Many fans baulked at the idea a club of Arsenal's stature would hand the reins to a man with no prior managerial experience back in December of 2019.
Eight months later, when Mikel Arteta was holding aloft the FA Cup to mark a first major honour won as a boss in his first half-season at the helm - Gunners fans thought the good times would never stop. What followed the next season was some of the worst form the club has seen since the 1950's.
To say Arteta's tenure has been turbulent would be an understatement, but at long last - two and a half years in, there finally appears to be some calmness. "What is more important - the journey or the destination?," Arteta can be heard pondering in the latest trailer of the club's upcoming Amazon 'All or Nothing' series.
The Spaniard's answer is eye-opening: "Do you know what we really have to care about? The company." After quite the cull of the squad he inherited, Arteta finally has a better grip of the kind of company he keeps at Arsenal.
The likes of Mesut Ozil, Shkodran Mustafi and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang have all been shown the exit door once the Gunners boss thought their standards had started to slip.
In their place, Arteta has been overseeing the club's transfer dealings and making additions that haven't always been the most popular - but are proving to work exactly as planned. At the beginning of his time as boss, Arsenal seemed to boast some potentially unhealthy relationships with notorious 'super-agents' that led to some disappointing signings.
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However, last summer seemed to be a turning point and Arteta really took hold of the players arriving. Goalkeeper Aaron Ramsale was hardly welcomed unanimously among the Arsenal faithful, yet a season in he is adored by the fanbase and is pushing Jordan Pickford for the England number one shirt.
Takehiro Tomiyasu was another unknown when Arsenal forked out £17million to pry him away from Serie A side Bologna on deadline day last year. Bar the sporadic spells on the sidelines with injury, many would regard the Japan international as Arteta's shrewdest purchase to date.
Tomiyasu's willingness to put the team's needs before anything else is a marked difference from some of the attitudes that have plagued the Arsenal dressing room in the all too recent past.
That selflessness became clear from the right-back's first interview with the club, where he admitted: "If the coach told me you have to play as a striker, I'll play as a striker."
Just under a year later, Arsenal have added someone with the exact same work-ethic and team-centric attitude on the opposite flank in Oleksandr Zinchenko. The Ukraine international cost the Gunners £30m from Manchester City and is thought to have been high on Arteta's transfer wish-list coming into the window.
Following confirmation of his switch, the 25-year-old echoed Tomiyasu's sentiments by explaining: "If the manager tells me one day I need to be a goalkeeper, I will be there."
This is very much Arteta's Arsenal, any potential dressing room attitude problem seems to have been weeded out and replaced with an intense willingness to work and follow instruction.
The Gunners boss can rejoice in the fact that as he bids to oversee a long-awaited return to the top four, he will do so with a squad of players he fully believes in, given he has signed the majority of them.
However, with that comes pressure - failing with the likes of Sokratis, Mustafi and Ozil was one thing, fail with players Arteta has actively sought out himself and he could be staring the down the barrel of an Arsenal exit himself.
