Uncertainty and possibility: the first days of Unai Emery at Arsenal

The “Merci Arsène” billboards were still up in the club shop on the day in May when Unai Emery suddenly appeared at the Emirates Stadium. Wearing his newly fitted Arsenal blazer and tie, the Spaniard was given a guided tour and a leather-bound book about the club’s history, and was ushered into an office hastily adorned with a brushed steel plate bearing his name. After one of the longest-running relationships in contemporary football, this summer has been all about how quickly, and how deeply, Emery could build up a whole new set of connections to replace those everyone knew a little too well.

For any new manager, finding the right balance between introducing your own methodology and absorbing the particular idiosyncrasies of a new club is key. To what extent do you lay down your own laws? How keenly do you want to listen and learn? How flexible are your lines of communication? Emery’s way of tackling this crucial period was to rely on what fuels him personally: work, work, work. From day one at the training ground he has shown little interest in anything outside of preparing his team with the maximum intensity he can summon.

He has behind him a summer of effort spent trying to figure out what makes the players tick, dispensing details about the high press he favours and pushing fitness levels, and now he feels ready to step into the Emirates dugout for the serious stuff. Manchester City at home. Chelsea away. Champions of the past two seasons. The overture could have been more subtle.

The presence of a new figure in the technical area after so long is bound to be a focal point in the season ahead, but it is important to recognise that the scale of change across the club over the past year has been radical. The cull of coaches and backroom support staff around Arsène Wenger’s departure was far-reaching: people from the medical department and youth development left, and even the kit man called it a day. There are few high-profile survivors apart from Steve Bould and Gunnersaurus. All this was on top of a major restructuring of recruitment and football-relations executives, plus a large turnover of players. All in all, a tornado of change.

When World Cup latecomers Lucas Torreira and Stephan Lichsteiner clocked in less than two weeks before Arsenal’s opening fixture of the season, they shook hands with a host of people who are themselves in the process of settling into new surroundings. For any signing, becoming accustomed to the ways and wonders of a club is part of that process, but at Arsenal the whole squad and management is, to a greater or lesser extent, finding its feet. The culture around the club is being redrawn. It is the unknown – unpredictable but also alive with possibility.

Arsenal wanted, even needed, something different. The irony is that Emery’s presence is not dissimilar to the early days of Wenger: A new manager, a 46-year-old who knows his own football mind and is obsessive to the exclusion of reasonable distraction, walks into a place that had grown stale to meet players who are keen to try something new.

Last season’s Arsenal had vulnerabilities that were obvious and targeted. Emery wants to instil a high press, which demands that his players push themselves when they don’t have the ball and make calm decisions when they do. Nobody is expecting overnight miracles but signs of improvement in terms of being competitive – home and away, no matter the opponents – are a minimum requirement. Be hard to beat. Stop giving away silly goals. Don’t give up. That said, Emery is not a miracle worker. Despite new personnel and fresh ideas it is still a sizeable task to transform last season’s unreliable defensive mindset over one summer.

Every block of the team has new (or new-ish) blood and, as recruitment demonstrates, the back end had to be the priority. Defensively, Bernd Leno is pushing hard to be first-choice goalkeeper and Emery has to try to form a more resilient backline, with Sokratis Papastathopoulos and Lichsteiner recruited to add attitude in that department. Torreira, the Uruguayan terrier bought to snap and prowl at the base of midfield, has the qualities to fill a role that had been neglected, and the teenage passer Mattéo Guendouzi has caught the eye in pre-season. Further forward it’s worth noting Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang has played only 13 times for Arsenal in the Premier League and Henrikh Mkhitaryan 11 times, both having joined last January, just a few months after Alexandre Lacazette.

Emery has been fortunate that many of Arsenal’s key performers either didn’t qualify for the World Cup, or didn’t stick around too long, giving him more time than might have been expected in which to bond with his new players. The bulk of the squad has been present from the first day of pre-season.

Emery’s drive in trying to galvanise everyone has made a quick impression. Although training has been rigorous, it has also been motivating. Here is a manager who has marched on to the lawns at London Colney, exuding and exhorting a fierce work ethic every minute of every day, helped by the cranked-up cajoling of his popular sidekick Juan Carlos Carcedo. It is infectious, and the players have welcomed it. Training sessions feel fresh and are asking new questions of them, setting different challenges, in stark contrast to what they became accustomed to in the final Wenger years.

Bums on seats may not be an entirely accurate gauge of the mood around a football club but the appetite to see something different will be felt at a sold-out Emirates Stadium for the opening game of the season. It is telling that the last time Manchester City visited the crowd was painfully sparse. Yes, it was freezing, and yes, Pep Guardiola’s team had just cantered past them in the League Cup final, but still. When so many choose to stay away even though they have already paid a minimum of £60 per match for such a high-grade fixture, there is no disguising the demoralising impact of apathy. That particular game was finished by half-time, and City were able to coast through the second half in a way that was as pointed as it was damning.

Those ever-growing numbers of unused red plastic seats evident around the stadium last season became symbolic. Interest, though, has been revived by the promise of something new. As long as the returning crowds come armed with patience as well as hope and expectation, the matchday atmosphere should be happier and less fractured. Emery needs time to implement substantial change.

This new chapter is a strike out into the unknown. It starts with multiple questions for the new manager. Who will be his first-choice goalkeeper? How does he best utilise his two most expensive and experienced strikers, Aubameyang and Lacazette? Can Mesut Özil and Aaron Ramsey, two big talents who have generally played with freedom, fit into his high-press, high-workload strategy? How quickly can Torreira make his abundant qualities felt? Is Guendouzi ready for the first team? Will the side’s shortage of pace at the back be easily exposed? There is plenty for Emery to try to answer over the weeks and months ahead.