Football news - Mikel Arteta to Arsenal: Five things the new manager must address

Since Arsene Wenger left last summer, Unai Emery failed to address a number of major issues on and off the field, and it was losing the faith of the squad that finally saw him sacked.

Arteta, who was considered for the job when Emery was first appointed, will now go from working as Pep Guardiola's assistant at Manchester City to the manager at Arsenal, with a very different set of challenges before him.

At the end of both the Wenger and Emery eras, the same accusation was leveled at the Arsenal team: that they showed no fight on the pitch. Many of the Gunners faithful claim the players should be showing greater professionalism but in the end, it is the manager who pays with his job when players decide they don't believe in him any more.

The arrival of a new man with such a reputation, particularly at Arsenal, as Arteta should put an extra spring into the players' steps but in modern football, it is rarely as simple as that and the Spaniard will need to identify what gets the squad going, and quickly.

Emery came to Arsenal with a wealth of tactical knowledge and a proven ability to navigate his way through competitions, as shown by his three consecutive Europa League triumphs with Sevilla.

However, he had struggled to ignite Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League and with Arsenal, deployed so many different tactical systems that the side often looked as though they had no plan at all. When you combine that with a manager whose communication skills were said to be so poor that coach Freddie Ljungberg was often mentioned as the one who would end up trying to explain things to the squad.

Arteta will not have the same language barrier as Emery encountered having lived and worked in England for the last 15 years, but he will benefit from picking a system at the Emirates and sticking to it, at least early on.

Anyone with even a passing interest in football could have told you what Arsenal needed to do over the summer was strengthen defensively and create a reliable back four. Or three. Or four. Something.

The arrival of Bernd Leno the year before has proved a prudent one but to spend a club-record fee on a winger while then bringing in David Luiz, a man who regards defending as a chore he has to fulfill like a petulant teenager before rampaging into midfield to play spraying passes and over-commit to tackles.

Arteta will surely look at the current crop and decide that at one minute past midnight on January 1, he wants to get some dry ink on a contract with a centre-half he can rely on. They say Kalidou Koulibaly is finally on the move from Napoli - and what a statement that would be.

"What do you do with problem like Mesu-ut?" Okay, it doesn't quite scan properly but the Rodgers and Hammerstein, Sound of Music classic applies just as well to Mesut Ozil as it does to Maria von Trapp. Perhaps the Arsenal board should consult the Nonberg nuns before making a decision? (You're getting side-tracked here... Ed.)

But Arteta himself will have seen enough of Ozil - having spent time making plans for his downfall with Guardiola - to know what he thinks of the player. In all likelihood, Arteta has already made his mind up on the German midfielder, and his first few team-sheets will be very telling as to what he thinks.

Spare a thought for Freddie Ljungberg, one of the most exciting players in a very exciting Arsenal team. Since starting working for the club in 2013, he has been an ambassador, the under-15s coach, the under-23s coach, a first-team coach and then interim manager. And yet twice in the last week he has had to complain publicly about the fact that he essentially does not have a back-room staff and that the team is being run on a shoe-string.

The club have refused to bring in coaches to replace Emery's team because Ljungberg is not the permanent boss, so Arteta presumably will be given free rein. Unlike other managers, he will not come with a ready-made team - so it will be fascinating to see what names he pulls out from mid-2000s Premier League fame.