Arsenal’s New Decisiveness Could Earn Them The Title

In just a few short weeks Arsenal will kick-off the new Premier League season with a stern opening day fixture as the club welcomes the reigning Champions, Manchester City. It doesn’t get much easier after that and Arsenal could find themselves off the pace before September. The club has a new coach after 22 years, 5 new players to bed in and a different mentality – it’s easy to look at that and write them off as title challengers.

However, it is precisely those reasons why I am so confident about Arsenal’s chances this season and if you are too and fancy putting money on it click here for the latest odds. Arsenal are a different beast from the last half decade or so. For the first time in a long time there seems to be joined up thinking in the recruitment policy at the club.

Head Coach Unai Emery, Director of Football Raul Sanllehi and Chief Scout Sven Mislintat seem to be on the same page when it comes to identifying targets and getting the deal over the line. Already this summer Arsenal have welcomed Leno, Sokratis, Lichtsteiner, Torreira and Guendouzi as well as signing players to extended and first contracts. There is a decisiveness about Arsenal that hasn’t been apparent in recent years and getting such significant business done early has allowed Emery to spend more of his time on the training field.

Perhaps most impressively, Emery has assessed the squad and concerned himself with getting the players he wants at the club before arranging to ship out those he deems surplus to requirements. Under Wenger, who will always remain our greatest ever manager, the club seemed to spend as much time setting up deals to move players out as they did on bringing them in. This focus on having players pass each other in the corridors seemed to cost us time and again with players who would have taken us to the next level.

The club has signed Torreira and Guendouzi whilst extending the contracts of Elneny and Xhaka. Depending on what formation Emery deploys it’s likely those players will be competing for the same 1-2 roles. One of those players is going to stagnate long before we ship them out and we’ll likely take a loss on them. It’s ruthless and something which rarely happened under Wenger who cared deeply about his players and their potential as he saw it – sometimes to the detriment of the squad as evinced by his protestations that signing Xabi Alonso would have “killed” Denilson, Diaby and Song, players who for different reasons achieved little with the club and barely progressed as players.

I’ve no idea how Arsenal are going to line up next season but I am confident that this club will be in the title chase. Under Wenger we often claimed we were just a few players away from climbing to the top; the new decisiveness Arsenal has shown has finally brought those players to the club in the same transfer window plus a couple more. This really could be our year.

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