One of the hardest things for a football club to do is to reinvent itself. Most
clubs are decades - even centuries old - institutions whose infrastructure often
reflects the haphazard nature of their evolution.
On top of this, the football calendar is so constant that it can feel like even the most
basic changes a club makes are like trying to build a plane when it’s already in the air.
But it can happen. Take Arsenal. At the end of the 2019/20 season, they had just finished 8th in the
league. They had just appointed a rookie manager and their backroom staff was completely different
to what it is now. They also had a completely different set of personnel at the board level.
Fast forward three years and they find themselves sitting at the top of the Premier
League at the halfway point of the season, a club reinvented and heading in the right direction.
Across London, there is another famous football club looking to reinvent themselves. Last summer,
Chelsea were bought by American investor Todd Boehly. Since then,
they’ve been able to make sweeping changes.
So, are Chelsea the next Arsenal?
It’s important to note that Arsenal and Chelsea are two different clubs at two different
junctures. But there are some fundamentals that all clubs need to succeed in the modern game.
Let’s look at five areas in which Arsenal were recently able to make
changes which influenced their future direction:
A new manager
It’s easy to ascribe most of Arsenal’s recent success to Mikel Arteta
but it’s important to remember that the success of the Spanish
manager is as much down to the club’s patience with him as his own coaching.
After finishing 8th in his first half-season,
Arteta then only managed another 8th place finish in his first full season before seeing his young
side drop out of the Champions League spots in a late season collapse the following year.
But the lesson here is not that you should always give your manager more time. Rather:
that if you are going to appoint a process manager, you need to support
them with underlying infrastructure changes that allow them to succeed.
A new sporting director
One of the key underlying infrastructure
changes that Arsenal made that benefited Arteta was changing the sporting director.
When Arteta arrived at the club in 2019, former Arsenal player Edu Gaspar
had recently joined as the club’s Technical Director. At that point, Raul Sanllehi was
the club’s Director of Football but he left in 2020, being functionally replaced by Edu.
With this shuffle around at the highest level, Arsenal were able to refresh a lot
of their day-to-day operating processes to give them an advantage over their rivals.
A fresh scouting approach
One area where these processes changed was in player acquisition. Previously,
Arsenal had operated with a traditional scouting department but in 2020, Edu announced that head of
recruitment, Francis Cagigao, would be leaving the club as part of a wide-ranging review.
In place of this more “eyes-on” approach, Edu announced that the club’s player acquisition
would rely more heavily on StatDNA, the internal data and analytics company which Arsenal bought in
2014. The fruits of this shift are already being seen in Arsenal’s more recent transfer activity.
New backroom staff
But it wasn’t just at the board level that Arsenal made changes.
Soon after Arteta joined in 2019, it was announced that he was bringing in Steve Round
and Albert Stuivenberg as assistants, along with a goalkeeper coach, Inaki Cana Pavon.
The next summer, three more faces were brought in to bolster this group:
Carlos Cuesta, Andreas Georgson and Miguel Molina.
Each of these assistants has a clear role behind the scenes. For example, Carlos Cuesta functions
as an individual development coach for the Arsenal players. Fluent in 6 languages,
he was often seen on the All or Nothing series acting as a mentor and counsellor to the players.
Culture change
All of these four areas contributed to a more fundamental area of improvement:
a culture change which underpinned everything Arteta wanted to achieve at the club.
Interestingly, this refresh of the culture at Arsenal was facilitated by the covid-19
pandemic which saw the football season curtailed for a little while, allowing Arteta to take the
time to rethink how the employees of the club should approach their jobs.
By the time the football returned, Arteta was able to implement this cultural shift across all the
various elements of the club in order to unify the club and focus them as they looked forward.
These five areas of improvement all played a part in the current success of Arsenal
football club. And this is the sort of restructuring that Todd Boehly will want
to see at Chelsea. The American has already made sweeping changes since he took over.
At the level of management, Boehly has followed the Arsenal model. By bringing in Graham Potter
along with his backroom staff from Brighton, the Chelsea owner has committed the club to
a long-term process of improvement similar to what happened at Arsenal under Arteta.
This is a brave new world for a club who have adopted much more short-term strategies in
the past. Where Arsenal had to endure two 8th place finishes in a row and the disappointment
of missing out on Champions League football under Arteta, it’s likely that the Chelsea
board and fan base might have to accept a similar fallow period for their club.
Behind the scenes, a lot has already changed at Chelsea. Soon after Boehly arrived, Petr Cech,
the club’s Technical and Performance Advisor, and Marina Granovskaia,
the club’s director were moved on to be replaced by Laurence Stewart from Monaco
and Christopher Vivell from Leipzig. There have also been changes made at the level of player
recruitment too with the entire infrastructure of the scouting department being remodelled.
When it comes to tearing things down,
then, Chelsea have adopted a very similar strategy to Arsenal. The big question is:
will they oversee the rebuild process as well as their cross-city rivals? And this is where the
final of our five areas becomes important: the culture change that Arteta oversaw.
Because it was this aspect of the process that has given Arsenal football club the
unity of purpose that has allowed them to succeed. With a clear sense
of what everyone’s role is and how it fits within the broader picture,
the club have been able to make the step up to challenge for the Premier League title.
If Chelsea are to do the same, they will also require a similarly considered cultural overhaul.