Arsenal: Does Paul Merson know what tactics are?

Paul Merson has stated that he cannot understand why Unai Emery is not playing Mesut Ozil, as Ozil is Arsenal’s player. I guess he doesn’t know what tactics are.

When England won the World Cup in 1966, Sir Alf Ramsay didn’t play the best striker in world football at the time, Jimmy Greaves. Instead, as he worked out earlier in the group stage, he believed his team worked better with Geoff Hurst leading the line. Hurst would go on to score a hat-trick in the final.

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For Ramsay, the system, the tactical approach of the collective, was more important than the individual talent of the players.

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Similarly, Sir Alex Ferguson would regularly make curious selection decisions in the Champions League, specifically to nullify the given opponent. Park Ji-Sung was his favourite player for some matches. He was most certainly not his best.

These examples lead to a very simple axiom: your 11 best players do not necessarily make your best team. No one, apparently, has told Paul Merson. This is Merson, speaking to Sky Sports News this week, regarding the Mesut Ozil situation.

"“You play your best players and work around them. Ozil is Arsenal’s best player and he doesn’t play, it beats me. He must sit at home and watch Arsenal and think ‘how am I not getting into this team?’ <…> Ozil is not so influential that you have to build a team around him, but he has to play because he is their best player <…> Arsenal have to stick with him, they are not good enough not to have him in the team.”"

Merson’s argument is this: Ozil is Arsenal’s best player, therefore Unai Emery should be playing him.

The thing, even if I did believe that Ozil was Arsenal’s best player, and I don’t, I still don’t believe that he should start every single match. It is more important for the collective team to be cohesive and connected than it is to crowbar all of your best players into the same team. And if Emery believes that Ozil’s presence is the detriment to the collective system, then he is quite right to drop Ozil from the team.

Now, whether Ozil actually is detrimental to the team or not, I am not so sure. I would be playing him if I was Emery, let me put it that way. But the fact that Emery is prioritising system over personnel is a simple choice of tactics. Pep Guardiola has done it all his career. Just do a quick google search for all of the players that he has sold. If the player does not fit the system, the player, no matter how good they may be, does not play.

The Ozil fanboys may be enraged and disgusted by this, but I would be making the same argument about Alexandre Lacazette, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang or any other player. No player is bigger than the system. There are some players that fit almost any system, but that does not mean that they are bigger than the system itself. They aren’t. And that goes for Ozil, too.