Plenty were laughing at Arsenal at the start of this season when, after three games and three losses, they were rock bottom of the Premier League. Some talked of possible relegation, plenty chuckled at the notion of the Amazon Prime documentary cameras capturing this most farcical of seasons.
It was a pretty bold move, then, by Gunners boss Mikel Arteta to jettison his captain and senior striker Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang after a few weeks more of the campaign had passed by. But perhaps it was a lesson in rebuilding that Manchester United could take note of.
Arsenal had already sanctioned the exits of Saed Kolasinac, Calum Chambers and Willian for free before Arteta allowed Aubameyang to seal a Barcelona move for nothing in January. In previous windows, the Gunners had let the likes of Mesut Ozil, Shkodran Mustafi and Henrikh Mkhitaryan all go for basically no money, with Arteta keen to oversee a proper reset in north London.
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United thought they had completed a rebuild of their own, the 'cultural reset' that Ole Gunnar Solskjaer oversaw between 2019 and 2021. And while the Norwegian made plenty of brave calls of his own in that time — selling Romelu Lukaku, tearing up Alexis Sanchez's contract, for example — the club was too cautious and there was no mass exodus.
Still in the United first team are Phil Jones, Juan Mata, Jesse Lingard, Paul Pogba, Eric Bailly and Nemanja Matic, all either relics of a previous era or players who would rather move on. Still on the club's books are Tahith Chong, Donny van de Beek, Anthony Martial and Axel Tuanzebe — who should all arguably be sold permanently.
You can be sure Arsenal wouldn't have held onto them for this long. While Arteta's reign has been far from perfect, he's recently settled on a small core of 14 or 15 first team players he trusts and who are mostly young and brimming with potential.
The Gunners swept Leicester aside 2-0 on Sunday afternoon with all the confidence of a team that has now won five successive league games. They are big favourites to pip United to the top four, despite that 3-2 win at Old Trafford over Tottenham on Saturday.
Players like Bukayo Saka (20), Martin Odegaard (23) and Kieran Tierney (24) are being allowed to mould the Arsenal team in their own image. Others like Aaron Ramsdale (23), Ben White (24) and Emile Smith Rowe (21) are being backed by the manager when some doubted their ability to shine at the elite level.
Compare that to United, who are reliant on a 37-year-old master goal poacher and the talents of erratic individualists like Paul Pogba and Bruno Fernandes. Arsenal are a team, United are still a bunch of individuals.
Ralf Rangnick has displayed a refreshing brand of honesty when talking about United's need to rebuild and whether some players might leave. He doesn't mind if the club lose Pogba and Lingard, Edinson Cavani, nor even academy stalwart Marcus Rashford. He knows the importance of squad building and making the right decisions in the transfer market.
But he needs to go one step further and persuade the United hierarchy to actually take the risk and reset their squad. Arsenal have leapfrogged United this season because they've been willing to take that risk and it's now paying off.
Rangnick must go where Solskjaer, ultimately, couldn't go.
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