Do Not Sell My Personal Information
After a horrible week, the knives are out again – some for Arsène Wenger, and some for those who dare to question him. It seems like an appropriate moment for me to write (for what feels like the billionth time) on why it is Wenger that is the problem at the club, and not money.
It is easy to blame the board; they’re a bunch of businessmen in suits whom we have no attachment to as fans. Wenger on the other hand is our long-serving manager who’s brought us many great memories – even if they are feeling evermore distant – it’s hard for some gooners to call for the head of a man who brought us trophies, great football; the man who brought us Thierry Henry.
Still, a great manager is not necessarily great forever. People get old, tired, they fail to keep up with the game as it changes, or they become complacent and feel untouchable after their own great achievements. I don’t really know which of these applies most to Wenger, but it could be a combination of any of them when you look at the way he signs players, uses them, and his seeming inability to motivate them to put in the effort required. When you look at what actually happens on the pitch, it’s hard to keep arguing that this is all about the board not giving him enough money.
For one thing, the board have said year after year that the money is there for the boss if he wants to spend it. If he finds a player he likes for £30million or even more, the board have said he can sign this player. We then get quotes from Wenger saying he’s only after players of top quality, suggesting he really doesn’t think there are better players out there than Gervinho. Remember his recent quote on how the Ivorian was the best player at the African Cup of Nations? I think even people who he slams as never having “worked half a day in football” can see that that is plainly not true. These are the words of a man who is either deluded, or who has an agenda, and that agenda is not silverware.
Ok, so since we last won anything we have always finished behind teams who have a great deal more spending power than we do. The likes of Chelsea, United and City have won titles because they can afford to throw around money and bring in quality that is somewhat out of our reach, or even on flops like Berbatov and Torres. Maybe it’s worth giving managers the funding to take risks like this and hope more big-name signings will pay off rather than fail? Or maybe you could look at Liverpool, who spend far more than we do bringing in players like Andy Carroll, Jordan Henderson and Stewart Downing for a combined fee of nearly £100million and who continue to miss out on the Champions League places and only have the Carling Cup (won rather luckily on penalties against Cardiff) to show for their recent trophies.
Maybe throwing money around isn’t always the answer? Maybe it’s continuity – having a core of players who have been at the club together for a long time, who know each other and develop a team spirit. There were cries for us to improve the squad in the summer of 2003 after we let the title slip, but Wenger spent just under £2million bringing in Jens Lehmann and a 17-year-old Gaël Clichy. He kept together an experienced squad who were hungry to make up for the disappointment they’d experienced together, and lo and behold we had our glorious unbeaten season and got the title back.
Wenger’s biggest mistake was breaking apart that group of players too quickly. Ray Parlour went on to have a couple of decent seasons with Middlesbrough, did he really need to leave that summer? Martin Keown might have been a bit past it as a regular, but was a decent backup and definitely a good player to have around on the training ground with the view of eventually becoming a coach.
Of course he did briefly work for us as a coach – the record-breaking sequence of clean sheets in our run to the 2006 Champions League final coincided neatly with Keown coaching our defence. Might I remind you that that back four was: Eboue, Touré, Senderos and Flamini; a backline that cost around £3million in total; consisting of players like Eboue and Senderos who never played as well again since; and Flamini who’d never played left-back before who moved back into midfield afterwards. Did we need to spend millions on star names to achieve this feat? No, all it took was a bit of variety on the training ground, from a man who’d won trophies with Arsenal after spending much of his career being drilled by George Graham, who was notorious for winning things with Arsenal with a tight defence. It’s a simple philosophy: keep around players with something to pass on. Wenger didn’t see the value in this, and Keown didn’t continue in his role.
Back to money…
People lament the fact that Chelsea and City have come along and ruined the game with money, making it impossible for us to compete. Trust me, I’d rather they weren’t around either, but it’s showing a short memory.
In the early 00s when we were still winning things or at least doing a better job of competing for things, Manchester United still spent huge amounts of money. In the summer before our double winning season of 01/02, United had spent around £50million on Ruud van Nistelrooy and Juan Sebastian Veron, that didn’t stop us from doing better than them that season. And it’s worth remembering as well that at this time Leeds, Newcastle and Chelsea (even pre-Abramovich) were spending more than us, and that didn’t get them in on the two-horse race for the title between us and United every year in that period.
What’s really changed in the last few years? Teams have always spent more than us, so it’s not that. The change I see is that we’ve chopped and changed our teams too much, letting old heads and winners like Campbell, Píres, Lehmann and Gilberto leave earlier than they needed to, and relying on young, untried, and sometimes just plain crap players to take their place. You don’t need to spend millions and millions on Cavani, Falcao, Gotze or whoever to get past Bradford and Blackburn in the cup competitions – these poor results and performances are symptomatic of a deeper problem at the club; the fact that we’ve lost our way, becoming a new team in a new stadium, becoming disattached from our roots.
I’m not saying Wenger definitely needs to be sacked, but he has to change the way he’s doing things. He should allow Steve Bould or Martin Keown or Tony Adams or whoever to have more control over the defensive areas of the team, and he should stop worrying about balancing the books by selling players every summer. The fact is, he has more control than anyone at the club, so why focus the blame away from him? After all, no one focuses attention away from the success he brought us in the past – the highs and the lows are all his doing. He just needs to rediscover the methods that brought that early success.
Sadly, I don’t see that happening, which is why my preference would be for him to be replaced. And if you’re one of those fans who thinks there’s no one out there who could possibly do as good a job as Wenger then you’re ignoring what’s right in front of you. Roberto Di Matteo came in for half a season at Chelsea and won the Champions League in his first attempt (after they couldn’t defend to save their lives under AVB – same players, different manager = different results, see where I’m going with this?). The young and inexperienced Antonio Conte won the league unbeaten with Juventus last season in his first year with the club. Jurgen Klopp has done great work with Borussia Dortmund with less money than us. There are a lot of talented managers out there who I’m fairly sure could get more out of this talented squad than Wenger is doing at the moment. And it is the manager who is at the heart of the club, nobody else.
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