Is it too much to hope that Wenger will usher in a new age of reason in English football as a whole and not merely at Highbury? – The Guardian, October 1996.
Each man kills the thing he loves. Arsene Wenger transformed English football, but in recent years, he has also transformed summers at Arsenal. The season of hope has, at the Emirates at least, become a time of foreboding.
Wenger has applied his logical mind to the issue of player recruitment and concluded that, to a certain degree, the transfer market is illogical. It is dictated by the unreasonable and the mercenary. The only thing available for certain is the instant gratification provided by hope. And everybody knows what hope does to you.
“In the end you do not buy to give one hope,” Wenger said last season. “You want to buy because the players who come in can help your squad to be stronger. You have to find an efficient solution.”
Wenger may have become more willing in recent years, but he retains a desire in finding the efficient solution which underlines that Strasbourg, the city he was raised in, is as German as it is French.
In October, he will mark twenty years at Arsenal. It’s possible that it will be recognised as a glorious time, but one which would be better off coming to an end.
Wenger’s reasoned and considered approach has created a mutinous and unreasonable atmosphere at Arsenal. If Wenger ushered in an age of reason in English football, (although he didn’t, of course) he embarks on what may be his final season at the club surrounded by the howls of the enraged and the wails of the emotionally incontinent.
On Sunday, Arsenal begin their Premier League season at home to Liverpool trailed by these familiar sounds. Unless something extraordinary happens over the next nine months, they will be the noises that accompany a great career ending in failure.
Wenger is right in recognising that the tendency to spend for spending’s sake can often provide a short-term hit and nothing more. But his solution not to spend for not spending’s sake has blinded him to the weaknesses of his squad, and the reality that some of those flaws could be rectified on the transfer market.
Last season, he was asked why he didn’t provide answers to the fans who had so many questions. “It’s endless,” he said. Wenger’s solution to the infinite number of questions is to answer as few as possible, to remain profoundly and maybe self-destructively committed to his way.
“The best way to create an identity with the way we play football, to get players integrated into our culture, with our beliefs, our values, was to get them as young as possible and to develop them together,” he said in 2008. “I felt it would be an interesting experiment to see players grow together with these qualities and with a love for the club,” he said. “It was an idealistic vision of the world of football.”
He has relented in recent years, tempering this idealism – perhaps because it had failed – but when he signs a player, the supporters want another one. It is endless, but it may be endless because Wenger’s way has failed.
Wenger would dispute that, pointing to the repeated qualification for the Champions League, but there is no question that more will be expected this season or, more precisely, even less will be tolerated.
There is no point in Wenger saying that Arsenal are progressing, as he does when he says they have moved steadily from fourth to third to second last season. There is no point as using Leicester as an example of what can be achieved without spending money when their success is seen as further evidence that Wenger has failed.
There was, of course, a time when his way had a transformative effect. Dennis Bergkamp recalled his first year in England, before Wenger arrived, and his astonishment at walking by a pub during pre-season and seeing nine Arsenal players sitting outside.
“I thought, This is unbelievable! You’ve just had two hard sessions to prepare for the season, and now everything you did is going down with the alcohol! What’s the point of being there?”
Wenger would change that. His thinking on footballers’ diets and alcohol may have chimed with a growing awareness of what was at stake for those at the highest level of the game, but he also helped England look confidently towards the world.
Players like Ruud Gullit and Juninho had arrived previously in the Premier League, while Gianfranco Zola would arrive a few months after Wenger left Japan for north London. Wenger, however, recruited methodically and with insight. Patrick Vieira made his debut for Arsenal before Wenger had left Japan. In September 1996, he was sent from the bench after 28 minutes and his first hour in English football suggested a little of what was to come from the player and the manager who had signed him.
But there are no mysteries anymore or, if there are, Wenger doesn’t uncover them. This summer, he has been pursued while cycling by a supporter demanding that he sign Riyad Mahrez which he may yet do, but there would have been a time when Mahrez, N’golo Kante and Paul Pogba would have considered Arsenal the club they should go to when they arrive in England.
Instead others caught up. They may not have viewed the world as Wenger did. They didn’t have the perception and intelligence of Wenger, but they had the resources to make that irrelevant.
When Arsenal lost at the Emirates on the opening day of the 2013/2014 season, supporters held up signs calling on Wenger to spend, spend, spend.
A couple of weeks later, Wenger spent £43 million on Mesut Ozil, a signing who could today be used to bolster either side of the argument.
On Friday, Wenger said there was no need for Arsenal fans to be concerned that Ozil and Alexis Sanchez hadn’t extended their contracts yet. Reports have suggested that Ozil is concerned that Arsenal haven’t strengthened the squad in a Premier League which is showing a great eagerness to spend its TV money.
Other things matter to Wenger, but as Pep Guardiola, Jose Mourinho and Antonio Conte have arrived with only one intention, this year may be the year when those things are shown to matter no longer.
“My never-ending struggle in this business is to release what is beautiful in man,” Wenger told L’Equipe last year. “I can be described as naïve in that sense. But it allows me to believe, and I am often proven right.”
In recent years, Wenger has inadvertently released what is ugly in man. Two years ago, he was abused by a bunch of fans as Arsenal boarded a train following defeat at Stoke and there will always be people in the crowd at the Emirates waiting to hold up their signs or express their anger on Arsenal TV.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pb4zoCUC_c
He can seem like a man born for another time, a man of grace and dignity who enters into what should be his final season speaking about how all things are possible, but knowing that they are not.
“You have two kinds of players who play football,” Wenger has said, “those who want to serve football like you serve God, and they put football so high that everything that is not close to what football should be is a little bit non-acceptable. And then you have those who use football to serve their ego.”
Wenger’s insistence that his way is best could be seen as an assertion of his own ego too, but there may be no other way to survive.
Survival may also be all he can hope for now. Wenger will hope for more and insist that anything is possible, but there is dwindling faith in his methods. The age of reason might have passed in an instant for English football. But if Wenger’s turmoil continues, then it will confirm that the Premier League has embarked on a new age, one where his ways are seen as obsolete.
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