Unai Emery has spoken again about his time as Arsenal boss and as usual, he has been sharing the blame.
In an interview with the Guardian, Emery placed some of the blame on Mesut Ozil for the German’s application at the club, and some of the blame on the club’s board who signed Nicolas Pepe instead of Wilfried Zaha.
The Spaniard has continued to claim that he shouldn’t be blamed solely for his failure to make Arsenal the team of our dreams, and I wonder if he is right.
Every club is bigger than the manager and individual players and although the manager pays the ultimate price for the team’s failure, I don’t subscribe to the idea that they should blame the manager alone when the team doesn’t do well.
When Emery helped us limp to a fifth-place finish and to reach the final of the Europa League in his first season, not everyone talked about how bad he was at the time, but as soon as it started falling apart in his team, he was blamed.
I still think most of the problems we had as a team was because of having a not-so-good manager who didn’t exactly understand the league or the team he was managing.
However, I also think the club’s board and the players didn’t help Emery enough.
It felt like the players didn’t like the Spaniard enough to follow his instruction or they didn’t trust his judgement, and they have to take some blame for that.
The board’s reluctance to sign Zaha, a player that he wanted and for them to have forced Pepe on him also showed that they placed business before success.
Emery wasn’t the best manager we could have had, but I reckon that the Spaniard could have thrived if he was given more support.
An article by Ime
