Arsenal: Mikel Arteta isn’t going to fix this bunch, unfortunately

Arsenal are supposedly inching closer to announcing Mikel Arteta as the new manager. That’s well and good, but he can’t polish this turd any better than the next guy.

Freddie Ljungberg spoke after Arsenal‘s shambolic defeat to Manchester City about how badly this club needed to make a managerial decision. Everyone was doing two jobs since Unai Emery left. The fact that the board didn’t stop to consider this—or willfully ignored it—is a disturbing little bit of evidence against them.

Now, with Mikel Arteta shaping up to be the next manager, we have to consider the implications here. I’m not in love with the prospective appointment. But that doesn’t mean I won’t welcome it, because anything having to do with change is absolutely necessary.

My beef with Mikel Arteta is he isn’t going to fix this bunch of misfits. The same way that Freddie Ljungberg couldn’t. That has nothing to do with his quality as a coach, and it’s probably that Arteta will have a great managerial career, perhaps even at Arsenal.

But this bunch of bloated superstars and raw youngsters is out of his control. He isn’t going to be able to change Mesut Ozil. He isn’t going to be able to maximize Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang. He isn’t going to be able to get Sokratis or David Luiz to work.

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If you wanted someone to get in here and make this bunch work, you’d need someone like Max Allegri. Someone who knows how to knock heads and still keep a unified front.

Arteta isn’t that guy. Mikel Arteta is a long play. He’s the guy you turn to and say essentially what you said to Unai Emery, only you actually follow through this time—build your own thing. Clean house, bring in your guys, build with the pieces worth keeping at Arsenal now, and build for the long haul.

Unai Emery would have done that too. But he, like Ljungberg and like Arteta, are not going to make this turd look any shinier than it already is. It’s a dead duck. There are too many incompatible components here to make a well-oiled machine.

That’s asking a lot of fans, too. They have to set aside hopes of a quick turn around in order to have faith in the long-term. Good luck with that. We’ve seen how they behave.

It’s going to be interesting, to say the least. Arteta can do the job, but how long are you willing to wait for him to do it?