One argument I'm finding weird about utilizing Arsenal's weak squad to defend Arteta. Wasn't everyone and their mothers rating Arsenal to be a shoo-in for top four at the beginning of 2019/20 season? Even most of the caf was in that camp. Now, we're at about a year and a half containing a year with Arteta where he has been the manager during the two succeeding transfer windows after the beginning of 2019/20 season. So, the question is has the squad/individual players gotten worse under Arteta's watch and why isn't he responsible for that squad being in the 15th position? or was their squad just over-hyped for no reason at the beginning of 2019/20 season? And obviously, I'm ignoring the amount of control he may or may not have towards buying and selling players and the contract renewals because I don't know.
Our squad was definitely over-hyped, our new players have been massively under performing (or we paid far too much for them).
Pepe is a flop, I still rate him but he isn't performing at the level we expected at the beginning of 2019/2020 season.
Laca is a flop, he was supposed to replace Giroud and give us another dimension and he's arguably worse than him.
Saliba isn't playing, we spent 20 mill+ on a CB that Arteta doesn't rate enough to play in Europa league.
Mari, Luiz, Willian, Cedric are very expensive squad players that fail to improve our team when they play.
Compare that to Man united : Maguire, AWB, Bruno, Lindelof, Cavani (early days for VdB) all are adding something to your team. You could argue that you overpaid for some of them, but it's night and day compared to our transfers.
I'd say that Arteta inherited a lot of this mess, but he added a few himself (Cedric, Mari, Luiz, Willian) and in my opinion he should take part of the blame for failing to make these players perform at a decent level.