Tottenham Hotspur’s sacking of Mauricio Pochettino has confirmed many Arsenal fans’ worst fear, namely that their greatest rivals are now better than them at everything, including sacking supposedly underperforming managers. Going into the recent international break, there had been persistent rumours that if Arsenal failed to get a result at Leicester City, or at least put in a good performance, Unai Emery would be sacked, following a generally underwhelming start to the Premier League season and, in particular, a run of three matches without a win against teams lower than Arsenal in the table. Of course, as many Gunners fans had feared (and quite a few had predicted), Arsenal failed on both fronts at Leicester, meekly losing 2-0 and failing to create more than one good scoring opportunity themselves.
If Tottenham Can Sack Mauricio Pochettino, Why is Unai Emery Still at Arsenal?
Emery Was Not the North London Manager Who Got Sacked
However, as it transpired, Emery was not the north London manager who got the sack during the international break. Instead, it was Pochettino who was dismissed, despite the Argentinian boasting an overall record at Spurs that is infinitely superior to that of Emery at Arsenal (albeit over a considerably longer period of time).
Although Spurs had undoubtedly had a poor 2019 overall, with the truly notable exception of reaching the Champions League final, Pochettino’s work in getting Spurs to qualify for the Champions League for four seasons in a row, two of which they had largely spent playing every match away from home while their new stadium was being built, was remarkable. Nevertheless, with qualification for next season’s Champions League now looking decidedly unlikely, Daniel Levy (no doubt at the insistence of Joe Lewis, the reclusive billionaire owner of Spurs) decided to get rid of Pochettino and replace him with Jose Mourinho.
Increasing Pressure on Unai Emery
All of which has only increased the pressure on Unai Emery. If Pochettino, for all his undoubted achievements at Spurs, can get the bullet, how on earth can Emery, the man who is now almost universally derided by Arsenal fans themselves as ‘Dick Emery’, ‘Bruce Rioja’, or even ‘The RiDICKulous One’, survive?
The obvious answer, surely, is that Spurs are now operating with the kind of clear focus and cold-hearted efficiency (read ruthlessness) that is essential at any top club, something that Arsenal seem to have stopped doing some time in the second half of Arsene Wenger’s tenure and are still not doing even now, long after the once-great Frenchman left the club. However, there are also other short-term and long-term factors to consider when trying to understand why Emery has somehow survived.
The Short and Long-Term Explanations for Emery’s Survival
In the short term, it is surely because the Arsenal hierarchy believe that the team’s results must now improve, given that they face a number of the bottom sides in the Premier League in the next few weeks, starting with a home match against Southampton this weekend. And yet, almost exactly the same argument was put forward before the last international break, with Arsenal facing what looked like a relatively benign run of games against Sheffield United (away), and then Crystal Palace and Wolverhampton Wanderers (both at home). Of course, they failed to perform at all in a dismal defeat at Bramall Lane, before giving away first-half leads against Palace and Wolves to draw both those games. So there is absolutely no guarantee that they will improve significantly in the coming weeks, even against the likes of Southampton and Norwich City.
In the longer term, the failure to sack Unai Emery is surely evidence of the increasingly poor overall running of Arsenal. Rather than dismiss the Spaniard and pay considerable compensation, the club appears to be content just to let the whole sorry saga rumble on until next summer when Emery’s contract will be up and he can just move on without receiving any compensation. Of course, the danger with that approach is that if Arsenal fail to finish in the Champions League qualifying places for a fourth successive season, they will probably not only lose their few remaining star players (in particular Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang) but they will find it almost impossible to recruit replacements of anything like a similar standard.
The Biggest Problem is The Kroenkes
Ultimately, as with everything else at Arsenal, the biggest problem is not Emery (or Wenger, or whoever else is the manager) but the actual owners of the club, the Kroenke family. The patriarch of the family, the famously silent Stan, has been replaced as the figurehead at Arsenal by his son, Josh, but this is a man who has twice appeared at the Arsenal training ground this season (and been photographed doing so, even by the club’s own cameras) proudly wearing an LA Rams t-shirt.
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to do so once might just have been an unfortunate mistake, but to do so twice suggests that there is something far more serious, even sinister, at work. Either he genuinely does not care about the club that he is in control of, or, worse still, he is subliminally sending a message to the Arsenal fans about where he and his family’s real sporting priorities and loyalties lie. In effect, as many of the club’s fans have come to fear, Arsenal are in danger of becoming the first football club that are a feeder club (at least financially, with suspicions that Arsenal’s considerable resources are being used to underwrite the Rams) not for another football team but for a team in a completely different sport.
At Least Levy and Lewis are Genuine Spurs Fans
For all the obvious failings of Daniel Levy and Joe Lewis, it at least seems obvious that they are genuine fans of Tottenham and are not even running the risk of being distracted by involvement in another sport. Completely the opposite appears to be true of the Kroenkes (both Stan and Josh), and that is the real reason why they have not intervened decisively to insist upon the dismissal of an obviously failing manager. As long as Arsenal fans keep turning up at The Emirates and as long as the club keeps producing some kind of profit, that will be enough for them.
Of course, for any true Arsenal fan that is nowhere near enough. The very least that they, like any other football fan (or indeed any fan of any sports club), should be able to expect is that the owner of their club is also a genuine fan, who shares their sense of joy when the team wins and their sense of despair when they lose. However, the Kroenkes are anything but genuine Arsenal fans. As Josh’s repeated wearing of an LA Rams T-shirt shows, they are not even genuine football fans but instead are primarily fans of American football. In the final analysis, that is surely why they have failed to take decisive action and sack Emery, a lamentably under-performing manager who should never have been appointed in the first place. They just don’t care enough to take the decisive action that is required.
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