Dein’s revenge? « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News, supporting the club, the players and the manager
By Walter Broeckx and Tony Attwood
A group of fans have been calling for Dein to be reinstalled at Arsenal again. Now I don’t know much about the inner kitchen at Arsenal so I have to rely on what I read and hear.
I think it is fair to say that Dein has done a lot of good things for Arsenal. I will not take anything away from him. But he had a different take on how Arsenal should move on. He wanted Arsenal to move to Wembley and he also wanted us to embrace Usmanov and take his money. So he wanted us to be some kind of Chelsea or City.
I can imagine that part of the Arsenal fans that want to see big names coming to Arsenal and even bigger debts surrounding our club; and they want Mr Dein.
Maybe there have been other reasons that we don’t know about but I think this is what came out in the open when Dein got kicked out by the rest of the board. Since then Dein has become a mythical figure of some part of the U10 fans we have. They make it sound as if in the Dein days we bought big names all the time. But when I think back of the signings we made in those days they also had a lot of things in common with these days: mostly young and unknown players. Players with no big names.
Who was Thierry Henry when he came to us? Who was Patrick Vieira when he came to us? Even Dennis Bergkamp was no longer a big name, having had a very poor time in Milan. During his time there the media stopped their weekly “Donkey of the week” column about the worst player in Italy that weekend and called it, “Bergkamp of the week”. Platt was his other signing was Dein’s other signing and he was in the last three years of his playing career after four years covering Bari, Juve and Sampdoria.
I think most of the U10 had never heard of some of those players and maybe were complaining about Dein, as they now complain about Wenger, for buying them.
But now they make it look as if we only signed world class players that were already big stars. But the myth that Dein brought in big names is a myth that is very much alive amongst that part of the fans. Maybe the shout to bring him back comes because he was at Arsenal when we bought Wiltord from Bordeaux who had been French League champions, but I am not sure they really follow French football that closely, or even a player who scored in the Euro 2000 final. Yes Wiltord was our record signing when he came in 2000, (a fee only surpassed by that for Arshavin), but was he really a world star?
As usually happens when people throw other people out of the board there is a lot of hostility. This is a normal human reaction. And certainly when the disagreement is about which direction the club should be heading the next decades (ie is it the self sustaining model the majority of the board wants or the billionaire model a la City and Chelsea that Mr Dein wanted). Wenger who was brought in by Dein (as the story goes) had a good relationship with Dein who helped him with the transfer dealings in those days. And it was said that they were personal friends. But Wenger agreed with the rest of the board on the self sustaining model so he stood in the other camp and maybe this also could have had an influence on their friendship.
But when I now look back over the years I do wonder if it is any coincidence that most of the players that are leaving us are players that have Darren Dein is their agent. Darren Dein is the son of David Dein. And he was the agent of Thierry Henry when he left us. If my memory serves me right he also was the agent of Hleb. Anyone knows if he was the agent of Flamini?
But now it seems that Dein is the agent of Clichy who just left us. He is the agent of Fabregas and since then you hear nothing but Cesc will leave us in the media. And he is the agent of Nasri and you hear the same stories.
So I wonder if this is some kind of revenge against Arsenal? Here’s a fanciful view: Father Dein doesn’t want us to be successful. Because if we were successful in the way we are doing it now it would prove the board right and him wrong. So is he in some way, through his son Darren, trying to make sure that we don’t get success?
Is it a coincidence that all the players who leave/presumably want to leave/don’t want to sign a new contract are players who have Dein as their agent? An agent is very powerful these days and has a big influence on a player. So when an agent tells his player that his current club (Arsenal) will never be successful this might have an impact on the player. (Of course this is all supposition, but so is the view that we don’t sign or re-sign players because of Wenger’s stubbornness. The mere fact that an idea is repeated a lot does not make it true).
We have seen on many occasions that agents start rumours to get a transfer from their player. So again I wonder do many of the Cesc rumours come from Dein the Younger? In fact Dein is the only winner no matter what happens. If he can sell Cesc his bank account will benefit. And Arsenal will be weaker and less successful. And if Cesc isn’t sold and Arsenal stand firm, thanks to the rumour it will undermine the position of Cesc and the fans could turn against him. This will have a negative influence on the player and his performances and so the chance of Arsenal not being successful grows bigger.
So is this the revenge of the Dein family on the current board? Again I have to say there is no proof, but for the moment it looks like every time we hear the name Dein it is bad news for Arsenal. So what is going on?
Or is this the revenge of a son who feels his dad has been badly treated? I don’t know if David Dein is still an Arsenal supporter and still wants the best for Arsenal. But I do know that Darren Dein is someone who is working in football, and the apparent result of his actions are that Arsenal’s players ask for transfers.
Of course there are always other explanations: one gentleman wrote on the Arsenal History site this week that all the players who leave do so because they want to win things – and among his list was the fact that Campbell and Kanu went to Portsmouth to win trophies – which they did. Of course one can believe in this sort of pre-cognition, and this is a possible view, but it seems a little fanciful to me. All we can say is that there is a theory that Campbell and Kanu “knew” that by leaving Arsenal to go to Portsmouth they would win something. There is another theory that Dein the Younger is acting against the club’s best interests. There is another that he is working in favour of the club, but that he is getting it all wrong, and the the result is that he is harming the club when all along he is trying to help.
The fact is that we don’t know – all we can see are a few facts: the boardroom bust-up which threw out Dein the Elder, the fact that Dein the Younger is agent to a number of players who want to leave…
David Dein did a lot of good in his days for Arsenal, although it was not always immediately clear just how much good he did (as with Bergkamp’s transfer). We can only hope that his son, as an agent, has a feeling for Arsenal, as he obviously must have for the clients he serves.
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On the history site: all the Arsenal players who are now coaches or managers