UK Edition
Henrikh Mkhitaryan will be better off under Arsene Wenger - but that might not be good news for Arsenal
Particularly since his return to the Premier League, it has been an increasingly prevalent aspect of Jose Mourinho's teams that No 10s submit to the greater good of the team.
Juan Mata has twice been the victim of this tactic: first at Chelsea where he lost out to Oscar for the role of defensive-minded attacker behind the striker; then at Manchester United, where he has been given more game time than at Chelsea but almost exclusively on the right side of midfield.
Henrikh Mkhitaryan has fallen foul this time, unable to convince Mourinho he is capable of fulfilling the No 10 role sufficiently well despite his obvious ability.
Arsene Wenger, meanwhile, stockpiles attacking midfielders as if there is a shortage, and tries to squeeze as many creative players as possible into his team.
Comments made last week by Artur Petrosyan, the Armenia manager, thus rang true.
“It is my impression that I think Henrikh had a problem with the coach [Mourinho], and, at Arsenal, it will be another thing and not the same situation. There will not be so much pressure on him defensively.
"Wenger likes them [Arsenal] to play better football. I think Wenger is better for Henrikh."
He is right. Attacking midfielders are given more freedom at Arsenal. They are asked to do less without the ball and are rarely discouraged from expressing themselves. Mourinho takes something away from his creative players.
Take Mata, for example. He was Chelsea's player of the season in each of the two seasons before Mourinho's return in 2013, as they won the FA Cup, Champions League and Europa League.
In open play in the Premier League, he created a chance every 36 and 39 minutes in 2011/12 and 2012/13, respectively. That went up to one every 46 minutes under Mourinho at Chelsea, and has increased further at Old Trafford to one every 50 minutes this season.
Mkhitaryan, meanwhile, created 2.2 chances per game from open play in his final season at Borussia Dortmund - by a distance the most in the entire Bundesliga. At United, that dropped to 1.2 per league appearance.
Since Mourinho moved to Manchester in the same summer as Mkhitaryan, United's best player for laying on chances in open play has been Paul Pogba, with one every 45 minutes, ranking as the Premier League's 14th best player in this regard. In the same time, Arsenal had two players in the top four, in Mesut Ozil and Alexis Sanchez.
Given a decent run in the team, you would expect Mkhitaryan to rediscover something close to his creative best under Wenger, which we saw all too rarely at United.
But there is another side to all of this. Over the past decade, Mourinho has been the most difficult to beat, with teams so drilled, so stubbornly compact and often infuriatingly defensive that nobody can break through. Creativity might suffer, but his teams are rarely beaten and are simply never torn apart.
Wenger, on the other hand, might allow his attackers to roam free, swap positions and lose their shape, and on an individual level the attacking players will invariably enjoy doing so. But Arsenal are picked apart more often than any of the 'big six' sides. That is a huge part of why so many fans have lost faith in their manager.
Mourinho is so often derided for 'killing' matches with tactics deemed over-defensive, but he has been vastly more successful than Wenger in the last 13 years. Arsenal have not won a Premier League title since he came to England. Mourinho has won three in that time, and spent five seasons managing in Italy and Spain. Even last season, when Wenger finished a season above Mourinho for the first time, the Portuguese manager won two trophies to Wenger's one.
Petrosyan spoke for a whole group of disgruntled attacking midfielders who have had to sacrifice themselves for the common good under Mourinho and, individually, Mkhitaryan will feel the benefit of more freedom under Wenger.
But Wenger's tactics have been exposed as naive too many times already. Whether Mkhitaryan having more fun on the pitch brings success is another issue entirely.