Arsenal and Unai Emery: Time to trust the process

Unai Emery has been criticised for his approach against Manchester City last weekend. The Arsenal head coach must be resilient and patient, trusting his process, not the results, especially at this early stage.

There is a debate in analytics circles (not just sporting analytics, but in all of analytics, especially in the business and HR world). It centres on the tension between the process and the result. Essentially, the difficulties come when a good process yields a poor result. Should that work be graded well or badly? The process was good; the result, or outcome, was not.

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It is an argument that has rippled throughout the sporting world as the use of stats and analytics has slowly crept in. Arsenal’s 2-0 defeat to Manchester City last weekend is a prime example of how the debate comes to the fore.

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Unai Emery was criticised by some for his approach to the game. His playing-out-from-the-back style was to blame, according to these critics, and the result of the match was proof of this. But others defended him. Their argument was simple: this is his first game in charge of a new team and he is yet to fine-tune the tactics, the strategy, the process, that he wants his players to execute. It is a classic process vs results debate.

Speaking in his press conference prior to Saturday’s trip to Chelsea, in which his Arsenal team will be put under the microscope once more, Emery clearly landed on the ‘process’ side of the debate. Here is some of what he said, which I found extremely interesting indeed:

"“We are training for each situation. I want in each moment to know what is our best action to do in the match. This is our creative style and idea. We need security, with confidence, to build in each match and training session. We are in this process. It’s clear that when you lose, it’s a bad result. When you win, it’s a good result. For me, this is the resilience I am explaining. It makes me resilient, when you win, when you lose, it must be consistent, you must stay regulated, keep thinking positively every day. You need to take the positive things out of the game to build our identity.”"

That is a quintessential ‘process’ argument. Stating that sometimes the result will be good, sometimes it will be bad, protesting the importance of resilience, patience and consistency, insisting that the positives from the performance must be gleaned, rather than undoubted negatives of the outcome.

It is one that I agree with. You may often hear the phrase, ‘trust the process’. This is precisely what Emery is saying. He is asking the fans, his players, his coaching staff and the whole club to trust in the work that he is doing, in the plans that he is implementing, in the strategies that he is using, in the whole process of his management, arguing that if the process is done correctly, the results will come naturally.

It makes sense. Pep Guardiola was spouting exactly the same argument a little under two years ago when he took over at City and the early results were not going his way. Look where they are now. The difference here is that because of his success at Bayern Munich and Barcelona, there was little doubt that his process was a good process. There is not the same confidence in Emery’s process.

That doesn’t mean that it is a bad process. It simply means that we will have to wait and see. There will come a time when Emery’s process will be judged. One game into his first season is not that time. So, in the meantime, with Emery leading the line, there’s just one thing to do: ‘trust the process’.