No-one has ever gone toe-to-toe with Manchester City three seasons in a row. Perhaps Mikel Arteta knew that when changing his approach with Arsenal.
Is Mikel Arteta really turning into Jose Mourinho and, perhaps just as importantly, does that matter?
Jamie Carragher on Sky has been the main cheerleader of the Arteta-as-Mourinho narrative that has taken hold in recent weeks, and it’s important to note that every time he brings it up – which is now every week – he’s at pains to point out that is an observation not a criticism.
The problem there, of course, is that you can’t really throw the name Jose Mourinho around these days and expect an objective response. At all stages of Mourinho’s career, from his rise, to his dominant, domineering peak and subsequent fall, he has been a manager who provokes strong opinions. Very often directly contrasting opinions depending on whether his shtick is currently wearing very thin indeed at Manchester United or providing box-office press-conference copy ahead of a match against Manchester United.
There are connotations inherent in the name Mourinho, and nowadays not many of them are good. They are in fact really quite toxic. He is the great manager football forgot, overtaken by a different and – subjectively – more pleasing style of football that has become the accepted go-to approach for the biggest teams and copied slavishly if often disastrously much further down the food chain.
Thus, to compare a manager to Mourinho in 2024 is, unwittingly or otherwise, to imply that said manager is a dinosaur, a relic of a bygone age, no matter how suspiciously flawless his hair may remain.
Yet while that is the noise that screams from the headlines, it’s not really the comparison Carragher is making. He is not comparing Arteta’s Arsenal to the most recent Mourinho sides, but the great ones. He’s talking about the expensively assembled and physically ferocious Chelsea team that broke the United-Arsenal Premier League duopoly in the noughties. The Chelsea side that conceded an absurd 15 goals in an entire season.
That Arsenal have moved down that road is undeniable. They routinely play four centre-backs in their back four, with Riccardo Calafiori the latest giant addition to the collective. Mikel Merino is precisely the sort of midfielder 2004 Mourinho would have loved to get his hands on: big, strong, but technically gifted too.
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Because it must be remembered that Peak Mourinho’s sides, while physically dominant, were not the dour specimens our deceptive memories may sometimes remember. The year they conceded 15 goals they also scored 72. Sure, it was fewer than a far more swashbuckling Arsenal, but it was at least 14 more than anyone else. They scored four goals or more in seven league matches that season, despite so very rarely needing any more than one.
This was the season ‘park the bus’ entered the English football lexicon, but it was born of Mourinho’s response to Tottenham’s tactics against his team, not the other way round.
What Mourinho’s very best sides valued above all else and possessed in spades was pragmatism. That’s what he’s lost as a manager, and is the risk inherent in Arteta trying to make his Arsenal more like those sides. Mourinho’s pragmatism slowly gave way to negativity, which duly became the opposite of what originally made him stand out.
Not every team has John Terry and Ricardo Carvalho and Ashley Cole. More often than not, the pragmatic approach to being 1-0 up is to try and go 2-0 up. Those great Chelsea sides did that in a way his later ones there and at United and Spurs did not. That was not pragmatism, it was negativity.
And here’s the problem now for Arteta. Look beyond the toxicity of the Mourinho brand now and you can see something similar creeping in to Arsenal’s play.
There is simply no denying that a) something has changed and that b) it isn’t working. The underlying numbers weren’t great even during the seven-match unbeaten run with which they began the season.
Arsenal scored 91 goals last season at a rate of a tick under 2.4 a game. This season they have 17 from 10. Sample size notwithstanding, that’s a marked drop. They significantly outperformed an xG of 76 last season, but the drop remains with this season’s figure reading 15.5 after 10 games.
We find ourselves constantly coming back to the three-season problem. It was a notable feature of Liverpool’s attempts to go toe-to-toe with City. Jurgen Klopp, an outstanding and far more seasoned manager, even in the specific task of going up against a better-resourced and all-powerful opponent, could never muster more than two consecutive seasons of direct competition with City.
There’s a compelling argument that the levels required simply melt the brain. And that must be especially true for Arteta under that hair hat.
The irony, of course, is that City have rarely looked more vulnerable than they have since losing Rodri and, while a deceptive glimmer of early-season vulnerability is a key plank of the City playbook, there does appear something fundamentally undone about them in the absence of Real Madrid’s nemesis.
And yet Arsenal have been unable to capitalise because they’ve gone away from what took them so close to City in the first place. Arteta was Pep-lite, and it’s easy to see why he might come to the conclusion that while that was something that could take Arsenal a long way it could never topple the real thing.
So he and Arsenal had to try and become something else, the upshot of which is that they are now a less convincing version of something less pleasant and no closer to City than they were as the likable, progressive upstarts of two years ago.
Maybe taking on City is just fundamentally bad for your health. There are certainly some Arsenal fans who could do without it.
And it wouldn’t do to pretend Arteta’s lurch from his comfort zone has been entirely without merit either. The win at Spurs was notably achieved primarily from the back foot, as was the attempt to take all three points from the Etihad with 10 men that so very nearly worked.
The 10 men is, of course, another undeniable thread to the story of Arsenal’s season. Their red cards have so often come for offences small and twatty rather than a direct result of overtly excessive physicality, but it does still point on some level to a team trying to show us – and perhaps themselves – who they now are.
There is something praiseworthy about the attempt at growth and change. Arsenal had got so close it would be almost overwhelmingly tempting to just carry on and hope for something to break their way from City themselves.
But in that change they appear to have lost something quite fundamental about what carried them so far, and the undeniable benefits it has brought are currently nowhere near making up for what has been lost.
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