Arsenal: Jose Mourinho reveals Unai Emery sacking problem

Jose Mourinho is being linked as a potential successor to Unai Emery, should the Arsenal coach be fired. The rumours help reveal a crucial difficulty with sacking a manager: finding a capable replacement.

It is quite clear: Arsenal fans want the club to sack Unai Emery. Fellow blog, Arseblog, put a poll on Twitter asking fans whether they want Emery to be fired. The results were emphatic.

Find the latest episode of the Pain in the Arsenal Podcast here — Unai Emery out, again

From nearly 60,000 votes, 87% said that the Gunners should sack Emery now. 6% then said that he should have a bit more time. A final 7% voted for Emery to be given until the end of the season. If you wanted to measure the pulse of the fanbase regarding Emery, you need not look any further.

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However, caution should be taken when it comes to blatantly calling for a manager to be fired. While Emery is justifiably under pressure and the club would well be within their rights to fire him, successfully sacking a manager requires more than just ridding of the incumbent employee. To undertake this process in a way that benefits the club, more must be done that merely sacking the manager; hiring the right successor is even more pertinent.

This brings me to the recent links regarding Jose Mourinho. Arsenal, it should be said, have distanced themselves from the prospect of the former Manchester United manager taking over from Emery, and it is likely that the initial reports were planted from Mourinho and his camp, but the overall point still pertains: sacking Emery is not enough; hiring the right successor must also be undertaken.

Mourinho is not the right successor. Both for footballing and personal reasons, he would be a calamitous hiring, destroying the soul of the club and ridding the team of a prosperous, long-term future, all in the hope that he can spend his way to a title before everything crumbles around him in two hectic years time. But the fact that he isn’t, illustrates the importance of the appointment, not just the sacking.

The club would be better off being patient with Emery and hoping that he can finally deliver on his ‘process’ than turning to an unqualified and unprepared replacement. When Manchester United sacked David Moyes a year after Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement, their mistake was not necessarily firing Moyes, it was hiring the wrong man to replace him, Louis van Gaal.

Arsenal are in a similar situation here. Sacking Emery is the right thing to do, but it can only be the right thing if the club then hires a superior coach to replace him, someone who can progress the team and implement a beneficial and improved identity.

Calls for Emery to be fired, then, while inherently justified, are a little empty. It is only half the job. The Mourinho links help demonstrate that fact. Let’s hope, then, that Arsenal are listening.