All the Unai vs Mikel rhetoric is exhausting. We were in a shit state when Wenger left, and it's likely that no one would have done a better job than Unai ended up doing with the most poisoned of chalices, but I think most would agree that Mikel has a much higher ceiling than Unai. So we moved on from him. Simple as.
this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2024
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I agree. I think context is important and looking back after the fact, with less emotion involved, it's easy to see how big a task he had.
I think Unai did a pretty decent job with the state the club was in. In an unlikely moment, we went on an unbeaten streak (but, yes, we failed to qualify for CL) and we made it to the Europa League final (albeit we ended up losing).
There were also some poor transfers by the club with Ceballos and the very costly Pepe. But, this was also under Raul Sanllehi, who seemed to under some scrutiny over the funds for that deal, from memory. Tierney did well for us though and, although David Luiz had a blunder or two in him, we were worse off without him in the defensive line at the line.
With more time, who knows how we may have developed under Unai. What we do know is that Arteta stepped in and I think blew us away (at least he did for me).
His vision was clear and he reunified everyone, fans and club, after how fractured we all were. He also hasn't been faultless, but you can't question where we are now from where we were when he started. And he has well surpassed what Emery contributed to Arsenal.
Yeah, I also feel like Unai did a decent job for us. He lost the changing room towards the end. But we now know how fractured and toxic it was back then.
Sanhehi really fucked us over with some of the transfers he pushed through. He would splash the club's cash on big names (possibly pocketing money on the side in the process), and then leave it to Unai to figure out how to integrate an increasingly dysfunctional mess.