Arsenal Chief Executive, Ivan Gazidis, has lifted the lid on the one impressive aspect of new manager, Unai Emery’s interview that helped Spanish gaffer get the job.
The North London outfit announced Emery as Arsene Wenger’s successor on Wednesday and the former Sevilla coach signed a four-year contract.
The decision to appoint the former Paris Saint-Germain manager was supposedly a unanimous one. While Emery faces a number of challenges, including a limited transfer budget of around £50 million, his pedigree is unquestioned.
And Gazidis said the Spaniard’s forensic details about the squad during his interview won the board over.
Gazidis told reporters, “What was really impressive was when you scratched the surface to go deeper and deeper and deeper.
“If we were speaking about one of our young players, if we targeted Ainsley Maitland-Niles for example, Unai knows Ainsley.
“He’s watched him, he’s familiar with his patterns of play, his capabilities, he’s very excited about his potential and was able to talk about how excited he was to work with Ainsley, to develop him as a player.
“Very specifically, when you asked the follow-up question and the follow-up question and the follow-up question, you’d get more and more depth about how exactly he would do that, exactly how him and his team would work with an individual player to develop them into the best player they can possibly be and also within the team dynamic.
“There are a lot of platitudes in the game of football, a lot, and people can speak at a surface level very easily to sound confident and impressive.
“What’s impressive to me is when you scratch through that and you get deeply involved in what exactly they mean.”