Arsenal is a club that, in my opinion, lost its soul when Gunners legend Arsene Wenger left back in 2017. A series of failed restructures, an inability to transition club legends into influential club roles, average players on big salaries to name but a few. Though perhaps most profoundly; Arsenal's biggest mistake was a failure to implement a philosophy that fed off of all the values that Arsene Wenger instilled in not only Arsenal fans, but football people around the world.
This is a FM21 series that will focus on the rebuild of Arsenal's on-pitch philosophy and will also obviously explore the mechanics of the FM21 match engine to see how we can implement a coach's idea of how football should be played. Done through the main vehicles of creating an aggressive, free-flowing and expressive attacking system. It will focus on the pillar of Wengers legacy - developing a young team. With individual training practices to perfect everyone's role within our team philosophy, we will still allow the players creative freedom up the pitch. We will need to support this at a world class level in all elements of our coaching setups, we will need to build the best footballing network in the world to ensure the best coaches & players continue to come in and - most importantly - develop at this club. It's going to look like how Arsene would have wanted Arsenal to continue to be, just with slightly different people.
Read the first three parts here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mMsQn59UjPZPQ2q8GWAqKaYxfj630fQNiljzhklNU0o/edit
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PART 4:
RECRUITING FOR SUSTAINABILITY
Something that has been a real enjoyment from this project so far has been the development of the youngsters we have at Arsenal thus far in our first season. To be transparent with you guys, initially I wanted to sign certain young players in FM21 and develop them into Arsenal players. I now no longer want to do this, and recognise the immense talent that we currently have at the club.
So now we have to change our ideas - something that will commonly happen with me, as I get a million ideas in a day. Something I have immensely enjoyed from playing through with other FM fans, is the ability to discuss things that we think would be appropriate for the vision we have for Arsenal - it's been like having my own advisors, and they have influenced my decisions on what we want to do going forward.
Arsenal are fortunate to have some great youngsters coming through the ranks. Let's take a look at some of them now briefly, and identify areas that we want to develop (also look at their determination…)
Joe Willock
Eddie Nketiah
Reiss Nelson
William Saliba
Bukayo Saka
Gabriel
So as you can see, some serious talent to work with here - and all at an age where they can be hugely influenced by a strong structure, and strong influencers around them.
Next is the cream of the crop. Putting in place a strong scouting network and an emphasis on recruiting and developing world class young talent… leads to players like this:
Tommy Henry! Future Captain?
Tom Henry (pronounced just like Thierry Henry of course) is going to be the lynchpin of our midfield in the future. A perfectionist with 20 determination, 16 teamwork and 16 work rate at 15 is unbelievable. Yes, he has already started for Arsenal in the EPL, because… look at him!!
Donaldson, our future at left back.
Next is Neal Donaldson, who we all agreed during our broadcast of this playthrough that he is the next Ashley Cole for us. There are definitely some growing pains that need to be had, but I'm so excited to see this guy develop. Oh by the way, he's already scored a winning goal, an assist and a man-of-the-match performance in the EPL. He's 15.
So, we definitely have some fantastic young talent coming through the club - but unfortunately our senior squad doesn't have the sorts of characters that are going to positively influence these players' development. You'll notice a lot of our young players' determination is actually decreasing! I've highlighted the particular traits that I don't mind in a player - but mostly I want our players to be model citizens, perfectionists, professional or loyal. Loyal not so much, but I don't mind that. Loyalty is grouse. But a key focus for us is to raise the determination and also influence the personality of our young players. Currently, our balanced and conservative senior players don't allow this.
A fairly balanced squad, but not a lot of leaders.
So now we need to look at how we can help these young players become the best they can be, in personal development, but also in the way that they can help the club and our idea of football. We're fortunate to have a lot of "fairly" players. I feel like with the right mentoring and right senior professionals at the club, we can fine tune these players to become absolute animals for us.
We don't want to over-saturate our senior squad, nor do we want to be spending copious amounts of money on wages for senior players that aren't going to contribute positively to our ethos. I have identified some key targets for us to bring in to help mentor our youngsters. Key attributes we focus on: determination, personality, work rate, teamwork, leadership, and to be honest just generally being mentally strong - these guys aren't going to play much, they are here to be influential and inspire our youth to become the best we can be.
Goalkeeping - Pepe Reina:
Provides mentoring for young keepers, and even Leno.
Professional, good determination and leadership, also has a great ability to start counter attacks with a long throw - will be great as a backup, but also as a mentor for any young goalkeepers coming through in the next two-to-three years.
Defensive - Phil Jagielka and Dani Alves
Model Citizen is a fantastic personality trait for a mentor.
Model citizen, determined, aggressive and intelligent. Great mentor for our young, hungry and aggressive centre backs.
Dani Alves, a perfectionist.
Look at Dani Alves lads. Yes. Yes and YES!
Midfielders - Lucas Leiva, Santi Cazorla and…?
Lucas provided a good short term option for mentoring.
Lucas was the first mentor we bought in as he was available for only 3 million. Fantastic, well rounded mentally and still offers us a great backup option as a ball winning midfielder. Also, on the day he joined the club he became a highly influential player.
Arsenal icon Cazorla can give young players creative flair. Also a model citizen.
Arsenal icon Santi Cazorla will also (hopefully) come in (he's keen) to help our deep lying creative midfielders develop as a player. Need I say more? Look at the state of Santi! What a player.
Finally considering bringing in former Arsenal captain Cesc Fabregas, but I will explore better options soon:
Could bring back Cesc?
Attackers - Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Arjen Robben
Arsenal do love a Dutchman.
Two perfectionists that can drive our youngsters to train extremely hard, motivate them to develop into perfectionists themselves… Robben carries some serious injury concerns so we have to rethink
our "wide creative" influencer in our squad.
Captain, leader, legend?
What can you say about Zlatan?! He's still genuinely unbelievable and can (even at the age of 39) still compete with our CF options to provide competition - but more importantly, be the leader in our dressing room. I am determined to bring in Zlatan to fulfil this role.
So this is how I recruit for "sustainability" in the playing department. Once these younger players have been positively influenced by these senior players, the mantle gets handed over. We then start the next part of our save (long ways away in the future) where we begin to recruit our next batch of Arsenal youngsters to come in and start a new generation of Gunners legends.
The final part of this Arsenal project will be Part 5 "If you don't believe you can do it, you have no chance at all." This is where I discuss how we develop a winning mentality at the club which develops high level professionals, model citizens and future role models to help with transitions between generations of players. As we've discussed the mentoring section of this in a previous part, we will focus more on my role as a manager in keeping expectations high, morale high, and keeping players fit, firing and motivated. Hope to see you all there, until then, adios!
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But until then, I'll leave you with this. We've achieved a significant goal of the project - creating a dynamic duo between our striking partnership… cheers fellas!
Our best XI displays our goals - Laca & Auba responsible for 75 goals, without assists.
And:
Success isn't a goal, it's an outcome.
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Follow me on Twitch to watch series live Mon-Fri: twitch.tv/propirate
Follow me on YouTube for Football content (coming soon): shorturl.at/ikryN
Read this series through Google Docs: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mMsQn59UjPZPQ2q8GWAqKaYxfj630fQNiljzhklNU0o/edit
COME ON YOU GUNNERS!
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