Arsenal have shown Ralf Rangnick the perfect Manchester United rebuild plan

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.

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