Sky Sports pundit Paul Merson believes Arsenal should move quickly to snap up Chelsea boss Antonio Conte if Chelsea give him the sack at the end of the season.
“The day Conte leaves Chelsea, if I was Arsenal, I’d be straight on the phone,” Merson told The Debate.
“Managers like Conte don’t come along too often. Arsenal need someone that is going to go in there and upset people. Conte upsets people. He wants you to play a certain way and he’ll make you rock solid at the back. As soon as Arsenal get rock solid at the back, they’ll be a force.”
“I think Arsenal would say: ‘we’d have you next season’. I think they’d be mad if they didn’t. I think it ticks all the boxes. Arsenal can’t keep missing all these managers. You can’t tell me Pep Guardiola wouldn’t want to have managed Arsenal? If he had that opportunity, he’d have gone to Arsenal in my opinion.”
“Jurgen Klopp, Jose Mourinho, they all went to Arsenal’s rivals because Wenger was sat there in the manager’s seat instead of saying the time was right to leave. There are other top managers like Massimiliano Allegri at Juventus, but he might come in and it would take him a year to get used to the Premier League – like it did with Klopp.”
The pundit also believes that Wenger is soon approaching the end of his long era at the Emirates and maybe moving on come the end of the season.
These don’t seem like Arsene Wenger signings to me,” he added.
“When has he ever bought a 29-year-old for £60m with no sell-on clause? Never ever. Sir Alex Ferguson did it a few years ago. He said he needed to win the league and he got Robin van Persie to score him the goals to get above Manchester City. There was no sell-on, he got him to win the league, then he planned to retire. The Aubameyang signing says to me, ‘this is a top-four signing then see you later.'”
Although Conte won the title with an average Chelsea side last season, the Italian has been in the line of fire this season for not living up to the lofty standards he set last time around. The disappointing results in the last few weeks may well see Conte exit SW6.
As for Arsenal, there is no telling as to when Wenger would actually leave but replacing a man of Wenger’s magnitude would mean that the club would need to go through a thorough transition to overcome the hangover of the post-Wenger era. In such a delicate situation, a man like Conte would be the perfect man to lead the Gunners.
