In terms of “sympathy” for Emery, I have what I’d consider a normal amount for someone who tried really hard at doing something but ultimately wasn’t good enough. You’d have to really dislike someone to have zero sympathy for them in such a scenario.

But I don’t find this a case where we should have significantly more sympathy. The level of scrutiny he’s faced has actually been quite low. The majority of Arsenal fans gave him over a year before really expressing concerns.

Simply not making us worse than we were at the end of the Wenger reign probably would’ve been enough for him to earn a reasonable amount of backing from the fanbase for a couple of years, but he couldn’t even do that, and boy were we at a low ebb at the end of Wenger.

On top of that he somewhat duped his way into the job in the first place. Supposedly wowing the board with his ambitious plans for how we would play and clear idea on how he would use each player. Quickly it became clear none of this would be the case.

For example, he clearly identified that he would use Ramsey as a number ten. Arsenal essentially didn’t sell Ramsey in the 2018 summer because of this, even though his contract was running out. Emery wanted him to be a key player, so the club backed him.

Only by about September, Emery worked out Ramsey wasn’t as effective when starting higher up. This is something most of Arsenal twitter could easily have told you. It resulted in Arsenal letting him go on a free after all, costing the club probably at least £30m.

That’s just one costly example of him badly identifying how to use his players, as evidenced by the constant tinkering in search of a solution. Then you get to his promise of us being protagonists with and without the ball under him.

That we weren’t perhaps wasn’t a surprising turn of events for those who’d followed his career, but it was still a failed promise. All in all he was very handsomely compensated for performing badly, failing to deliver on the promises of his job interview, and being fairly sacked.

I’m well aware money doesn’t absolve people from suffering from the effects of pressure. But as a football coach the money correlates with the scrutiny. If it’s not something you can handle, there are plenty of coaching jobs at lower levels.

If there’s one bit of genuine pity I have for him it’s that the luck we had early in his tenure, combined with a proportion of Arsenal fans and the media overstating the deficiencies of late era Wenger, made the inevitable fall for him bigger.

Hope he lands on his feet (I’m sure he will, I believe he’s still very well thought of in Spain) but can’t say I’ll miss him in any way. /thread