Raul Sanllehi has left the building by Konstantin Mitov
Well, well, lovely Arsenal people, hello to you all. Raul Sanllehi has just left the club and it makes me quite happy honestly. All of this happens just a couple of days after we signed Willian, with news coming on that very same day we were investigating our Pepe transfer and the money we paid for him.
It’s really hard not to suggest these things are connected. There are rumours that Sanllehi had connections over at Lille and that this led to us paying more to sign Pepe even though Unai Emery preferred to being in Zaha. Now, I am not a person sitting behind the scenes to know this, but if true it’s a good enough reason to get rid of him.
Also, we brought 3 players from KIA (Joorabchian) recently, which wasn’t really Arsenal’s way of doing things. Sure, we needed a change, and sometimes these super agents can give you an exceptional player, but Cedric, Willian at 32 and Luiz aren’t exactly setting the world alight.
Raul was brought by Ivan Gazidis, three years ago, to be the footballing person in a three-man leadership with Ivan and Sven Mislintat. One left for Milan and the other was forced out by Raul. Funnily enough the German made remarks about Arsenal having too many scouts and how we should move to a more modern data driven approach. With Arsenal making a clear-out in the scouting department and Raul out the door, he is kind of vindicated.
Some rumours also suggest that Raul brought in Unai Emery and that was the reason it took us so long to sack him after he failed us. Again this is just speculation, but he was definitely part of the people making the decision and this set us back another 18 months, because we were interested in Arteta back then and at the last moment we changed our minds.
After all is said and done, we’re left with Edu as the strong footballing person and Vinai V. It’s interesting if Arteta is going to now have a stronger influence of the players we bring in? It’s also interesting if we are moving back to a more similar way of things to the Wenger days.
Ivan Gazidis wanted to implement a new system where power is distributed so we do not see another situation where everything at the club hangs on one person (Wenger at the time). Now, with him and the personnel he employed all gone, we are done with the Gazidis-Wenger era on board level.
The final legacy left are players like Mustafi, Ozil, Xhaka and Bellerin and the soft underbelly of the side. The good news is that we now have a head coach that has shown promise he can turn things around and has united the fans, and delivered us an FA cup in the most difficult of circumstances from all the 4 we won this decade.
If we now back him in the market, sell a few unused players and remove some off-field distractions, I think we can start thinking about only the footballing side of things at Arsenal and head to a brighter future.
Konstantin