This.At the time I think Arteta just had too many fires to put out and had inherited so many problem players that he just couldn’t afford to keep devoting so much time to Guendouzi and his nonsense.
This issue of professionalism isn’t so much about whether players have a rush of blood to the head when they’re on the pitch - it’s about how they conduct themselves around their place of business. Who can be trusted to listen and get on with their jobs without needing constant supervision? And who is a constant distraction who takes way too much time and oxygen away from work you should be doing with the group? We all know the types - I’m sure we’ve all had them at our respective jobs.
If you were just talking about one or two of the latter type in an otherwise professional group then I think we may have been able to work with them, but as it was I think we had so many of them that there was no choice but to break them up and move them on. They’d formed a clique and were feeding off each other’s shitty attitudes, and unfortunately we didn’t get to Guendouzi in time before he’d been become too absorbed into it. In that respect I feel a little sorry for him because I think, if he’d come into this current Arsenal, where the culture and attitude is much improved, then we might have been better able to work with him.
(Incidentally I suspect this is an important secondary reason why we were keen to get Saliba away from the club - there were a couple of early warnings signs that he was gravitating towards that clique and I think think we wanted to keep him as far away from it as possible until it had been dismantled and the club was a better environment for him to be in.)