Credits: Sky
He was like a storm. Rarely did a man, in that day and age, appear out of nowhere to captivate the imagination of millions around the globe. That was who he was, when he signed from Japan and headlines of “Arsene Who” ran on front pages of newspapers. He came to a massive football club in London which was, few will admit, threatening to teeter into mediocrity post-Graham and introduced health and training reforms that (r)evolutionized the game. It’s rather easy, with the benefit of hindsight, to downplay the importance of these ideas, but they were crucial blocks into building the most successful period of Arsenal’s history.
I find it criminal that Arsene’s success – and we all know it by now, his doubles, his FA Cups, the Invincibles – is not credited more to him giving the players the right enough culture shock. For the likes of Tony Adams and Ian Wright, here was a French guy who would charm you with his intellect, his enigma and desire to play football as an art. It must have been hugely captivating for them, and as they found themselves winning trophies with the man, downright inspiring. Wenger always had an aura about him that made you feel he was much more than the layman coach who told you to run more and work hard. Despite the lack of trophies in Wenger’s last thirteen years, his willingness to preach and philosophize is one of the many reasons he is still loved by Arsenal fans, maybe more as a man than as manager.
The fact that Wenger would pluck unknown youngsters from across the continent and gave them regular playing time, something unheard of at the time, was a massive advantage he had over someone like Sir Alex Ferguson. Robert Pires. Freddie Ljungberg. Kolo Toure. Patrick Vieira. Thierry Henry. Names synonymous to Arsenal Football Club today, all because Wenger had the knowledge and the courage to give them a chance, center stage. He knew his talents, he used them well, and built a legacy.
And then, the Invincibles. A team with defenders who had learned from the best, midfielders honed by Arsene in his prime and the most monstrous front duo the Premier League had seen. Manchester City won the latest Premier League with 100 points, and fair play to them, but I like to think that Arsenal’s champions would have surely beaten them the way Liverpool did thrice. After all, this was a team that could consistently defend in ways Graham would be proud of and rip the opposition with some swashbuckling football. That was the Age of Heroes, the days of glory, the era when Arsene Wenger was a footballing heavyweight.
It’s hard to know when it all started to go wrong. There are theories: some believe losing the Champions League final to Barcelona ‘broke’ Wenger. Many think David Dien’s departure created a power vaccum that no one benefited from. Others think the lack of leaders in the dressing room played a huge part – after all, the trophy drought did begin after Vieira left for Juventus in 2005.
The most popular theory, of course, is that the Emirates Stadium severely restricted the financial budget of the club, even though numerous sources have tallied the salaries Arsenal paid to bloated squads full of duds like Almunia, Eboue, Senderos, Squillaci, Traore, Clichy, Denilson, Diaby, Bendtner, Chamakh, Park, etc. I get that every football team has its duds, but frankly, the amount Arsene had accumulated in his squads was criminal – in wanting to see his Project Youth succeed, he threw away hordes of cash that should have been used more wisely, at a time when money was an issue.
It is tempting to point to money as the sole issue, at a time when Manchester City and Chelsea were on the rise purely through liquid investments, but the downfall was a lot more nuanced than that. The idea that money is the sole obstacle to competing for success has been downplayed by many, including Atletico Madrid, Borussia Dortmund, Liverpool and even Tottenham Hotspur. Besides, a lack of funds was not the reason why Arsenal collapsed, it was shoddy man management and outdated tactics that injured key players at the wrong times and capitulating in games that mattered.
This was when the rot really began to set in, and I don’t mean on the pitch. Whenever a fan tried to point out man-management and tactical issues with Arsene Wenger, he was immediately dismissed as not a “proper” fan, or someone who misunderstood the monetary nuances of football. I firmly believe it was this condescension and patronizing that made a certain section of Arsenal fans hate the other, both never truly understanding each other’s points of view, giving rise to shitbox acronyms like AKB and WOB, eventually ruining the fanbase.
When it came to Wenger, everything was binary. If you liked Arsene, you had to be an AKB, you had to be gullible, you had to be a brainwashed minion of a willful dictatorship. If you wanted Wenger to go, you had to be an ungrateful old, bald, racist hater who didn’t understand anything about football. It’s easy to fall into a stereotype – if you were a reader of this blog back before I removed it last year, you would know that around 2015, I fell into one myself, blinded by my hate towards a man who I knew was incompetent but thought to be fraudulent as well. Heck, the very reason I started this blog was because of my insistent desire for others to agree to my opinions alone, a dangerously arrogant sentiment.
The truth, or something close to it, was always in the middle. Was Wenger a fraud? Absolutely not. Was Wenger better than Sir Alex Ferguson? Absolutely not. Was he a great man manager, a great cajoler? He wasn’t. Was he an intelligent man who understood a lot more about football than he let on? You bet he was… and so on.
Unfortunately, the divisions in the fanbase were far too distant for anyone to dare acknowledge that both sides were holding two pieces of the same jigsaw puzzle. Whenever Arsenal lost, it was an opportunity for the WOB to find pleasure in pain because they could lord it over the AKB. Whenever Arsenal won, the reverse would happen just as predictably. It was a sick, sick time in Arsene Wenger’s reign, a time when petty fanbase squabbles took priority over supporting the club both sides ultimately loved, a time when winning the argument and predicting what would happen next mattered more than feeling basic joy and sorrow in results. Football is meant to be escapist, but we politicized and polarized it to the point that it isn’t anymore, and that’s on us. The fact that some people are vehemently protesting against Mikel Arteta before he’s even selected as Arsenal manager (and others taking such joy in insulting them) shows how broken this fanbase is, and how even Arsene Wenger leaving cannot fix it anymore.
For me, this was the real nadir of Arsene Wenger’s reign as Arsenal manager, more than the trophyless years, more than the trashing against big teams, more than the season he finished sixth. As a manager, his refusal to change, his refusal to adapt or take note of the simmering discontent among the fans was something I felt certainly contributed to the AKB/WOB nonsense, and a real regret in his otherwise distinguished career.
Wenger would eventually end the protracted trophy drought with a 2014 FA Cup win, followed by two more, but for many (including me) their minds on Arsene were already made up. I doubt many people enjoyed these FA Cups the same way they did in 1998 or 2005. I know history has a knack for amplifying happiness, but even so, after all the anger and anguish Arsenal fans went through in those barren years, the Cup wasn’t to be the band-aid that everyone wished it to be.
I would argue that 2014-2018 threatened to be the start of a third era – one of apathy, when fans genuinely struggled with feeling anything when it came to football. Wins and losses were met with poker faces, people ran out of flaws to pinpoint and despite many coming to the consensus that Wenger was a spent force, factions between the fanbase remained. YouTube channels like ArsenalFanTV made money out of commodifying anger to the point that people hoped Arsenal would lose so that they could view good content on the Internet. It was an eerily apathetic four years or so, one I’m reticent to blame Arsene Wenger for and more eager to lay at the feet of social media and the consumerist football culture we live in today.
Yet, the effects were startling: empty seats at the Emirates, a perverse fondness to abuse one’s own players on social media, fans eager to watch their own team fail. An axe needed to be swung, and whether it was Arsene Wenger or Ivan Gazidis who made the call, I’m glad the call was made, because I, along with many others, shamelessly heaved a sigh of relief when the big man finally announced his departure.
One can be fully aware of what an extraordinary man like Arsene Wenger is and still be incredibly happy at his departure, as was I. The man will be remembered as a legend of the game, although the recent years of frustration, despair and finally, disinterest meant that he had to be consigned to the past. With Wenger gone, the club has another chance to unite, the fanbase another chance to heal. If we’re idiots enough to piss it all away by arguing with each other over new managerial appointments, we have no one to blame but ourselves.
I’m certain I echo the sentiments of almost every Arsenal fan when I thank the man for his service. For all his flaws, the work he put in at the club was immense, and it was obvious that he wanted to succeed at Arsenal as much as we wanted him to, but ultimately, found himself to be incapable of that. I firmly believe that if he finds the right club at the right time, he can inspire them enough to win some truly major honours, including that elusive Champions League. However, after a point, the structures, the politics and the circumstances meant that it just wasn’t meant to be for Arsene Wenger and Arsenal.
Arsene will leave with a bittersweet air, of knowing he should have achieved more, knowing he could have surrounded himself with better people at the right times, been more receptive when it mattered. But that’s not all he’ll leave with. When he clears his office on Thursday, he will leave the club as the most successful manager in its illustrious history, its longest serving one. He will step out of a stadium that he helped conceptualize, walk past legends cast in bronze he helped forge. He will walk out as Arsene Wenger, a man you loved, a man you hated, and a man you would never, ever, forget.
Arsene – it’s time to say goodbye… but thanks for the memories.
-Santi [Follow me on Twitter @ArsenalBlogz ]
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