Arsenal: The problem here is so much deeper than Unai Emery

There is a lot to talk about around Arsenal these days, but there are disturbing truths that still exist underneath the firing that need sorting.

Unai Emery gets a bad rap. I still believe he was a smart appointment. All the signs pointed to him being the right guy for Arsenal. They called him “underwhelming,” but that’s coming from the kind of people who wanted Carlo Ancelotti to ignore everything Arsene Wenger had built and do his own damn thing.

With Unai Emery now gone, some see this as the next step towards improvement. And that’s true. There’s no hiding from how delicate a situation this had all become at the Emirates. There’s no hiding from how Emery had lost the players and fans long ago.

It was just a matter of time, but now the time has come. The repairs can begin. And this starts on so many levels beyond just what Emery did or didn’t do during his time as manager.

Just because Emery is gone doesn’t mean that all the problems will just disappear. We may see that initial burst of positive results, but there is a deeper issue here, and a lot of those issues reared their ugly faces during the group effort to get Emery fired.

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For starters, the reports that players were openly mocking Unai Emery for his poor English are disturbing. This is something that fans get away with hiding behind social media, but this is not something that professional athletes should be engaging in. Not least of all because, like fans, they are human beings at their most simplest form, and that is not the way that one human treats another. It’s shambolic, really.

Fans did the same kind of thing, as mentioned, and fans were far, far worse. Name calling and personal insults are something you should be overcoming around the time you hit puberty, so to think that it was so widespread within this club to extend from fans to players is a problem that has to end, and you can’t blame Stan Kroenke for your own rash insults of another human being. No amount of money that he invests is going to change your own petulance.

So Emery is gone. Now improve. The board listened. They gave him a fair shot. It didn’t work. Maybe the players quite on him, maybe not. But if the club is trying to improve, you should to. Otherwise the same problems will come back again and again.