GETTING PRAGMATIC ABOUT ARSENAL SITUATION AND THE CHELSEA GAME

Well hello there, before we get into the Chelsea bits, let’s follow-up on some of the challenges to the culture piece I penned yesterday. HOW CAN YOU HAVE CULTURE IF YOU MAKE BIG REDUNDANCIES There are two parts to this point. A lot of people think culture is roasting marshmallows over a fire talking about... Read more »

Well hello there, before we get into the Chelsea bits, let’s follow-up on some of the challenges to the culture piece I penned yesterday.

HOW CAN YOU HAVE CULTURE IF YOU MAKE BIG REDUNDANCIES

There are two parts to this point.

1. A lot of people think culture is roasting marshmallows over a fire talking about feelings at a company retreat. That’s not it. Culture is not about making people feel warm and cosy (though it can be). It’s about orienting behaviors around a business vision.
   1. Pixar films has an epic culture built around technology and elite storytelling. It’s a creative first culture. They wanted to the be the greatest. But that obsessive culture led to extreme burnout of staff at the beginning to the point where people were forgetting to drop their kids off at school, leaving them in the Pixar parking lot.
   2. Steven Cohen ran SAC Capital, one of the most successful hedge funds ever to have existed. His business beat out the competition because his staff were tasked with finding edge in the market (information). He was so ruthless about performance, that his staff eventually pushed into some extremely shady practices that moved into illegality. His culture was not warm or fuzzy, it was the most aggressive on Wall Street (his office was in Connecticut), it was led by fear, but it delivered results.
2. Business realities are business realities. If you need to lay off 50 people because the world changes, that is what happens. It doesn’t mean you have a bad culture. Quite the opposite for a few reasons.
   1. A business can’t function if it’s not making money. Survival takes precedence over everything. If you have to fire sales staff because there’s nothing to sell, that’s what happens.
   2. Culling people can in fact become part of the culture. Bridgewater has a mad scoring tool for staff. You grade every interaction with your colleagues so people can get continuous feedback on them. If you hit a certain score, you are fired. That is a horrendous environment to work in for most people, but those who thrive in it make more money than me or you.
   3. Culling staff can motivate other staff. GE used to mandate that 10% of underperformers each year were sacked. He’d call it removing the ‘C players.’ I’ve had bosses tell me to do the same in the past. Average performers in high-performance environments bring the level of the top performers down and they encourage those with a penchant for not doing much to slip a level. There are some industries, like elements of public service, where no one ever gets fired. I worked with an Irish Government incubator that was based in London and one of the leads there told me the person above them would go to sleep on their keyboard on a Friday afternoon and snore so loudly, the people below could hear. The culture allowed for that to go on. If you did that in finance, you’d be fired before your head hit the keyboard.

HOW CAN YOU HAVE CULTURE WHEN NUNO IS PULLED AT HALFTIME

Sporting and corporate can share elements of culture. If I were the consultancy at the club, I would be trying to align sporting and corporate as much as I could so the whole club felt like it was playing by the same rules. ‘Team over the individual’ is such a trope in sport, but if staff know that’s what Bukayo is doing, it’s motivating for them.

Back to Nuno. The guiding mission of the club is to win trophies. For Arteta, delivering that means different things, because athletes are programmed in different ways.

Example: Arteta has to control when players sleep, how much chocolate they eat, even the amount of hound-dogging the chaps do on their days off.

Sally in marketing doesn’t live by those rules, she can drink a bottle of wine every night, do a tinder date every lunchtime, and eat McDonald’s for breakfast like a qweeeeeen. Giving her the motivation and structure to achieve elite-level marketing strategies is very different to what Tavares needs.

Sport isn’t pleasant. It’s ruthless. And managers have to be allowed to do what they need to do for the win. Sometimes blood on the floor motivates other players, that was always a Jose tactic, it’s not nice, I don’t think it’s been good for Arsenal, but you have to let those things go.

Now, a club culture could prevent Arteta from savaging the player in public. It could prevent him from boxing the player out and not giving him feedback. But it can’t change his team selection. The manager needs to be accountable for those sorts of decisions because ultimately, no one in the club has a higher pressure job, or more chance of getting fired.

THIS CULTURE THING IS A REACTION TO RESULTS

No, it’s not.

Arsenal’s leadership didn’t get to the 93rd minute against Southampton and decide it was time to call a culture specialist.

This is something that has been in the works for a while and it’s a result of damaged morale corporate side.

ARTETA HAS A BAD CULTURE AT THE CLUB

Again, this is just untrue. The culture at Arsenal on the training ground is in the best shape it’s been for many, many years. There are things that need to be fixed. But read what the players say, read what pundits like Rio have said after visiting, look at what the youngest team in the league was doing with a fit starting 11.

Also… look at who signs deals if you want further evidence.

Right… onto the main story.

Here we are on the day of an absolutely HUGE day for Mikel Arteta and the project.

A point or more away at Stamford Bridge and we’re right back in the mixer for top 4.

Lose, and we’re Europa League merchants this season and the West Ham and United games start to look a lot harder.

So what do we want to see tonight as fans?

Something different.

There are some things we know as facts:

Without Thomas Partey and Kieran Tierney in the side, we are not capable of doing big things in a 4-3-3 formation.

I spoke to Johnny this morning, the spirit animal of many readers here and he said Arteta should be doing more with what he has.

On the one hand, he’s right, the last three games were bad from a points haul, but let’s be real, a lot of luck went against us during those games and that happens in sport.

But you have to sharpen your reality glasses.

This Arsenal squad, in its current state, cannot withstand the loss of 4 first-team players. Top 4 dreams, however much your wished it into reality, were always a stretch this season.

The club decided not to invest in a striker. Why? Because there wasn’t a good enough players available. Was that Arteta’s decision alone? No. Was it Edu’s alone? No. We know that because Edu’s Arthur deal was slapped down because it didn’t represent out best interests financially in the long term.

Arteta won’t be sacked if our season fails on a lack of goals because the striker decision was a club decision.

This is all very pragmatic stuff but in the court of public opinion, it is painted as insanity. Think about your own world, I know many of you are very successful business folk. If you’ve ever hired people at a rate, you’ll know the biggest regrets you have is when you pull the HIRE trigger on a body versus waiting for the best candidate. You always pay for it in the end. The short term pain panic hiring alleviates very rarely alleviates the stress of having a substandard candidate you have to fire.

The most important signing of the next decade for Arsenal is a striker. We tried for Vlahovic, he moved to a club that gave his agent £13m in agent fees, it is what it is. Our other options were at clubs that wouldn’t sell. You don’t buy for the sake of it when money is finite. That might hurt us in the short term, but Arsenal simply have to play the long game in 2022. The stakes are too high.

United are going to have to reboot their entire squad this summer. Who knows where they will spend their money, but they don’t have £300m to spend, and it’s questionable if their top scorer Ronaldo is going to park £600k a week for their new manager. If they do buy a striker, I wouldn’t be shocked if it was Harry Kane.

Chelsea have to sell Lukaku, but they don’t have fuck you money in a post-Roman era. You think they’re getting £100m for Lukaku? You think they’re getting £50m for him? You think he’ll just leave on his deal?

Barcelona is skint. Madrid will sign MBappe. City will sign Haaland. We will be an attractive proposition and no doubt the club will have an impressive presentation package to show our targets as to why they should join. Our system, with the right talent in it, gets us at least 10 more points next season, which takes us to top 4.

Back to the injury issues. Let’s be pragmatic again.

Liverpool dropped 30 points in a single season without VVD. How do you think their Premier League push would go if they had lost both their fullbacks, Alcantara and one of their forwards? They’d be in the shitter.

How do you think Spurs would do with no fullbacks, Bentancur and Kane out?

I could go on.

‘Do better with what you have’ only carries so far. It’s chest-beating fan rhetoric that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny in the Premier League. Arsenal is in transition. We can’t carry massive injuries to our best players. But next season, we’ll add again, bolster the weaknesses and be better.

… and remember, our weaknesses are absolutely clear: We need a striker. We need elite cover for Partey. We need to solve for left back cover.

Now, where Mr Cochrane is right, is that we need to pivot into a system that gives us a better chance of surviving the European Champions. There is no point in rolling the dice on outplaying Chelsea with this current team. There is no point in pretending Lacazette is going to cause any issues to a clever team. There is no point in being naive.

Give me some of that early Arteta shithousing. Give me one break and a goal. Give me a shanked 15 yard shot from Cedric that hits the top corner.

I will take a filthy performance.

I will take the luck of the gods.

I would lay down on a slab of rock and sacrifice my soul and live beating heart for a point or more tonight.

… but at core I just want Arsenal to believe they can do something.

Everyone has written us off, just like they did under worse circumstances in 2020 when Emile blew up in his home debut.

What does Arteta have for us tonight?

Can he land the galaxy brain into something that back foots Thomas Tuchel?

Can he give Arsenal their very own Brentford moment in a season that hasn’t seen us do well against big teams?

We’ll have to wait and see…

The Arsenal Opinion will be going live and on the whistle with the usual gang, so make sure you subscribe to the Youtube or the Twitch.

Enjoy the game.