybe, maybe, but maybe, you know, he's, maybe this, this wick burns quickly. And I think he sees opportunity now and he's prepared to move on quickly to get it done. I just thought it was interesting talking about some of these players who might leave the club and thinking, wow, one year ago, two years ago, they were absolutely integral. And in such a short space of time, we've escalated to the point where now Man City won't even sell us a player. There you go, guys. That's what I've been thinking about. Hope you enjoyed it. Hope you found it interesting. If you did, let me know in the comments, do like, do subscribe. It all helps. And I'll speak to you all soon. No game this weekend, obviously, wait until Monday. Sit back, enjoy the Premier League, and I'll speak to you probably between now and the game. All right. Bye-bye.