People were excited to see how the teams would fair after such a long time off. Most teams seem to be doing well. Especially the teams who are high in standings. However, this is not the case for Arsenal. They started the season positively under Mikel Arteta’s management, but now Arsenal’s on a downward spiral.
Some fans are blaming Arteta for the downturn of the team. However, there seem to be many factors at play.
Arteta’s hunger for building a good team comes from coaching under Pep Guardiola at Manchester City. Arteta has only had six months with the team. Three of which were during the pandemic quarantine.
Arsenal has had an entourage of problems since the pandemic. Their list of injuries seems to get longer. The team already is down a goalkeeper with Bernd Leno’s knee injury.
Then the pandemic has caused financial panic for the club. They are having to worry about the contract renewals of players. Then with Mesut Ozil, their highest-paid player who makes £350,000 a week, has been benched.
There has been panic on where Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang will move to. Then there have been links to Alexandre Lacazette moving to Atletico Madrid. So the team could be down two players. But also their Real Madrid loanee Dani Ceballos went back to Spain.
Since there has been a lack of finances, that also means there is no rebuilding project for the summer. Arsenal seems to be stagnant in the number of players that they have. Which has resulted in a lack of a proper starting XI lineup and a good quality of play.
They also had problems with one player testing positive for COVID. This resulted in three players having to isolate. Current mandates say that people who were closer than 2 meters apart to those who tested positive for COVID for more than 15 minutes must self-isolate. Therefore, when one player tested positive then the other two had to quarantine.
However, Arsenal believed that the player was a false positive. They went ahead and did an in-house COVID test. The player came back with a negative during that round of testing. This meant that the players only missed three training sessions before returning. But, they were reported as three senior players who were crucial to the team.
Arteta is trying to keep his players positive and confident. This seems to be a challenge after the club lost 2-0 to Brighton this past weekend. Also, the club currently sits in the tenth place in Premier League.
Arsenal will face Southampton on Thursday, June 25. Southampton is currently in 14 place in the league.
Then they have their FA Cup quarterfinal game against Man City on June 28. Man City is likely to win seeing that they are second in the league.
The team and Arteta are feeling the huge amount of pressure to turn Arsenal’s downward spiral around. At this rate, they won’t be competing in the Champions League next year. That is disappointing for the club because it prevents them from making money, which is needed to get new players on the team.
Overall, Arsenal’s season looks like it won’t be able to turn around. At this point, they just have to do well enough to make some revenue. However, with the current way the team is playing, they may continue to slide down the totem pole.
