The popular opinion is that black is black, that white is white, and that when Elon Musk says “I want to die on Mars,” everyone else says “what are you waiting for?” The least popular opinion is to point out that things are more nuanced.
Was Wenger a miracle worker or a chump who ruined Arsenal? That’s the age-old (15 year old) debate between the WOBs and the AKBs. It’s a similar debate to Fabregas, was he an Arsenal legend or a snake? Or maybe you’ve heard people talk about Özil lately, is he an overpaid pampered baby or a brilliant technician?
The answer to all of the questions is yes.
Wenger left Arsenal some messes: Xhaka, Mustafi, Kolasinac, and a barely limping Bellerin. The disastrous season where we only signed Cech. A legacy of poor defending and shattered confidence in the defense. Wenger was flawed. Wenger made mistakes.
But Wenger wasn’t the owner. He wasn’t the general manager. And looking above Wenger Arsenal are a club which is obsessed with breaking even and putting money away, and Wenger got Arsenal into the top tier of World Football with an ownership structure which never put a dime into the club. None of the previous owners put money into the club. They all sat around, watched Wenger do his show, and when the price was right – they all cashed out.
David Dein, Lady Spitsoutherdummies, Danny Fiszman, Sir Fish and Chips, The guy with a top hat and monocle who shows up at board meetings to say “indeed”, and most recently Alisher Usmanov. None of them put a ruddy dime into the club and all of them cashed out millions of dollars in profits.
All of this happened under Wenger, who had to put together team after team of players that needed to perform at a high level, and he did this with very few structures above him that even understood anything about football much less how to operationalize a club the size of Arsenal and turn it into a commercial juggernaut. I can’t for the life of me figure out what Ivan Gazidis did for the last 10 years. Arsenal’s commercial revenue is still far behind every other top club and other than rubber stamping Wenger’s decisions and showing people the hallway, his main talent seemed to be promising a rosy future soon.
That all shows the work that Wenger had to do for a decade to keep this club afloat. That doesn’t mean that he didn’t leave a mess! It is possible for him to be both deeply flawed and to have worked miracles. This is the fallacy of the WOB/AKB argument that I have been railing against for the last 11 years.
Wenger is both to blame and and a convenient scapegoat for everything that has transpired at Arsenal in 2018. I thought it was clear that the club were preparing to push him out in the summer of 2017. They started building structures in the management of the club which clearly took away Wenger’s decision-making.
Player acquisition, which was entirely up to Wenger for most of his career, had been driven by StatsDNA for a few years prior. Players like Xhaka and Mustafi were purchased for the fact that their passes had “the most bypassed defenders” when even to the untrained eye there were major problems with their defending. How much of that was Wenger trying to adapt to the new reality and how much was him just acquiescing? Or maybe he drove the decisions. I don’t know. I do know that it’s simplistic to pin all that on him.
There was a break, however. 2015/16, the season Leicester won the League. I jokingly like to think of that as the moment that broke our timeline. After they won the League, we got Brexit and Trump, the Cubs won the World Series, VAR was taken seriously, and people started wearing vests because England beat some really poor teams in the Russian World Cup. Even Liverpool look like a title contender and because of that, Arsenal supporters are actively rooting for Man City to win the League – the team that has done more to ruin our own business model than any team in sports history.
Maybe Leicester didn’t break the timeline. Signs are that this stuff was all coming for years. But Leicester did break Arsene Wenger and Arsenal. Wenger only bought Cech that summer, we lost Cazorla to horrific injury, and Arsenal were unable to get over the line because Ozil, Ramsey, and Walcott couldn’t finish their chances. Because of that season, Wenger couldn’t convince any of Ramsey, Ozil, Alexis, or even Ox to sign new deals (you can’t force players to sign).
So, yes, losing the League that year set into motion a lot of the problems Arsenal are dealing with this year.
It’s still not as simple as we would all like it to be. As far as I know, Wenger left the club with £200m in cash after 22 years of work, three League titles, and a new stadium which generates the highest match-day income in England. No matter how much you hate Wenger, you have to admit that there are few managers in world football who would have left a dime for their successor, but Emery had more than enough money to buy Torreira, Guendouzi, and Sokratis. In contrast, Mourinho left Man U with £228m in unpaid transfers and Chelsea with an owner sick of sticking money in and no new stadium!
Yes, Wenger also left problems with player contracts, he left a lot of talent undeveloped, he maybe should have left three years ago, and the club spent a lot of money to try to get a League win for Wenger. He was both a miracle worker and a man who made a lot of mistakes. And we are both cleaning up after those mistakes and able to do so because of the legacy he left behind.
Also, Fabregas was both the most technically gifted midfielder I’ve seen at Arsenal, and also a guy who weaseled his way out of a contract he had signed the summer before. And Ozil is both a masterful attacking player and a bit of an effete snob when it comes to putting a foot in defensively.
Thanks for letting me take some time to end all of these debates.
Great post. And yes, folks should stop painting in black and white. The AKB and WOB thing always amused me. It is possible to love Wenger (I teared up a bit when he did that goodbye thing at the last home game), and to have reached the conclusion that he had lost it, years before the end came. I sometimes watch old Arsenal games on YouTube… especially when Arsene’s defence consisted of Bould, Adams, Winterburn and Dixon, his midfield of Vieira and Petit, and his attack of Overmars, Anelka, Kanu and Bergkamp (Thierry hadnt yet arrived).
Arsenal’s 20 Year Challenge. With video.
Spot on about the millionaire shareholders who all used Arsenal as a cash cow, even while watching us get priced out of the picture by financial doping.
And this 👇🏽
“That all shows the work that Wenger had to do for a decade to keep this club afloat. That doesn’t mean that he didn’t leave a mess! It is possible for him to be both deeply flawed and to have worked miracles. This is the fallacy of the WOB/AKB argument that I have been railing against for the last 11 years”.
Perfectly stated.
Spot on on Fabregas and Ozil too.
On Ozil, it pains me to watch a brutal constructive dismissal being effected, and this is affecting how I feel about our club, and about our coach. The first is repairable; the latter may not be. Shard talked about values…
Two very astute comments on twitter today from 2 guys who know their football. One, we’re chucking out Ramsey and Ozil (between them 1st and 2nd in assists last season, 2nd in goals scored). You better have a heck of a plan.
The 2nd is that Ozil is refusing to budge, is betting that he can outlast Emery, and is probably right.
I don’t begrudge the coach his right to not start Ozil. I don’t begrudge him his right to sub him, even at halftime. To not even have him on the bench in a squad of 18, or even entertain the thought that he could be game-changing option, insults the fans’ intelligence.
Yes Tim, Ozil IS both yin and yang. But I’m disgusted by then brutal squeeze on a senior player to free up money.
“Two very astute comments on twitter today from 2 guys who know their football. One, we’re chucking out Ramsey and Ozil (between them 1st and 2nd in assists last season, 2nd in goals scored). You better have a heck of a plan.
The 2nd is that Ozil is refusing to budge, is betting that he can outlast Emery, and is probably right.“
It’s hard to disagree with this logic if top four in the league this season is your main objective, and I said this much myself some weeks back ,that this situation was not sustainable from that point of view.
However, from the angle of building the squad for the future it would be hard to disagree with Emery to use both players sporadically.
Ramsey might be off this month( doubtful) but definitely in May.
Ozil is obviously not in Emery’s long term plans either for reasons perhaps only known to him, but it’s worth noting that there wasn’t much demand for Ozil on the free market either when he was available, was there.
I’ll just point out that with both Ozil and Ramsey in full swing Arsenal finished last season on 63 points in sixth, some 12 point out of top four.
Arsenal are in the transition period and this season was always going to be a wash.
This idea that Emery should deliver top four right away just because “we are Arsenal” and he spent some money in his first TW is so fanciful it’s almost laughable.
People who think that should wake up and smell the covfefe, as our dear supreme leader might say.
The €70m spent in the summer folks like to throw around a lot to show how much the squad has been improved by.., well , €25m of it was spent on a keeper who, as JOSHUAD pointed out, might’ve not been much of improvement on Cech at all as things stand right now.
Cech had another season in him ( maybe) but buying a younger capable keeper now was the right decision.
The €45m that’s left from the 70 buys you a single top quality midfielder these days ,if you’re lucky.
Or a couple young prospects and a journeyman defender to plug up a hole left by injuries.
Injuries and adaptive process is mostly to blame for the season Arsenal are having.
I said this before but it’s worth repeating; the well oiled Man City machine that demolished the league last season is not the same without Fernandinho or Silva( the David variety) , but you take them both out and City can lose last three games without them in the line up.
It’s not easy to manage great players and keep them happy (just look at Man U). So for that Wenger needs credit. But I think he was only one ingredient in an exceptional recipe, I’ve come to the opinion that I he was not the grand architect we’d all like to believe. He inherited a lot of great players. Vieira and Henry were not exactly unknown talents, just not given proper license. Fabregas, Cole… were these guys his creation or would they have been superstars regardless of where they came through? Arsenal were one of the big two teams in the Premier League until Abramovitch showed up so they had lots of relative financial power in his first ten years. Real Madrid dumped a bucket of cash for Anelka, Man City pays 25m for Adebayor and on and on…. that’s how he built up the cash reserves, it was no brainer sales of players to overspending rivals. When Liverpool, Chelsea, City, even Spurs started asserting themselves we started to see the decline. Wenger’s best before date was probably 2015.
I’m started to become disappointed in Emery’s tenure, but I’m not romantic at all about the Wenger era. Once we were stripped of the all-time great players (Bergkamp, Henry, Viera, Fabregas, Pires, van Persie) and great leaders (Adams, Vieira, Keown, Arteta, Mertesacker et al) Wenger got exposed and we started punching below our weight.
Manager can’t win without better players shocker.
Arsenal became part of the Big 2 because of Wenger. Liverpool were in much better position to take that mantle. Aston Villa as well had more revenue than us. Arsenal were around this group followed closely by Everton, Spurs and Newcastle. There was nothing guaranteed about Arsenal’s rise to being the primary challengers to ManU.
Also, Wenger is exactly the sort of teacher I’d want. He follows the principal of being a facilitator rather than just a master. That’s why you think he had little to do with things. “The greatest leader is where the people say we did it ourselves”
That’s a nice slogan. Not reality. Players at City and Liverpool are effusive in their praise of Guardiola and Klopp and how they have helped them to improve as players. Nobody is claiming to have done it themselves, yet I would call those two managers great leaders. Wenger could not make superstars out of players in his later years. Klopp takes an Alexander-Arnold and makes him into one of the premier backs in the league. Even the Ox looked miles better under Klopp. Guardiola makes Otamendi look like a solid CB when his skill set is almost identical to Mustafi.
Wenger was great with players who had high self-motivation and didactic personalities. Those are unicorns in the modern footballing world.
Slogans are meant to reflect a certain aspect of reality, not be taken literally. There’s more than one style of leadership. That’s all I was saying.
Pep also failed at ManCity even with many millions spent until he got in the right players. And he’s said it’s impossible to win without the money needed to get in those players.
So maybe, it’s not as black and white as you like to portray Wenger’s leadership. What was the theme of this blog?
“He inherited a lot of great players. Vieira and Henry were not exactly unknown talents, just not given proper license. Fabregas, Cole… were these guys his creation or would they have been superstars regardless of where they came through?”
AC Milan and Juventus were not convinced by Vieira and Henry and sold them to Arsenal. So they were far from great players when Wenger signed them. Yes, good players, but not great yet. Also, you have to remember that Henry played as a winger for Monaco and Juventus. He had great pace but was still raw. Wenger polished the diamond and moved him into the centerforward position. From a good winger, Wenger turned Henry into a world-class striker.
Same with Fabregas. Anybody could see that Fabregas was a special talent at 16. But how many managers would give a 17-year-old kid 33 games in his first Premier League season? It’s easy to see talent, it’s a different story to trust a youngster who will make mistakes while learning. Mourinho didn’t take that risk with Salah and limited his playing time at Chelsea. Wenger did the opposite by empowering Fabregas. And Mourinho is no exception: Sarri doesn’t want to give more playing time to Hudson-Odoi, and Guardiola is also limiting Foden’s playing time.
Speaking of black or white, Tim said, unequivocally, that Wenger was a miracle worker in the last thread. At least now we know he’s an AKB! 😀
I’m an HBD – hamberder
Mmmm…American fast food. And he served pizza, too, I hear. Wow. I didn’t realize Trump was so open to the contributions of immigrants! Ethnic food in the White House! A new dawn.
Filet-o-fish is English and salads are French so, he also brought some haute cuisine.
ALERT: Hamberders may not be American at all, see v. important update below.
Yes, the decision to buy only Cech is what ultimately ended Arsene’s time. There seemed to just be a lack of belief after that. And the frustrating thing is it SHOULD have been enough. Our finishing let us down. Ozil was on fire with his creativity that season.
There’s another thing that Wenger had to deal with. Was a narrative of constant disproportionate negativity. He just stayed too long. He became an easy target for any frustration. But flaws and all, he was a miracle worker who sacrificed building his CV to build up this club.
We argued at length about Cech only 🙂
It was NEVER enough. We had shortages/needs all over the field… in D, M and A. That for me was pure hubris/knowitallery on Arsene’s part. Know how me made up for it in the January window? We got Elneny. Whom he essentially told us was a touch-tackling midfielder. Arsene, by then, had totally lost it, and the shortcomings of the supermanager model model was laid bare for all to see. That decision eventually begat Mislintat.
Did we argue though? I always thought it was a mistake. At most I would have argued Arsene deserved the benefit of the doubt because for me he’d earned that trust. But I never said it’s what I would have done. We needed a midfielder and a striker more and I had expected us to get them. We’d have won the title most likely if we had.
Really enjoyed this post.
The metaphor of “grey matter”, neither just black or only white is apt also because Wenger does indeed possess so much grey matter. His brilliance was accompanied by a singular vision of doing things “in the right way” (his way, which became more hit and miss and inconsistent towards the end). That combination was also undermined by an obstinacy which could be very frustrating and which contributed in no small way to his departure.
I am very fond of him, miss him terribly but would cringe even he managed Arsenal again. It’s grey world.
🎶We’ve got Mesut Oziiiilllll
He’s Unai Emery’s man
He’s better than Zidane
We’ve got Mesut Oziiiilllll 🎶
I think that the fans’ song may be in need of an update 🙂
Tim, stop making nuanced arguments like a mentally competent adult…
Time to pick a side. Make Arsenal Great Again!
There. I feel better already…
So glad someone has some sense around here, whew! 🙃
Jack Action, if Wenger is just a component in a great recipe, then what are the other components? Meanwhile, your examples of great managers met great players at there clubs too. For instance, Puyol, Xavi, Iniesta and even Messi was already a revelation before Pep came in to Barca. A coach is as good as the material he as to work with. And its hilarious to imply that Wenger did not make Henry, Fabregas and the others a better player.
No doubt, great players make great managers. Wenger inherited a team of great players.
Listen, I have my opinions on Wenger and they aren’t popular. He was past his prime years ago and by hanging on too long ended up helping to create a mess, although it’s not solely his doing. The ownership and Gazidis carry a lot of blame too. I’m just sayin’, I am not nostalgic at all for Wenger. Cheers
Those players he inherited were label great players because Wenger he won trophies with them, check Arsenal position on the table the previous season before he came in. Think about it, would these present players he left behind be label messes if Emery had suddenly turned them to world beaters?
So I rarely read any other blogs these days , let alone comments sections, but there’s one comment by a person named “Johnno “ that I think most on here might find interesting.
I’m not sure what the proper etiquette here is and I hope I’m not out of line , but if anyone’s interested it’s on “ Arsenal Truth” by a certain “Johnno”
arsenal truth? i remember that dude. he used to blog with us back in the day on arsenal america. i forgot his name but we used to have some good discussions back then and he went out and started his own blog. glad to see he’s still up and at it.
Nice read.
Logical assessment of the arguments.
In terms of the club spending money to help Wenger to 1 more title, it would have been a fitting end to his reign. Maybe they should have spent some money in getting a good lawyer and someone like Dein to support Wenger in spending the money. Probably it was offered by the club but turned down Wenger – his flaw. Sigh!
If we had won the league that year, Wenger would have retired and instead of Liverpool we would have got Klopp.
Yeah, I kind of wish he’d gone after the first cup win, but saying that, he’d just ended our trophy drought, and it seemed like he could finally spend some money after all the years of austerity. He deserved a shot at that. And, as bad as things got if those next few years, he added 2 more cups to make Arsenal the most successful team in fa cup history.
It says a lot about the guy, that his worst period in charge involved 3 trophies in 4 years. That was him at his absolute worst.
“Wenger left Arsenal some messes: Xhaka, Mustafi, Kolasinac” – I’m not convinced that these were Wenger’s messes. AW’s behaviour in the transfer market was determined by his convictions and by his knowledge that when the money is spent, it is gone and unlikely to be replaced – whereas Gazidis was susceptible to fan and board pressure and the likely consequence of this was the (panic) purchase of players about whom AW was not convinced and therefore would not have bought and would rather have saved the money.
AW was handicapped in his later years not only by Man City, Utd, Chelsea all bidding aggressively for young players but also by Monaco in France changing their business model and becoming a club reliant on selling players and channeling profits into buying french youth players at high prices. The net result of all of this was that there were fewer hidden gems for AW to buy although it is clear that he became paralyzed as transfer prices spiraled out of control. I guess in retrospect his biggest mistake was not buying aggressively ahead of the new cash from the last EPL deal as he failed to predict prices being pushed up by the extra cash available to all EPL clubs.
Darn he won 3 titles in 4 years….coygs …not a bad way to go out.
Cups. He won cups. Not inconsequential, mind, but they’re not titles.
Those 3 Cups in 4 years are soon going to be looking pretty darn good if current form is anything to go by… never mind “titles”
I know right?
Are any of the next 3 Arsenal managers going to do better than 3 fa cups in their time at the club, however many years they’re given?
I would be overjoyed for any manager to have a better record than that, but it seems unlikely.
How many titles/cups are Arsenal going to win in the next 20 years?
I have a very important point to make about all of this that I think most people have missed.
A HAM-burger doesn’t really contain any HAM! Everyone knows it contains ground beef, which is not even the same animal let alone flavor profile. I feel so mislead. All these years of eating hamburgers and I never once considered that I may have been led around by my nose the whole time.
Then, I had an epiphany. WHAT IF “Hamburger” is pronounced in the German fashion, much like “Berliner” oder “Stuttgarter”?? But that would mean Hamburgers are actually an import and decidedly NOT American. Now I feel mislead AND unpatriotic.
So I did what any good American with a decent wifi connection would do when mislead and unpatriotic: consult wikipedia. Then, witnessing the convoluted and uncertain origins of said sandwich, my distractible mind quickly moved on to something else and I don’t really recall anything of substance from the article. TA DA! I have just painted an artistically defunct dystopian picture of 21st century angst in a run-on sentence, you’re welcome!
Important caveat: Liverpool’s 69 million pound goalkeeper ALLISON BECKER (who could be a teeny bopper with that name) was in fact born in the town of Novo Hamburgo, Brazil. Does that mean he has the power to keep 69 million pounds of Hamburgers??
Please write only considerate, thoughtful responses, thx.
Great post, but I’m amused to see how you can’t see what’s going on at the Arsenal. “Arsène Wenger left some messes: Xhaka, Mustafi, Kolasinac.” And Players acquisition had been led by statDNA for few years. Players like Xhaka, Mustafi. These 2 assertions are going in opposite directions. Would you like to know what a less is looking like? You can see it in Arsenal current situation on and of the pitch. A team without any playmaker. The highest paid player not worth even for the bench for a game against West Ham. The longest serving player of the club, and maybe one of the most decisive player of the team is leaving for free at 28. Chief Scout, which brought Auba (our top scorer, top scorer of the league) is set to leave the club after just 13 months. Arsenal seems to be managing by Jose Mourinho right now. Arsenal have been a big mess for about 10 years now. And Wenger took the blame during this period because of his commitment to the club. Now that he left, the ugly reality is what we’re seeing right now. I’m afraid of what the rest of the season might be. Maybe, Arsenal is the next Man United. Brrrr