Merci Arsène

[Makingtrax]

Was a really good article, his Biography came out today and ive got it ordered. Always wanted to see what he was really thinking when AFTV was hounding him out to get some Youtube views and sell some bs merchandise. Plus what it was like trying to get Merson/Adams to not drink the night before a game.

Arsène is a legend, who has one of the best skills possible... Common sense.

That whole BBC article makes complete sense. Even the Throw In discussion. Weirdly something that really annoys me with Arsenal, we seem really crap at them... so slow, and nobody makes space. I know its an odd thing, but the more I notice it the more it annoys me.

This. He believed his later years were better than his earlier years and I totally agree. 2005 to 2015 were incredible years, when he was not only fighting the wealth of United, but now the oil money of Chelsea and City with so much less money, yet he still achieved top 4 every year. It was absolutely remarkable stuff.

Since the Premiership was founded in 92' the 28 titles are United 13, Chelsea 5, City 4, Arsenal 3, Liverpool 1, Leicester 1, Blackburn Rovers 1.

Throw in 7 FA Cups and Arsenal are very much the outliers here, United, City and Chelsea outspending them by over a factor of 10, other clubs stunned out of existence. That was down to Wenger.

The ravings of AFTV and all the idiots they sucked in simply ruined the last two years of a footballing genius.

 

[HairSprayGooners]

Mod edit : ****e posting

 

[Makingtrax]

Gotta love @Makingtrax Arsène loving. Guy would probably lick Arsène's boots if he stepped in dog **** and burnt this club to the ground.

Some people just hate reading the truth and have to disparage the messenger else look an idiot for following the herd.

 

[UpTheGunnerz]

 

[progman07]

I miss the Arsène Wenger who was riding down from the Austrian hotel at Bad Waltersdorf with a ****ing bike, giving us high fives when arriving to the summer camp trainings. Completely calm and cheerful, transfer windows were different around 2006-2009. No 'WENGA', SIGN RONALDINHO PLEASE' chants around the stands, no twitter hatred towards our players. No intercontinental tours to gather a few million pounds.

However I feel this Wenger is full of bitterness, regarding his last few years. He definitely should have left earlier, maybe even go for the France NT after 2016. Could have even won the World Cup to end his career with. But he seems to forget he declined significantly in his last years, and it's a bit awkward that he hasn't once openly accepted it.

 

[kash2]

I miss the Arsène Wenger who was riding down from the Austrian hotel at Bad Waltersdorf with a ****ing bike, giving us high fives when arriving to the summer camp trainings. Completely calm and cheerful, transfer windows were different around 2006-2009. No 'WENGA', SIGN RONALDINHO PLEASE' chants around the stands, no twitter hatred towards our players. No intercontinental tours to gather a few million pounds.

However I feel this Wenger is full of bitterness, regarding his last few years. He definitely should have left earlier, maybe even go for the France NT after 2016. Could have even won the World Cup to end his career with. But he seems to forget he declined significantly in his last years, and it's a bit awkward that he hasn't once openly accepted it.

every career will be uneven..can not be like a machine. 20 yrs of CL is something unbelievable. Arsène didnt decline. The board and the fanbase did become remarkably crap.

 

[Batman]

every career will be uneven..can not be like a machine. 20 yrs of CL is something unbelievable. Arsène didnt decline. The board and the fanbase did become remarkably crap.

He absolutely did decline. Refused to evolve with the game. That's just fact. That doesn't mean that the board didn't let him down or that some fans weren't overly nasty but this idea that he was the same guy that was eating Fergie's lunch when he arrived at the end here is fantasy. His instincts were worse, his tactics were stale and his pride was getting in the way of what should have been a sooner and neater divorce.

 

[Kav]

He absolutely did decline. Refused to evolve with the game. That's just fact. That doesn't mean that the board didn't let him down or that some fans weren't overly nasty but this idea that he was the same guy that was eating Fergie's lunch when he arrived at the end here is fantasy. His instincts were worse, his tactics were stale and his pride was getting in the way of what should have been a sooner and neater divorce.

Perspective is important. I don’t think Wenger declines. His methods and ability stayed the same. If anything his capacity to compete with bigger spending clubs has been well established, we literally spent significantly less than our rivals between 2007-2012 by which time our squad was filled with good but not great players. The few bright players we had were continually sold (Fabregas, Nasri, Van Persie, Song) or injured for freakishly long periods (Eduardo, Diaby, Rosicky, Ramsey, Wilshere,). Al of which impacted significantly on our performances and form through different seasons.

When he finally got some money to spend (2013 - 2014) he was still many pieces short of the full puzzle. He did well.

I think his biggest mistake was trusting the players we had but what option did he have when the club made it clear that we were operating under significant financial constraints. When Man U was spending 80 mil the most we could spend was 35 mil. When we landed lacazette for 56 Mil it was in the context of other strikers going for 100mil or more. We were literally operating in the A different market from the rich clubs.

The sole reason people were angry or thought he declined was because his teams started suffering some significant losses like the 8-2 and some 5-1 and other high scoring losses. Then the idiots over at AFTV came out talking nonsense. We now see them for what they are, (self centered idiots). The average fan started to voice their discontent at Wenger and seeing him as the cause of the problem when in fact he was the beam that was keeping everything the way it was.

We have seen the decline of Arsenal since he left so there should be no doubt about his quality. Yes he was stubborn but he was. Also very good at what he did. Both can be true.

 

[Makingtrax]

every career will be uneven..can not be like a machine. 20 yrs of CL is something unbelievable. Arsène didnt decline. The board and the fanbase did become remarkably crap.

Yeah, all these posts about Arsène declining are still being posted out of guilt. We all know he was 2nd when his bored fan base became unbelievably angry and set out to remove him.

Then he buckled under the pressure, so they said, 'See, we told you he was declining'.

It was totally beyond my understanding how even posts on Arsenal Mania were ridiculously aggressive and full of spite towards the man. Somehow he survived those last two years without a breakdown, dropping out out of the top 4, was the least of his worries.

 

[kash2]

He absolutely did decline. Refused to evolve with the game. That's just fact. That doesn't mean that the board didn't let him down or that some fans weren't overly nasty but this idea that he was the same guy that was eating Fergie's lunch when he arrived at the end here is fantasy. His instincts were worse, his tactics were stale and his pride was getting in the way of what should have been a sooner and neater divorce.

he was still eating Man U s lunch. However dirty money, dirty referees and dirty fans had muddied the waters. A dip is not a decline. He lost out by one point and won the FA cup in the year before resigning. He of course may have peaked in his forties but thats a normal thing. Subsequent years have proved that he was over achieving.

 

[kash2]

Yeah, all these posts about Arsène declining are still being posted out of guilt. We all know he was 2nd when his bored fan base became unbelievably angry and set out to remove him.

Then he buckled under the pressure, so they said, 'See, we told you he was declining'.

It was totally beyond my understanding how even posts on Arsenal Mania were ridiculously aggressive and full of spite towards the man. Somehow he survived those last two years without a breakdown, dropping out out of the top 4, was the least of his worries.

there is nothing the hyenas hate more than an upright man

 

[Makingtrax]

there is nothing the hyenas hate more than an upright man

After 2004 the board investment in the team was really quite low, the most it reached was 5th. And by that metric Arsène overacheived every single year up to 2015/16. And of course the board knew it.

I used to post that on here regularly and it drew poison like squeezing an abssess. And at the end of 2015/16 I showed the info for us having the equal best defensive stats in the league including the most clean sheets and some posters became apoplectic. I never understood the source of the hate.

 

[Trilly]

Eurgh.

 

[HairSprayGooners]

Honestly baffles me how people are acceptant of these things towards the end of Arsène's career -

• Losing the league to bloody Leicester City on a dire point total. An incredible opportunity to go and win the league, but shock we failed miserably.
• Over a span of 4 years with Özil kicking things off we spent a lot of money under Arsène. £400M on footballers to be precise, £100M a year and that's when we started going backwards. Not sure how @Makingtrax can make the whole squad cost argument when Arsène was getting top 4 with squads that cost a lot less money and having not spent much money in general. Yet when he starts spending money we start falling? Work that out.
• We haven't won at Old Trafford in the league since 2006. Despite them being god awful for a few years now. Arteta has already beaten them at the Emirates and plays United in a few weeks, lets see if that can be changed. But its a shocking statistic to be honest.
• We have won at Stamford Bridge twice since 2005 in the league. Recently Arteta went there and managed a 2-2 draw with 10 men ffs.
• We haven't won at Anfield in the league since 2012, 8 years. 6 managed by Arsène, another shocking stat towards the end of his Arsenal career.
• Not only did he become completely inept in the big away games, but he regularly got battered whereas before he wasn't getting beaten 6-0/5-1 regularly. We'd receive the odd pasting, but this became a regular occurrence in big games. Yet a young manager who hasn't been in management for 5 minutes comes in and we are instantly hard to beat in the same games? Wow.

I'm not discrediting what he did before his final 5 years. He was immense for us, CL football with a pretty woeful squad and spend year after year. But after the summer where we signed Alexis and the season where we won that FA cup against Villa he should have gone. Xhaka/Mustafi summer was just the start of a horrific downward spiral.

Anyway, not surprised when I clicked on this thread that @Makingtrax was making pro Wenger comments. Not sure the thread should be for that to be honest, but nevertheless its pure gibberish.

 

[Makingtrax]

Honestly baffles me how people are acceptant of these things towards the end of Arsène's career -

• Losing the league to bloody Leicester City on a dire point total. An incredible opportunity to go and win the league, but shock we failed miserably.
• Over a span of 4 years with Özil kicking things off we spent a lot of money under Arsène. £400M on footballers to be precise, £100M a year and that's when we started going backwards. Not sure how @Makingtrax can make the whole squad cost argument when Arsène was getting top 4 with squads that cost a lot less money and having not spent much money in general. Yet when he starts spending money we start falling? Work that out.
• We haven't won at Old Trafford in the league since 2006. Despite them being god awful for a few years now. Arteta has already beaten them at the Emirates and plays United in a few weeks, lets see if that can be changed. But its a shocking statistic to be honest.
• We have won at Stamford Bridge twice since 2005 in the league. Recently Arteta went there and managed a 2-2 draw with 10 men ffs.
• We haven't won at Anfield in the league since 2012, 8 years. 6 managed by Arsène, another shocking stat towards the end of his Arsenal career.
• Not only did he become completely inept in the big away games, but he regularly got battered whereas before he wasn't getting beaten 6-0/5-1 regularly. We'd receive the odd pasting, but this became a regular occurrence in big games. Yet a young manager who hasn't been in management for 5 minutes comes in and we are instantly hard to beat in the same games? Wow.

I'm not discrediting what he did before his final 5 years. He was immense for us, CL football with a pretty woeful squad and spend year after year. But after the summer where we signed Alexis and the season where we won that FA cup against Villa he should have gone. Xhaka/Mustafi summer was just the start of a horrific downward spiral.

Anyway, not surprised when I clicked on this thread that @Makingtrax was making pro Wenger comments. Not sure the thread should be for that to be honest, but nevertheless its pure gibberish.

Selective nonsense from start to finish. Lets just take one of your points . . Chelsea 2005

Arsenal played Chelsea 28 times before Abramovic came, and only lost 2 of them.

In the 10 years after Abramovic injected £1.2 bn into players, outspending Arsenal by over a factor of 10, we played Chelsea 28 times up to 2015 and lost 16 of them.

And that shows Wengers decline and Mourinho had his number etc etc. Utter boll*cks. That just shows you have absolutely no understanding of how football works. And I'll remind you that Wenger still got top 4 every year. We weren't 8th.

 

[Batman]

he was still eating Man U s lunch. However dirty money, dirty referees and dirty fans had muddied the waters. A dip is not a decline. He lost out by one point and won the FA cup in the year before resigning. He of course may have peaked in his forties but thats a normal thing. Subsequent years have proved that he was over achieving.

We lost 8-2 to them. Stop it.

 

[GDeep™]

Mod Edit: calm down

 

[kash2]

We lost 8-2 to them. Stop it.

we finished above them in each of his so called declining seasons.. go look it up

 

[NieThePiet]

I want to cry.

 

[Macho]

https://theathletic.co.uk/2208854/2020/11/24/wenger-god-arsenal-invincibles/

Spoiler: Arsène the aesthete: ‘I will ask God, where is football – in hell or heaven?’

Amy Lawrence

Close friends of Arsène Wenger always worried about how this most singularly dedicated man of football would manage without management. So deep an obsession, so gripping an addiction. How could he cope with its absence?

The way he has flourished surprises even him. Freedom from football’s insatiable demands, it turns out, isn’t so bad. Time to be social, to read, to share ideas, to travel at a different pace, to engage in different kinds of conversations with different kinds of people about different kinds of subjects. But when it boils down to it, he remains utterly devoted to football. It still occupies most of his thoughts. So that is why, when he imagines a conversation with God when his time is up, his first question concerns the whereabouts of the nearest pitch. Does he envisage football in heaven? “I hope so,” he replies, in that familiar tone which occupies the exact mid-point between earnestness and deadpan. “I will ask God, where is football — in hell or in heaven? If it’s in hell I’ll say ‘Let me go down there’.”

These are the kind of jokes he really enjoys telling. He looks like he is heading somewhere profound only to drop his shoulder, sharp turn and go for the punchline. Humour is one of the handful of things about his book, My Life in Red and White, which he chose not to show too much of. He wrote the book he was comfortable with.

Some critics have suggested the raft of interviews on his book tour have offered more layers beneath and beyond than the book itself. Perhaps that is because Wenger is such an interesting and interested communicator. One of his players once said he could have a chat about something as mundane as the best type of duvet to buy and it would be fantastic and make you think. Maybe the human interaction prompts him and challenges him in a way that personal introspection does not.

Mid-chat, Wenger takes a moment to consider, slightly more seriously, the concept of football in heaven. Here is a chance to redesign the game in its most perfect state. If he were given carte blanche to reset, keeping all the best bits and obliterating all the aspects that frustrate or disappoint him, what would football look like?

“The dream is that everybody has exceptional skill,” he muses. “The ball has to be the friend of everybody. No matter where it comes from it has to be welcomed. So once everybody has that mastery of the technical level then you can express your qualities. At the moment we are far from that, believe me. I watch the Premier League and it has become more physical, not more technical.”

He has a clear idea of what belongs in an imagined football inferno as well. “All that is not on the pitch,” he says. “During my stay at Arsenal the time dedicated on the pitch shrunk and the time dedicated to convince people you are not bad augmented. At the end I felt the time I had to spend with media was detrimental to the quality of my work. I had not enough time to prepare mentally for the training session. You spent more time being persuasive than dedicating to the quality of your work. I would get rid of all that. Let me work on the pitch and leave me alone for the rest. Football is beautiful when you are on the grass with the ball. Basically, that’s where I was happy.”

As one of those responsible for eating away at his quality time, his happy time, I feel the compulsion to apologise. Sorry, Arsène!

He raises a conciliatory hand. “It’s a price to pay because you take the rewards,” he continues. “The evolution of the game has become (such that) the human side has disappeared a little bit and it is more about the economical side, the media side. Overall it has gone a bit from who you are to who you pretend to be or how you project yourself. But if you ask me I like to be on the football pitch.”

His dream football reflects the classic Wengerian principle that underpinned his teams in good times and bad. Even if he had any internal dialogue about the direction of the squads he created and managed, the inner aesthete won almost every debate. Apart from the 2005 FA Cup final — maybe the one match in 22 years that he was conspicuously pragmatic in picking a conservative team to do a specific job to win a tricky one-off contest — he always trusted in, and was in thrall to, pure skill.

He is one of the last great aesthetes of football management, someone prepared to die on the sword of beautiful football. That was fine when he had outstanding players who relished a fight while they were at it, but became much more complicated when his teams did not contain the same balance of grit and guile.

“Arsenal don’t like it up em… go in hard… leave a bit extra… hit them where it hurts.” Wenger revisits a concept he came up against, particularly when his group lost a bit of the competitive and physical edge he inherited with the iconic back four of Tony Adams and Co and sustained for a while with the sides led by Patrick Vieira and Sol Campbell. Does he think people had it in for Arsenal? “Of course,” he says. “Yes, it did drive me mad. I thought it was completely unfair. When a guy of 28 kicks a boy of 18, first you think that’s not right. But on top of that people say, ‘You don’t fancy it?’ ‘That’s right I don’t fancy it’. It still stings. Now aged 71, distanced from the everyday compulsion to win football matches, there is still some lingering fighting talk, some sense of the primal need to make a stand and defend the idea of football as art that should be protected.

“Some people were encouraged by the media,” he points out, reflecting on the stereotypical leading elbow or late clatter that was invariably relished by the opposition and often applauded as part of the game. “Today I see people sent off and before it was not even a yellow, not even a free kick — ‘Well done, my friend’.” It feels like he is back there wincing at the pumped-up cheering that greeted a silky player being taken out. “That is one of the things that VAR brings. When you look live at it you don’t always see the guy who stands on a player’s feet. You see it in slow motion. Today that is punished.”

His mind drifts back to the players he had whose careers were ravaged by bad tackles or serious injuries. Three of them, Jack Wilshere, Abou Diaby and Aaron Ramsey, were young when they first suffered major damage. Wenger ponders whether he should have played them less in their youth, maybe avoided exposing their talent so much in the Arsenal-don’t-like-it-up-em era. He still questions his own decisions.

The stylistic change that Wenger’s Arsenal went through is fascinating. They moved from older, experienced, brilliant players capable of winning titles, cups and completing a historic undefeated league campaign to the smaller, younger, technical, Barcelona-lite generation. The build of the team changed quite radically.

It also coincided with the period of burnout that Wenger experienced around the time of the upheaval of the stadium move he was such a big part of. The strain must have been extraordinary. Wenger knew exactly how it felt to send a team of charismatic giants onto the pitch and then he tried to create something more delicate, less robust, based around the Cesc Fabregas, Samir Nasri, Alexander Hleb, Tomas Rosicky collection of nimble playmakers. Why?

“If you look at my career at Arsenal you can have basically three periods,” he explains. “When I arrived I basically inherited a monocultural team of mostly 30-year-old players. This was the time when Arsenal players played for Arsenal their whole career. They were good players and they were ready to fight for the club because it was their life. Then we moved slowly to a multicultural team where the influence of the former players was strong but we added Vieira, Petit, Overmars as the first guys who came in. This was a good mixture. Then it became more and more of a foreign influence. In 2006 we moved into the new stadium at the Emirates. I talk about this period in the book. My regret is we could have crowned it with a Champions League win. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen. I will never digest that we had to play with 10 men against Barcelona.

“Once we moved into the stadium that limited resources. At the same time we had Chelsea and Manchester City coming in with huge finances and they bought our players. At first we had players who never moved. Then we had players who moved after eight or nine years like Henry and Vieira. I replaced them with younger players because I thought it was the only way I could compensate. It was not deliberate to buy players who were less strong. It was just the good players we found like Fabregas were smaller and less physical.”

Wenger considers how the game has continued to shift away even more towards high stamina competition. “The trend, because the game in the last 10 years has become more physical, is that creative players have been kicked out,” he says. “More compact teams give less room to express your talent. So that means the physical approach has been more dominant. We have an example of a creative player being kicked out of the game at Arsenal…” There is a very pregnant pause in the room filled with a fleeting apparition of Mesut Özil.

Wenger’s memoir tells a specific version of his story. It is more of a book of ideas, lessons and impressions than a tell-all page-turner. Some critics were left craving more detail but it was never his intention to give too much away.

“I was never happy with what I wrote,” he says. “I was not too much concerned by the way I wrote it but more what I felt was important to share. I had two targets: first to explain to people that no matter what your childhood is life can be bigger than your dream. The second thing is to share a bit of what I have learned from human beings after working with them at the top level.”

Did he wrestle with what to put in and what to leave out? “Of course. I could have created many controversial stories which would have interested people but I didn’t want to go into that at all. I just wanted to make a book that was optimistic and reflects who I was in my life. Optimism always took over. The job of a manager is basically a guy who believes in human beings, because you put your destiny in the hands of other people and say, ‘You can do that for me’. If you are a control freak don’t do this job. You don’t have complete control of your destiny. You will be very negative with people.”

In that case, how is it possible for a manager to stop themselves from being disappointed or frustrated with people who inevitably won’t or can’t always do what is asked of them, and can fall short of what is expected of them? Wenger laughs. “You are always frustrated or angry with somebody. But on the other hand, some people surprise you positively as well. They go much higher up than you thought they would, play much better than you thought they would. We always take the credit for people who perform well but we don’t want to take the blame for people who don’t play well.”

Performances can be fiendishly difficult to predict, even for a manager who spends all day, all week, all year, analysing and assessing players, processing information handed to them from medics and data analysts, eventually making decisions on his own hunches alone. It is a stressful, competitive environment on a daily basis. He is conscious that some players struggle to fulfil their talent because of the intensity of the football world. “You have players who can’t express their full potential because they are inhibited,” he says. “When you are a player you need to say, ‘I will walk out there in front of 60,000 people and show you how good I am’. If you think, ‘I will walk out there in front of 60,000 people but I am scared I am not good enough’ I wish you good luck. You lose people from that. More than you think. That insecurity.”

One of Wenger’s characteristics was his tendency to look at the human before the sportsman. At times he put the personal needs of his players above the sporting needs of the team. In hindsight was it always the right thing to do? “Every quality can be a vulnerability,” he explains. “If you are loyal you can stay too long. If you are stubborn you can become stupid. At the end of the day that is only decided by your results and your style of play. I thought I always approached a player as a global human being. Everything interferes. Everything is connected. If you want to know people you have to meet people, you have to ask questions. What is this guy really about? What is behind there? Or you just treat him like a machine. He comes in and he has to produce. But that’s not the way I see people. Part of me always was an educator. It’s a strength, it’s a weakness, but it’s the way I approach the job and everybody approaches the job in his own way. When I look back I think: yes, it’s me. It’s the loyalty. I was the longest-serving manager in Arsenal but also the longest-serving manager in Monaco in the history of the club. You cannot deny who you are really, deeply.”

Wenger’s approach evidently influenced many of those who played for him. A number of the very best — Dennis Bergkamp, Thierry Henry, Vieira — have or are trying their hand at coaching. Arsenal currently have three other former Wenger players in senior positions at the club now in Mikel Arteta, Edu and Per Mertesacker. Did he notice special qualities in them?

“Not more than in others,” he says. “For them the timing was right. Take the Adams generation, all of them — Adams, Bould, Dixon, Winterburn, Keown — all had the qualities to be managers or coaches. Arteta was highly focused to be a coach. He was already passionate when I had him as a player. I made him captain because he had an influence on other players. After that, you have to learn the job. He had an advantage because he played for Arsenal so gets straight away in a very high position. If you are a normal guy, a normal coach, you have to work first for 10 years to get there. He started straight away at the top. Mertesacker you could see straight away he had the qualities to be an educator. Edu had this job in Brazil which is why he has been selected.”

With these three heavily involved in shaping Arsenal’s future, hopefully the timing is right in the not too distant future for them to welcome Wenger back to the club. He has not visited since his departure in 2018. He didn’t want to add pressure on any successors and also needed space to heal.

Wenger has always said he prefers not to look back. That’s one of the reasons that even though he enjoyed the actual writing process of the book the reflecting pained him at times. But his Arsenal past remains close to his heart.

There is something reassuring about the fact the golden replica of the Premier League trophy is on prominent display in his home, in the front room. That gift — something he gave Arsenal by creating the Invincible team, and the club then symbolically presented to him after his farewell match at the Emirates to represent the summit of his life’s work in football — is something to be proud of. Even for someone who prefers to look forward and is currently motivated in his role as FIFA’s Chief of Global Football Development, there is no harm in remembering the best of times.