Originally Posted by
I am invisible
I have a feeling Willian has been given more lassitude because Arteta and Edu own that one - they brought him to the club, and it’s now directly on Arteta to justify the signing and extract value from it. He’s been noticeably more ruthless with any player who wasn’t his signing when they haven’t measured up.
Thankfully his patience with Willian hasn’t been limitless - it’s gone on longer than it should have, but he’s now been relegated to cup games that we deem unimportant, and hopefully Ødegaard will bury him even further down the pecking order.
Also worth noting that just because he was wrong about Willian, doesn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t right about Saliba - a loan and regular first team football is clearly going to be better for his development at this age than sitting on the bench behind Holding and Luiz for the year. The big mistake there was not getting it arranged in the summer.