Pochettino warned off taking Arsenal job
The reputation of Arsenal’s head of football is on the line as he seeks a manager who can inspire the club
Mauricio Pochettino has been advised not to jump straight back into management at Arsenal by friends who believe he should wait for a better job.
The former Tottenham Hotspur manager is among Arsenal’s preferred candidates to succeed Unai Emery permanently. Pochettino last year insisted he would “never” manage Arsenal and friends have encouraged him to stick to that vow.
Bayern Munich are also interested in Pochettino and may be willing to wait until the summer. Sources close to Pochettino believe he should take a proper break before waiting for one of Europe’s biggest jobs, such as Bayern, Real Madrid or Manchester United.
There is concern that Pochettino would not only ruin his Spurs legacy by taking over at Arsenal, but land himself in a much worse situation than he left at Tottenham. Arsenal face a battle to qualify for the Champions League and could lose strikers Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Alexandre Lacazette if they finish outside the top four again.
That would leave any incoming manager with limited transfer funds to rebuild a squad badly in need of defensive reinforcements.
Arsenal will take their time to work through an extensive list of potential successors to Emery, which includes Brendan Rodgers, Mikel Arteta, Max Allegri, Nuno Espirito Santo and Carlo Ancelotti. But the club will also give interim manager Freddie Ljungberg the opportunity to prove himself, with sources believing Arsenal’s preferred option would be for him to continue until the end of the season.
Ljungberg will be supported in the dugout by academy manager Per Mertesacker, the former captain, as Arsenal look to end their worst run of form since 1992. Mertesacker has impressed since taking control of the academy in 2018 and was promoted to the executive team within months of starting. His academy position is not a coaching role, though. Instead, he is responsible for managing the coaching departments within the system.
Ahead of his first game in charge, against Norwich City at Carrow Road today, Ljungberg said: “For me, it is about the team and the club. I try to concentrate on the game on Sunday. If it is a few other games, we will see. [There has been] no indication of how long or how short. They just said to concentrate on the next game, do as good as you can. We will see from there.”
Josh Kroenke, the increasingly influential son of owner Stan, told Arsenal’s website that he had asked Ljungberg to bring some “fun” back to the club.
“My message to Freddie and the players was let’s get back to basics and, most importantly, let’s get back to having some fun,” Kroenke said.
He added that he would be involved in hiring the new manager, and that there would be a “thorough search”. “It’s about finding the right candidate, not about finding the first candidate.”
Of the four men who were in the room when Unai Emery delivered the now-famous presentation that won him the Arsenal job, only one remains. Ivan Gazidis, Sven Mislintat and now Emery himself have all departed the building, leaving Raul Sanllehi as the last man standing and the final remnant of Gazidis’s great post-Arsene Wenger master plan.
Sanllehi, Arsenal’s head of football, could be forgiven for wondering how this all came to pass. Eighteen months down the line, the team who appointed Emery have been deconstructed and rebuilt around him, with new faces and new titles. There is no chief executive, no head of recruitment, no head of football relations. Instead there is Sanllehi, in his upgraded role, and there is Edu, the technical director who was more than a year away from being an Arsenal employee when Emery flicked through the PowerPoint slides which proved to be so alluring for the club’s executives.
What does the turnover in senior figures say about the effectiveness of Gazidis’s strategy to cope with Wenger’s departure? What does it say about Gazidis himself, the chief executive who set the train in motion but then disembarked at the first stop, joining AC Milan within a few months of Emery’s arrival?
More pressing, perhaps, is what it all means for Sanllehi and Edu as Arsenal begin to sift through a long list of potential candidates to replace the sacked Emery. Sanllehi was part of the selection team who chose Emery last year.
He is back at the same drawing board, except this time the ultimate responsibility will lie with him. The pressure is on, for Sanllehi and for Edu. They will know better than anyone that Arsenal’s next managerial appointment will shape the club’s future, determining their financial strength in the long term and the prospects of their most valuable players in the short.
Alexandre Lacazette and PierreEmerick Aubameyang want to be playing Champions League football, and it is no coincidence their contract negotiations have ground to a halt as Arsenal have floundered on the pitch.
What kind of club do Arsenal want to be? They do not want to be a team who churn through a different manager every season. Their training ground may be just over the road from Watford’s but, in ideological terms, the sides could not be further apart.
Arsenal want a long-term strategy, a plan to build for a successful future in a financially sustainable way. Just look at their transfer business in the most recent window: excluding David Luiz, their signings this summer had an average age below 21. They are plotting, constructing, moulding something new out of the ashes of Wenger’s club.
Emery was supposed to be the safe pair of hands who would guide the team through phase one. The problem, to ape that old Mike Tyson phrase, is that everyone has a plan until you get outclassed by Southampton at home. Emery lost the faith of the supporters, the players and, finally, his bosses. By the end, Sanllehi, Edu and Vinai Venkatesham, the managing director, barely had a choice.
Well, they have a choice to make now. Venkatesham will help, as will Huss Fahmy, the director of football operations, but it is Sanllehi and Edu who will make this next appointment happen, choosing between experienced older heads such as Carlo Ancelotti, who can steer the team back to normality, or the young bucks such as Mikel Arteta, who carry a greater risk but also a much greater potential reward.
A tantalising middle ground is represented by Mauricio Pochettino. The chances of convincing the former Tottenham Hotspur manager to come on board, however, are slim.
Then again, the same was said about Arsenal’s hopes of signing Nicolas Pepe from Lille this season. Sanllehi, all Catalan charm and charisma, put his contacts book to use and made it happen. It is not totally unreasonable to imagine him doing so again. Those Arsenal supporters who lionised him in the summer would certainly enjoy another opportunity to hail him as the world’s greatest negotiator.
All that gushing praise in the transfer window made Sanllehi uncomfortable. At one point he was mobbed by delirious fans before a match. The former Barcelona director knows that the adulation lasts only as long as the team are performing well and, true to form, the grumbles in recent weeks have been turned towards the executives as well as Emery. It would not be a stretch to say Sanllehi’s reputation is on the line, as well as Arsenal’s future, when it comes to this next managerial appointment.
It is similar for Edu, if a little less extreme. The former Arsenal midfielder only returned to the club this summer and his role is as much about constructing the playing squad as it is about cherry-picking coaches. A more intriguing time for Edu will be the forthcoming transfer windows, when he has a chance to address the imbalances in the team and, most crucially, the mess that is the midfield.
Edu knows Freddie Ljungberg, too, having been a fellow “Invincible” during their playing careers in north London. Ljungberg (left) will have a chance to press his claim over a series of winnable games before Christmas. Today they travel to Norwich City, before matches against Brighton, West Ham United and Standard Liege.
Arsenal certainly have the players capable of taking 12 points from these four matches and, should Ljungberg lift the mood, it will be hard not to draw parallels with Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s first few months at Manchester United.
The clamour to give Solskjaer the job permanently ultimately proved too loud to ignore for United. Sanllehi and Edu could find themselves in a similar situation. Their decision will be one of the most important in the club’s modern history.