Mikel Arteta claims he “knew” before the season started that his Arsenal squad wasn’t good enough and then tried to praise Arne Slot but insulted him instead.
Arsenal will finish the campaign potless for the fourth season on the bounce after they were dumped out of the Champions League by PSG this week having already ceded the Premier League title to Liverpool.
Arteta has come under fire for his comments about his side’s supposed superiority over PSG and some points nonsense to explain the Gunners’ misfortune at not winning the title in his time at the club.
And now the Arsenal boss has come up with another excuse for falling short, claiming he and his staff always “knew” the squad wasn’t good enough.
Ahead of their clash with Liverpool at Anfield on Sunday, Arteta said: “There are a lot of factors. We knew from the beginning of the season that our squad was super short.
“Being super short we had some players that had a high probability of getting injured, because that’s what they had in the last few seasons.
“So we knew that and we cannot do anything about it. But we will do everything that we can to improve the team and especially improve the players that we already have.
“That is not something we have just started to talk about now. If we were only having those meetings now we would be doing it very late.
“Whatever the market offers to give us a better chance to win for sure we will try to do it. Over the season there are many things you need to go your way.
“In the clinical moments, does the ball hit the post and come out, or go in? That’s the fine margins.
“What we have to try to do is to amplify the margins. The bigger the margins are, even if those things happen, then it will be very difficult for the opposition.
“We have to do it our way. We have to be authentic with ourselves and what we believe, what we can do and what we’ve been doing. That’s it.”
Arsenal have been hit significantly by injuries this term, while Arne Slot has had close to a fully fit squad to choose from at Liverpool for the majority of the campaign.
Arteta added: “That’s a big thing to win trophies, you know, and they did that extremely well.
“They managed to maintain that consistency, that level of players, a system, a coach, a stadium that has created again, and consistently, an incredible atmosphere for them.
“So you need a lot of ingredients or you don’t win the Premier League.
“That’s the difficulty of it, and it’s true that this season we never found that consistently because of the issues that we had.
“I don’t want to use it as an excuse.
Arteta then both praised and dug out Slot over his achievement with Liverpool this season, claiming he was “very intelligent” in doing “nothing new”.
He said: “What Arne did was very intelligent. He had all the platform – a team that has been competing and winning trophies throughout the last 10 years. So he had to do nothing new.
“He’s added his values, and he maintained a lot of the things. He’s obviously given his fingerprints to a lot of things that are very, very good as well.
“The most important thing is he got the best out of the players.
“And the players that have to make the difference, they were there constantly, making the difference for them. That’s capital to win any major trophy.
“But we want to have the sort of celebrations they are having now, big-time. Watching that will show that we have not won a competition we wanted to win.
“I really want it because that is what this club needs and has been so close to achieving.
“Now we need to make it happen. We have talked about it many times and will continue for sure with the same drive – or more – until we achieve it.”