Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta needs ruthless streak to resurrect team

New manager’s first few months at Arsenal will be tested by overpaid and underperforming players.

New Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta should bench one of his three key strike weapons to shore up the team’s defence Picture: Getty Images

Mikel Arteta inherits various problems at Arsenal. I’m not sure what Mesut Ozil will respond to. What mystifies me is that he was like this before he signed a new contract early last year, which more than doubled his wage to £350,000 ($460,000) a week. Who at Arsenal said yes to that? What has he done to warrant it? If the option was to tie him to a four-year deal on more than £300,000 a week or let him go, then let him go.

Everything about him should be right at that expense; instead it looks like he’s getting away with playing football the way he wants to, and that’s unacceptable. The problem Arteta will face is people further up the tree at Arsenal telling him to manage Ozil and get the best out of him, because they have made the mistake of investing so much money in him.

At the beginning, Unai Emery was handling it quite well, trying to motivate Ozil to train properly, effectively saying: “If you’re not going to give me everything, I can’t pick you.”

Yet when Arsenal ran into some dodgy results, he had to bring Ozil back, on his terms, which is never great for a manager.

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The captain also can’t tell the crowd to eff off, as Granit Xhaka did after being substituted against Crystal Palace in October, and expect to be easily accepted back by them. He’s got a lot of making up to do. Whether he has a future at Arsenal, we’ll see in the next six months. Arsenal’s new manager is perfect son-in-law material and strikes me as the sort who was a model professional as a player, but I’m not sure if that personality succeeds in this cutthroat business. I’m not sure if he is suited to being in charge of a big club in trouble.

That’s why there’s a question mark against Arteta, which will be answered in the next couple of years. We need to find out whether he can step up from being a coach, taking what he has learnt from working with people such as Pep Guardiola and Arsene Wenger and transferring it to his role as a manager who, at times, has to fall out with people and be ruthless – as Guardiola was early on at Barcelona with players such as Ronaldinho.

Most top managers have that edge to them, but how you manage the millionaires in the dressing room and the financial independence that gives them has never been more important. Players all have an opinion today, far more than they used to, and will test Arteta very early on with the usual excuses: it’s nothing to do with them, it’s all down to the coaching or preparation. Modern players are quick to unload the blame elsewhere.

He will find that very frustrating, because he seems a thoroughly decent guy. He will soon find it’s easy being a player or an assistant compared to being a manager. It’s great when things are going well, but when they’re not you feel responsible to everybody and it’s how you deal with that pressure.

I was 33 when I became player-manager of Rangers in 1986. Arteta is four years older yet still the youngest manager in the Premier League, four years younger than Frank Lampard, whose Chelsea side Arsenal early Monday morning (AEDT). There are similarities because both Arsenal and Rangers are institutions rather than just football clubs. Rangers hadn’t won the league for eight years when I arrived and it was a case of going back to basics and starting again. I was lucky I had some great people supporting me, both in the boardroom and in my coaching staff, and that’s what Arteta needs now.

The recent spate of sackings prove there has never been less time to get it right as a manager. Arsenal have been in decline for a decade, but the success of the first 10 years under Wenger is still relatively fresh in their fans’ minds. They need a big turnaround if they are to get back to where they want to be, but that’s not going to happen in three or four transfer windows.

The minute you start spending money, as Arteta may do next month, it compounds the pressure. If Nicolas Pepe had hit the ground running after his £72m summer move Lille, if he was firing goals in, that would have given Emery more time to get it right. It’s a factor. The pressure is multiplied when you start spending big money and most Premier League clubs do now.

There’s a player in Pepe, you see flashes of it. Thierry Henry didn’t have a great first few months at Arsenal, then exploded into arguably the finest foreign player of the Premier League era. With Pepe playing beside Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, who scored again in the Boxing Day draw at Bournemouth, and Alexandre Lacazette, then that’s some firepower, provided they perform.

Yet between them and Bernd Leno, a good goalkeeper, nothing is right. Any way you dress it up, Arsenal’s defenders are just not good enough, so you have to come up with a system to make you hard to beat. That may mean one of those front three being on the bench, as Pepe was at Bournemouth, if Arteta decides Arsenal are not good enough to take teams on with an open, expansive style.

They don’t have enough in midfield or the top-drawer defenders to simply say: “We’re good enough to let the front three punish teams.”

The mix is not right. It’s all right saying let’s play the way Liverpool do, but Liverpool’s front three are fed by three workaholics in midfield, players who sense danger and put a proper shift in, joined by the two fullbacks, so it’s actually four or five in midfield when they are bossing games.

The Sunday Times