London (AFP)
By appointing Spaniard Mikel Arteta as coach on Friday, Arsenal is making a risky policy change by entrusting the team to a novice, even if his playing history with the Gunners and his apprenticeship alongside Pep Guardiola argue for him.
The second attempt was the right one for Arteta, 37, a former midfielder, trained at Barça and then passed notably by the Paris SG, the Glasgow Rangers, or Everton.
Eighteen months ago, he had been close to replacing Arsène Wenger, who had just spent 22 years in the red and white house, which shows that he does not lack ambition or self-confidence.
But this choice still seems to be dictated by the sense of urgency of a club which has won only one of its last 12 games and which, 10th at 7 points from the top 4, is likely to follow a third season without Champions League.
After all, the reservations that prompted club management to prefer the experienced Unai Emery a year and a half ago remain just as valid today.
Replacing the Spaniard, who had turned against the public and part of his team, by his assistant Freddie Ljungberg - an internal solution and a former member of the "invincibles" (49 games unbeaten between May 2003 and October 2004 ) -, Arsenal hoped to give itself time to choose its future coach well.
- Guardiola as a mentor -
But the still mediocre results and the complicated conditions in which he had to carry out his task - he had on his staff only Per Mertesacker, also director of the training center and the goalkeepers' coach - had pushed Ljungberg himself- even to ask its leaders last Sunday to decide quickly.
We expected to see the residents of the Emirates Stadium turn to coaches of the caliber of Carlo Ancelotti, dismissed in Naples recently, or Massimo Allegri, even Rafael Benitez, currently in China ...
Arsenal finally bowed to the strong trend of the moment in the English "big 6": entrust the reins to an old iconic player to create a link with a glorious past while he is still hot.
This was the case with Ole Gunnar Solskjaer at Manchester United and Frank Lampard at Chelsea, with contrasting results.
His 150 matches under Wenger between 2011 and 2016, his two English cups and two Community Shields won and his status as former captain argue for Arteta.
Trained as a Barça player, he chose Pep Guardiola as a mentor a few months after the end of his career in the summer of 2016 and there is no doubt that he learned his new profession as a coach from one of the all the best coaches in the world over the past ten years.
- "Not overnight" -
All of this makes him a young coach with great potential. But still without experience.
When he started at Arsenal, he was assured of the support of the club and the public. He will certainly have the ear of the players and he knows the championship by heart.
"It is a huge honor. Arsenal is one of the biggest clubs in the world. We want to be competitive to win the biggest trophies," Arteta said in the statement.
But the scale of the project has enough to dampen the enthusiasm. The novice coach will inherit a team without a clear playing identity and without great strength of character since the start of the season.
It will have to do with a heterogeneous assembly of players which still include some top players like Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, Alexandre Lacazette in attack or Bernd Leno in the cages.
But he will also have to deal with "stars" far from their supposed level (Mesut Özil, David Luiz), some promising young people like the French midfielder Mattéo Guendouzi (20 years old) or the Brazilian striker Gabriel Martinelli (18 years old) and quite a lot of fairly average players.
"We all know that there is a lot of work to do to get there, but I trust that we will get there," he promised before tempering: "But I'm realistic, I know it won't happen overnight. "
© 2019 AFP