As Arsene Wenger said farewell to the Emirates a stadium that, as much as anything,
will stand as his legacy – the mind was drawn back to the end of the season 14 years ago.
Ostensibly the scenes were similar
Wenger, tall and erect, in shirt and tie, applauding awkwardly in the sunshine
as the crowd sang his name
but the context could hardly have been more different.
Back in 2004, Arsenal had just beaten Leicester City 2-1
to complete the league season unbeaten. As pundits queued up to add their plaudits
Amy Lawrence asked presciently in this paper,
"Is this as good as it gets for Arsenal?” It turned out it was.
Not that it seemed like it then. Wenger had arrived from nowhere,
all but unknown in Britain, and had revolutionised the game.
He changed diet and nutrition, modernised training methods and exploited his
knowledge of overseas leagues to sign great players at bargain prices.
He changed the attitude to foreign ideas, erasing in a few weeks the
doubts raised by memories of Dr Jozsef Venglos’s ill-starred reign at
Aston Villa. Wenger, in that sense, pioneered the cosmopolitanism
that characterises the modern Premier League.
And in 2004 he was leading a team that had won three league titles in
seven seasons towards a new stadium that would take them to a new financial level.
The onward march of progress seemed assured. It was not.
In retrospect, the turning point had come against Chelsea the previous
month, on 6 April when, with three minutes of the Champions League
quarter-final second leg remaining, Wayne Bridge had scored the winner
for Claudio Ranieri’s side. Symbolically at least, that was when the
balance of power in London shifted southward. Arsenal, through no real fault of their own
had found themselves the victims of an irony of timing.
Highbury, for all its charm, was cramped; Arsenal had to leave.
Moving to the Emirates in 2006 was supposed to close the economic gap on
Manchester United and the European elite. But in 2003 Roman Abramovich
arrived and revolutionised the financial landscape of English Football.
Abramovich was not the first sugar-daddy but he was the first with a
wealth that seemed infinite. All that careful husbandry, the plotting
of new investment, all diminished by an outside agent that could not
have been foreseen. It may seem normal now that foreign billionaires
should buy Premier League clubs but it was not then.
What Abramovich had begun, Sheikh Mansour continued.
Arsenal’s position became impossible. They had the trappings and
expectations of a great club, but not the resources, neither through
an oligarchal owner nor the extraordinary marketing of Manchester United.
There was an FA Cup, then a Champions League final,
then, for a long time, there was nothing.
In facing overwhelming odds, Wenger changed. Perhaps time would anyway
have wearied him, but in his second decade in the job, he succumbed to
self-parody, as though when faced with a problem, he didn’t ask himself how to solve it
but how Arsene Wenger would solve it: what was the most Wengerian solution?
Managers, after all, spend much of their working lives defending their
principles, explaining why their way is the right way. It’s hardly
surprising then if, in moments of crisis, they prefer stubbornness to
the accusation of abandoning their principles.
Wenger’s great sides featured rough diamonds and hard men but
increasingly there came a template of an Arsenal player. Their squad
became full of small technically accomplished creative midfielders, of
pleasant young men.
There was something of late period Brian Clough about this, different
as Clough and Wenger were as personalities. Clough too had found his
resources restricted after expanding the stadium and as time had gone
by had lost the capacity or the willingness to deal with difficult
characters.
And Clough too, finding his lack of resources denied him the chance of
a genuine title challenge, had sought validation through other means,
focusing less on winning than on style. Niceness, for him and for
Wenger, became an end in itself, a surrogate trophy.
Then, at the very end, the purse-strings were relaxed once more. There
were big signings – Mesut Ozil, Alexis Sanchez, Alexandre Lacazette,
Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang – and a flurry of three FA Cups in Wenger’s
final five seasons.
Would it be too harsh to dismiss those successes as yesterday’s
manager winning yesterday’s competition with yesterday’s football?
Probably, but even as Wenger became the most successful manager in the
FA Cup’s history, dissatisfaction continued to mount.
Few can seriously doubt that Wenger stayed on too long, but for all
the frustrations of the past few years, his influence on Arsenal and
English football had been profound. His career may be a reminder that
in football most professional lives end in failure, but he remains one
of the greatest of all modern managers.