Jose Mourinho Says He'd Sign Every Arsenal Player in Implied Arsene Wenger 'Dig'

Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho couldn’t resist a final jibe at Arsenal boss Arsene Wenger in the wake of the two teams’ meeting at Stamford Bridge on Saturday, insisting he’d sign all of the Gunners players if possible and they should be challenging for the Premier League title.

Mourinho’s side churned out a 2-0 win over Arsenal on the day in controversial circumstances and as reported by Neil Ashton of the Daily Mail, before finishing his post-match media commitments, the Blues chief took a “pointed dig” at Wenger:

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I think Arsenal have the squad to be champions—and every season I feel that.

I don’t know why they can’t win it, but that’s my feeling—I like every player. If one of their players is a free agent and Arsenal don’t want him there, I would take every one. I like all of their players.

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Chelsea’s win over the Gunners came in controversial circumstances, with the visitors having two players sent off in Gabriel Paulista and Santi Cazorla.

It was the kind of vital clash Arsenal have struggled to get results from in recent years and as such, they’ve been hampered in pursuit of English football’s top prize.

Indeed, as noted by Ashton’s piece, Wenger chose to lay the blame at the feet of the referee and Diego Costa—who was on the wind-up throughout the game—in the aftermath of the match rather than focus on the flaws of his own side. Football writer Henry Winter thinks the Gunners should be looking at their own issues:

As Mourinho says, the talent is there to win the Premier League. At their best Arsenal are a tremendous side with elegant and effective footballers. The likes of Alexis Sanchez, Mesut Ozil, Laurent Koscielny and Petr Cech are players who would be pushing to make it into the starting line-ups of any side in the division, too.

Still, the squad is clearly flawed. Mentally, they seem to crumble against the top opposition and tactically, the XI is a mess against cohesive, physical sides. Especially, as ESPN FC’s Miguel Delaney notes here, when coming up against Mourinho’s Chelsea team:

The aforementioned quality players also need to be supplemented with quality recruitment. Since Arsenal last won the Premier League in 2004, that’s not happened and it’s an issue which came to a head this summer, with the Gunners failing to sign any outfield players to bolster the squad.

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But as Sky Sports MNF noted earlier in the season, the problems with player acquisition seem to be a long-standing trend under Wenger:

Mourinho may have been twisting the knife here, but there’s no denying there is some truth to the claims he’s making. Arsenal have plenty in place to mount a title charge of real clout, but when it comes to the crunch, these players and this manager don’t seem to have the intangible factors needed to surge to the Premier League summit.

The manager, ultimately, must take the brunt of the blame for that. A team is a reflection of its coach after all, and while Wenger has been a hugely positive influence in north London, if he continues to focus on external rather than internal factors when assessing poor, naive performances like this one, the club’s wait for a league title will go on for a while yet.