The Premier League title race is over for this season but Arsenal have an opportunity in 25/26; Mikel Arteta is under pressure along with Ruben Amorim and Ange Postecoglou.
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Arsenal have a massive decision to make as 25/26 opens up
Are the Arsenal board heading towards the biggest decision they’ve made in years? They look like they need to spend upwards of another 150 million this summer on a striker and one or two more positions. Are they going to back Arteta with close to 1 billion in transfers with very little in return?
Next season’s league looks winnable for a team that’s not Man City. If Liverpool don’t sign Salah on for another year or 2, I see them dropping off massively. Without his input this season they would be battling for top four, not strolling to the league title. Even if they sign a player to replace him, they’d be doing well to come anywhere near his 44 (so far!) goal contributions. And this is not the same team that had Mane and Firmino chipping in with a decent amount of goals. All this doesn’t factor in losing Van Dijk’s presence at the back and his long balls forward, as he seems most likely to extend, or Trent leaving.
As for Man City, they have already spent big in January and probably will again in the summer but with all the change it seems next season could be a transition year for them. I don’t see them putting up 90+ points while bedding in so many new players. Rodri is due back but he’s spent a year not playing and who knows what level he will come back at. De Bruyne’s output also needs replacing as this season has shown.
As for the rest, Forest will most likely drop off with Champions League football and I can’t see a title-winning team in that Chelsea squad. Unless a team does a Leicester (technically Spurs and Man United have fallen so far down it could be one of them!), I don’t see any playing squad being prepared well enough to win the league next year bar Arsenal.
Add in a striker and one or 2 other squad players and they should be favourites. And that’s the decision for the Arsenal board. Do they persist with the Arteta project or look to bring in someone to get them over the line? I think, like others have pointed out, Arteta will be Arsenal’s Brendan Rodgers and be their nearly man. This season is a drop-off in performance in a weaker league than before despite the squad at hand.
They need a trophy winner next year. Get Ten Hag on the phone!
David, Ireland
READ: Ancelotti to Arsenal as Premier League managers predicted for 2028
Left-back to the future
Say what you want about Arteta but have you ever known a manager to think so far out of the box and have half the outfield players on the pitch be left-backs (or at least have played a substantial amount of games at left-back)
Left back at left-back, left-back at right centre back, left-back at left centre mid, left-back at right centre mid and left-back on the left wing. 5 left-backs…..5.
Total left back football.
Lee Bristol AFC
Last-chance saloon for Ange at Spurs?
And so, at Spurs, here we are at last chance saloon for Ange, his project and his band of ‘Angeball’ enthusiasts. David Tickner must be pinching himself with glee.
I’ve long been a vocal believer in Ange and all he’s been trying to do at Spurs. I’ve been happily able to ignore the ridicule and the criticism for the past 3 months, on the promise that our woes *were* genuinely down to a devastating injury crisis and a thin squad, and not because of Ange being out of his depth. However, the last 3 games of miserable football have truly put the ‘Ange in’ crowd on the back foot. Worse even than the results, it’s the meek, shapeless, confidence-starved performances that are most damning.
This Thursday in the Europa League against AZ Alkmaar, the Ange project is truly hanging by a final thread.
My faith in Ange was always rooted in 4 things:
1. This was a manager who *wanted* to be at Spurs. Not like Conte or Mourinho who were just gracing us with their presence.
2. He wanted to make us a *winning* team playing the kind of exciting, attacking football we fans craved. He wasn’t just coming to fight for 5th and 6th.
3. The early evidence was beautiful. His first 10 games, and the big wins this season over United, City, Villa showed how good it *could* be.
4. Most importantly, the players. The players visibly and vocally bought into Ange’s vision. Hopefully still true.
After years of pressing the reset button every 18 months at Spurs, the thoughts of a long-term, positive, Ange project was beautiful. I hated the thought at Christmas of pressing the red button once more, bringing in, whoever, Fonseca? Terzic? Iraola?… and then sacking them and doing it all over again 18 months later (Welcome, Kieran McKenna!).
But now, even a staunch Ange fan like me has to admit the risk. Despite the high highs, it’s doubtful whether any manager can have such a damning record of inconsistency, bad losses, and bad performances over 18 months as Ange has had, and survive. Even if he *does* turn things around in the last quarter of the season, that might not be enough. Erik Ten Hag at Man United taught us that. It might be time for any reasonable person to admit defeat, and to start to think about the Iraola, or the Thomas Frank era..
…but since when has football fandom suited reasonable people?
I can’t help but still dream of Ange and this group of players climbing back out of this absolute pit, and bringing Spurs to that sweet, sweet promised land of Trophy glory in the Europa league this season. Can you imagine? Not just months of anguish this season, but years and years of ridicule and ‘Spursiness” swept away in one thrilling cup final night. Incredible. And this win being the launch pad for a beautiful era at Spurs.
But that dream hangs in the balance, and on Thursday night the scales will tip.
Ange in… til it kills me.
Andy, THFC, Eire
READ: Why Manchester United and Spurs are battling to become the new Stoke
Amor-out?
I am going to require some input or feedback from coaches or football analysts for this, but I have come to the conclusion that Rubin Amorin is the wrong coach at the wrong time for the wrong club in the wrong league.
This is not a knee jerk response based on recent results or performances. My conclusion is based on the following assessments:
1 – A 3-5-2 formation relies very heavily on the role of the wing backs. You can see the difference Dorgu makes over Dalot. I doubt there are many two-footed wing backs around let alone one-footed ones, so over a gruelling English Premier League season, you are going to need FOUR wing backs in the squad.
2 – Another fatal flaw is that the high press requires three components which must ALL be present; 1) incredibly fit players, 2) a level of aggressiveness to attack the opposition which is not a quality easily trained, and 3) the ability to then have the talent, both teammate awareness and ball skill, to find the open teammate and that person have the ability to score.
If we take Liverpool as the benchmark (as much as it pains me to admit!), they are probably the closest to the exemplar but it required them to have at least a couple of World Class players which makes it seem like they are playing with more than eleven men (not including the referee!). Take any combination of Alisson, Van Dijk, TAA or Salah out and they become as vulnerable as anyone else.
3 – Such an approach works when you are the 800 lb gorilla of your League as you overpower everyone else. Amorin was able to achieve that quickly in the Portuguese League. The problem is, in the EPL, there are 900 lb and even 1,000 lb gorillas who can afford better players. Even if Amorin could buy his Fantasy XI, it would not be a Liverpool or City in their peak. Bournemouth and Newcastle show that young, hungry and aggressive only get you so far.
4 – The high press is akin to committing all your troops into battle with no reserve – once you get over it, you are in open field. Games where Bournemouth, Newcastle, etc. have lost or played badly is either when this has been exploited or key defenders have been missing. Someone once said “goals win games but defense wins titles.” If you constantly concede from corners and free kicks, it places that much extra pressure on the forwards. It is simple logic that if you have 3 defenders on the halfway line, they are going to be more susceptible to conceding than a 8-man low block. Mourinho’s Chelsea was a team that, if they scored, you might as well have gone home because the opposition was never going to score. Anyone remember “1-0 to the Arsenal”? Boring but absolutely bloody successful. Look at Atletico Madrid.
5 – This seems so obvious to even be saying it but, you cannot score if you do not have the ball. I understand that the chances of scoring improves if you win the ball back 30 yards from goal instead of 60 but it defeats the objective if you give it straight back. The premise is, you win the ball back high up the pitch and, 10 seconds or 3 passes later, goal! Well, MUFC currently can’t string 3 passes together.
This missive is not designed to present a solution but to propose the following – what is the “next big thing” in football tactics?
Adidasmufc (Reminisces for the days of Holland’s “Total Football”)
Finance men have killed Man Utd
So Ben’s looking for a man in finance. Presumably with a trust fund.
It may come as a surprise Ben but the people who have run United up to now did in fact understand finance. Edward Woodward – an accountant and investment banker. Richard Arnold – an accountant. What is clear is that they were hopeless at running a football club.
Unfashionable thought it might be to say football is in fact the business of a football club. The jerseys, the sponsorships, the TV deals – they are ancillary to and consequent of the football. If the football fails ultimately all of it fails. As we are now seeing.
United are in such deep financial distress not because of the tea lady or the canteen. The management of the football was handled by incompetents, the team has plummeted down the league table and there has been a consequent collapse in revenue – primarily champions league related.
Jim’s solution? Fire HR directors and secretaries. Oh and build a vast new stadium which Ben refers to as a ‘masterstroke’. How is this a credible plan? The team, coaching and scouting are in complete disarray. The club cannot afford new high quality players and the scouts are incapable of finding emerging talent (the scouts Jim hasn’t fired that is).
Even if they do happen to find them, top tier emerging talent is increasingly unwilling to join United because in the last decade the club has served only to destroy new players – not improve them.
How does a new stadium in 7 years fix all of that? It won’t fix the playing staff nor the broken culture. It won’t repair a decade of poor scouting and poor coaching. It won’t get the team back in the champions league. (That’s if it is even built – you’ll note they were silent on how exactly this is to be funded. The British government will help apparently! Britain’s economy cannot currently bear that cost.)
What Jim has manifestly failed to articulate is any sort of plan to actually improve how United play football. The evidence thus far is damning – Retaining ETH, buying €200m of ETH players, extending his contract, then firing him. Hiring Ashworth. Firing Ashworth. Hiring a manager totally unsuited to the club at this time and place. All at colossal expense.
Ben there is no evidence whatsoever that Jim Radcliffe has a “realistic strategic vision”. And United, I’m sorry to say, have already lost their position in the top 3 clubs globally.
United have been run by financiers exclusively for a decade with catastrophic results. More than anything United need a team experienced in developing a club’s football from the ground up. Not bankers and cost cutters.
Your old pal Stevo
Not good enough, Football365
Can I just call F365 out for some pretty misleading reporting.
You have multiple articles up saying that Ratcliffe explicitly said Onana, Casemiro, Sancho, Antony and Hojlund were either overpaid or not good enough.
I’ve listened to the interview and that is simply untrue. You’re (I think deliberately) conflating two separate, back-to-back questions.
The first was about the club finances, where he factually made the point that United owe instalments this coming summer on the above-listed players of over £80m, as an example of one of the cost pressures they face – it was not a criticism of the players in question.
The subsequent separate question was about the quality of the squad generally and, when asked if the squad was good enough, he said that some players aren’t good enough and some are overpaid. It was not a comment about those players specifically.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there’s a bloody big overlap on Jim’s Venn diagram between “players we still owe instalments on” and “rubbish and/or overpaid”, but your articles are attributing him as saying something that he simply didn’t.
He was trying to demoralise the whole squad, not just five lucky members!
I mean, question the wisdom of his comments by all means. Coming out one week and saying “our players are awful and overpriced” before a few weeks later saying, presumably, “please buy our players!” doesn’t strike me as a sensible thing to do, but the point stands that he did not say what your reporters keep saying he did.
And while I’m complaining about you… be honest, did you have Sam Cooper’s article slagging United off for their stadium being “worryingly similar to many other new stadiums across European football” pre-written, just bunged in a sentence about the tent and publish anyway?
It’s a bowl design – so what? That’s the most sensible design for a new build sport stadium, that will enable them to maximise attendance and (hopefully) minimise the pressure to increase prices to pay for the thing. I don’t think there’s anything inherent to the bowl shape that makes the atmosphere bad, if anything I imagine that the big top design will be great for the acoustics! You specifically criticise the atmosphere at the Emirates. It’s been a few years but, if memory serves, the old stadium had a famous, poor atmosphere-related, nickname – maybe it isn’t really to do with stands versus bowls?
There’s plenty to say about the design United released yesterday but “identical-looking” to other European stadiums is not one of them…
I bet you had an equally negative article about redeveloping OT ready to upload.
Andy (MUFC)
Who will Tuchel pick for England?
Given Tuchel’s first squad is imminent, it would be a great time for 365 to predict his picks in your Famous England Ladder feature.
I didn’t have time to do a full 50 but here is my prediction for his first squad. I have not included anyone who is currently injured.
Pickford, Henderson, Pope
Alexander-Arnold, Livramento, Lewis-Skelly, Guehi, Branthwaite, Colwill, Konsa
Wharton, Cook, Rice, Bellingham, Palmer, Gibbs-White
Foden, Bowen, Hudson-Odoi, Gordon, Kane, Watkins, Delap
Just outside;
R James, Wan Bissaka, Maguire, Mainoo, Lewis, Gomes, C Jones, Smith-Rowe, Rogers, Eze, Nwaneri, P Neville
Probably forgot loads of players but there we are.
Cheers
J-Dog
