Back from holidays : Plates : Fixtures : Coaches

Hello again!

I’m back from Barcelona, and I had a very nice time in a city I love a lot. The first thing to do is thank Andrew, Lewis, and Tim, for keeping the blog going in my absence. I always enjoy reading it when I’m away, and the main thing I’ve gleaned from those blogs is that very, very little has happened. Fair play to the lads for making such entertaining reading from so little.

I’m fortunate in that I didn’t allow myself to get too worried about that. First, because I wasn’t going to spend my holiday freaking out about the same transfer rumours, repackaged and rehashed with slightly different language by the usual suspects whose presences online demand that kind of thing. Also, because I still think it’s really, really early in the summer and I am strongly of the opinion that it’s what we do that matters, not anyone else. Particularly any club involved in the pathetic travesty that is the Club World Cup, with its miserable attendances and games nobody cares about.

Like everyone else, I want us to do good business and there’s a point where that anxiety will bubble over into a ‘Ok, but when?!’ kind of vibe for me, but I’m really not there yet at all. From the outside, it seems as if Arsenal are spinning some plates, and happy enough for those plates to be seen publicly, but it also feels as if they are keeping a lid a lot of things that are not part of the relentless content churn from Johnny Here-We-Go and his cohorts.

It wouldn’t surprise me at all if we ended up signing a plate or two which haven’t been spun that much at all. Not literal plates, you know what I mean. Anyway, there is still so much time to get things done. The season doesn’t kick off for 2 more months, as Lewis pointed out, and I remain pretty relaxed about what we’re going to do and, crucially, our ability to do it.

Speaking of the new season, the Premier League fixtures are being officially released at 9am this morning. I’ve seen some leaks, as is always the case, but we now live in a world where it’s increasingly difficult to parse what’s real from what is not. If what I’ve seen is real though, we have a very tough start, but let’s see. I don’t want to deal in disinformation, so we’ll wait for actual information. The news will be over on Arseblog News as and when it happens, and we can discuss those fixtures in tomorrow’s blog and how the schedule is set up for us to go and win the Premier League in 2026.

And while we consider changes to the playing squad, it appears as if Mikel Arteta is going to have to deal with a change to his coaching staff as Carlos Cuesta is being linked with a move to Serie A to take over at Parma. It’s certainly an interesting move for a 29 year old coach, and one that I’m sure is hard for him to turn down. When you get into the coaching game at such an early age, chances are your ambition is to be a manager/head-coach at some point, and he’s unquestionably learned plenty and developed during his time at Arsenal.

Originally he was more of a specialist in individual performance coaching, as we saw in the Amazon documentary, but when Steve Round departed in the summer of 2023, he was promoted to assistant head coach. He was on the radar of Norwich last year, and his stock has continued to rise as part of an Arsenal set-up that did reach the Champions League semi-final last season. So, it looks as if this is a big opportunity for him, and Arteta is on record as saying he wouldn’t stand in the way of his coaching staff if they had offers of this sort.

If it goes through, good luck to him and it’ll be fascinating to see how he gets on, and what – if anything – he takes from his time at Arsenal for his career going forward. It also likely requires some kind of replacement, and that too will be interesting. Will Arteta look to give youth and potential another chance, or perhaps someone a little more experienced as he seeks to go again next season and make that final push from second to first? We’ve regularly had questions for the Arsecast Extra about whether changes to the coaching staff were necessary to continue improving. I don’t think that’s absolutely the case, but in these circumstances it looks as if we have to find out.

Speaking of which, we’ll have a podcast for you a bit later on this afternoon. So, keep an eye out for the call for questions on BlueSky @gunnerblog.bsky.social and @arseblog.com with the hashtag #arsecastextra – or if you’re an Arseblog Member on Patreon, leave your question in the #arsecast-extra-questions channel on our Discord server.

Pod should be out late afternoon.

So, how are you all doing?!