Ivan Gazidis has explained how impressed the Arsenal board were when interviewing Unai Emery, and noted that the former PSG manager knew so much about their young players.
He said that the knowledge was impressive, and pointed out one player in particular who the manager knew well and had ambitions to work with and improve.
“What was really impressive was when you scratched the surface to go deeper and deeper and deeper,” Standard Sport report he said. “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.
The fact Emery could go into such detail about players and ones who were in the youth set up was the crunch factor according to the Arsenal chief executive, who noted that there were many candidates for the job but Emery was by far the most impressive one.
“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.”