What are your expectations for a new manager?

Sports, as we all know, is a ruthlessly bottom-line business. You win, you stay. You lose, you go. Arsenal have been resistant to that in recent years, as they’ve won just enough and just often enough to stave off the change that other teams seem to go through every three or four years.

And in the most recent Arsenal down cycle, we, you, and a ton of other people all over the world have done a lot of talking about what a new coach would bring - not just in terms of the breath of fresh air, but in terms of performance. Would a new guy be a step backwards, a sort of lateral, tread-water move for a couple years, or would that new guy be the spark that hits the touchpaper and vaults Arsenal back into the top of the top, where a lot of people think Arsenal should rightly be?

While there is of course no way of knowing what will happen, that doesn’t stop me from wondering - what are your expectations of a new Arsenal manager? Or, as we put it in the wonderful world of being a business analyst, what are your success criteria?

For me, it’s simple - I have long thought that Arsenal might take a step backwards once a new guy came on board, and while the club has kinda taken the first of those backwards steps in the last couple seasons under Wenger, I still believe that to be a strong possibility. The squad is kind of a mess right now, aging, inconsistent, and in flux, and if the reports of only having £50 million to spend (exclusive of any player sales, which will disrupt the squad further) are true, there’s not a lot of cavalry on the way immediately to make things a whole lot better.

Building or rebuilding a club takes time; if a new manager were inheriting a strong squad that just needed one push to get going, that’d be one thing, but this is a time of unprecedented change at Arsenal, and with that comes a lot of uncertainty that one man can, or indeed should be expected to, make a massive, instantaneous difference.

But that’s just me. What are your expectations for a new manager? What will your reaction be if those expectations are not met? Take the poll below, or let us know in the comments - or both!