If Mr Wenger went, would anyone take the job? « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News, supporting the club, the players and the manager

By Tony Attwood

It has become commonplace to cite the names of famous big time managers who might come in to replace Mr Wenger when he leaves, but such commentaries tend generally to leave out one important question: would such a man want to come to Arsenal?

In fact I believe that Arsenal and Man U have a similar dilemma: the  replacement problem.  However my focus here will be on Arsenal.

In fact there’s a whole raft of reasons why top name managers will, I believe, look twice at the Arsenal situation when Mr Wenger leaves, and then look away.  Here’s just a few of them.

1.  The referee bias in favour of certain clubs, which we have rigoursly charted on this site, and which has been picked up elsewhere, is not an unknown factor among the management fraternity.  And quite simply, the fact that Arsenal suffer in this way means that they are not part of the Calciopoli epidemic that is now within the Premier League, as our figures and reporting on the way the refereeing is organised, has clearly shown.

That means that Arsenal does not do favours to refs.  That means that our chances of winning the league or FA Cup are much reduced, if not somewhere around zero.  So why would a top manager come to such a club?

2.  This problem also means that it is getting harder and harder to recruit top name players to the club.  They know, as others in the game know, that something rotten is going on.  Of course they know because they see the way refs behave, week in week out, and they know which clubs are getting all the decisions their way and which ones are not.

This is turn makes it harder to recruit top players – they would sooner go to a club that is engaged in Calciopoli even if that club is awash with players, because there is a chance of a medal, and a chance of getting all the decisions going your way.

3.  Arsenal’s crowd used to be seen as supportive, urbane, knowledgeable and friendly, in the general footballing world.  All matches sold out, and the away section at games likewise sold out and noisy.  Now the AAA has had an effect.  Arsenal is seen, in my view, as a place of in-fighting among fans, and having within it a terrible split.   There is talk of boycotts, talk of fighting between fans, and talk of a rejection of what the board has been doing.

Of course it is not really like this since most of the noise is on the blogs, and many readers and commentators therein are either non-attenders, or indeed (in some cases) supporters of other clubs who enjoy stirring things up.

But the fact is that when Mr Wenger arrived, the expectations of the club were low – getting into the Uefa cup on the last day of the season before he arrived was a matter for huge rejoicing at Highbury.  When Tony Adams dismissed Mr Wenger as someone who knew nothing about English football and therefore would be a poor manager, no one really minded that too much either.

The last manager had been fairly awful, and had lost part of the dressing room, the one before that had been sacked for financial matters, so expectations were on the floor.

But now, there is every possibility that the new man will get a week or two before the bloggers who hound Arsene Wenger every day will get on the new man’s back.  Is it worth coming to Arsenal for that?  Probably not.

3. Just as there is no ref fixing at Arsenal there is no huge pot of money on the scale of Man C or Chelsea or (quite possibly) QPR.  So the chance of going out and buying success is very limited.   Mr Wenger solved that, as we are seeing on the Arsenal History site at the moment, by getting players in on the cheap (Vieira £3.5m, Overmars £5m etc), and by selling (Merson for £5m).  We would need a manager who could do that – and many of the very big names have made their names by buying big at big prices.  That’s not an option at Arsenal, where the funds simply are not there.

4.   For those managers working outside of England, there is a recognition that working in a league that will do nothing about match fixing, and which is itself working with the corrupt and incompetent FA (now embroiled in the post-world cup fiasco, and it seems, legal cases) is not ideal.  Working within a country that has one central body, and a set of clearly defined and understood rules and expectations rather than the rambling shambling mess that is football in England, is a much nicer prospect.

5.  Of course the EPL is rich, but football finance is on the edge due to the TV challenge in the European Courts which has gone against Sky and its fellow retailers of football.  The courts are saying that it against EU rules for anyone to stop people in England having dishes pointing at any satellite, and tuning into football from elsewhere, and indeed showing the programmes in a pub.  When that ruling is confirmed, the value of Sky’s football franchise will drop like a stone and the money will drift away.

This is of course speculation, but we have been in a Golden Era since the Bosman ruling and Mr Wenger’s proof that non-UK players could make a huge difference to English football.  Sky then found itself sitting on a pile of gold… but all stories do have an end, and the end of this one is just around the corner.

6.  If point five is true, then another factor comes into effect: the huge churn rate of the EPL.  Over half the top league of 10 years ago will not be playing in the Premier League next season because they have fallen on hard times.  Some of these clubs were in their day big timers.  Top clubs don’t stay top forever in England, in the way that they do in other countries, and the fact that there is ref bias and financial doping going on wholesale in this country, with no one taking any action to stop it, just enhances the instability.  Being at a top club is not a guarantee of eternal success, or near success, as it is in say Scotland, or Spain.

7.  And yet there is a large section of the blogging population who believe that taking a club that not so long ago was finishing 12th in the Premier League, into a position so that it qualifies for the Champs League every single year (and not even clubs like the mighty Milan can do that) is a failure.   The expectations among some (many of whom I suspect don’t actually go to games now, and probably didn’t in 1995 when we finished 12th) are so high that failure to win the league would be seen as absolute failure, and lead to calls for sacking.  Indeed any defeat against a team defined as “lesser” than Arsenal would lead to the same, in my view.

This is the view in Spain with Real Mad and Barca.  But there is a guarantee there that they will finish first or second, and let us not forget, they get all the TV money that is related to their club, rather than having to share it.

So it is as if the expectation of Spain has been transmuted into the wholly different situation in England.  A bit odd, but then so is the whole situation.

8.  And then there’s the media.  The rest of Europe by and large look on England, with its press and its libel laws, with horror.  We are so used to having people’s private lives spread across the popular press, that we somehow assume it is normal.  But pick up papers in other parts of the world, and this is far from the case.

At the moment matters are being held slightly in check by the “super injunction” through which we now have a situation in which the majority of the England team are said to have taken out “super injunctions” to stop the press saying anything about their private lives.

But the whole legal system is under review, not least because of England’s growing reputation for protecting the rich and famous, and the press’ ever extending attempts to find stories among the slightly less rich and famous.

Is it worth the risk of having your private life exposed the moment you step off the plane, and before your team of lawyers is in place?  Probably not – unless the club can afford to pay for the gags to be put in place.  And I don’t think Arsenal could, or would.  Man City and Chelsea, maybe.  Arsenal?  No.

9.  Managing the youth system is therefore a priority for any manager.  We don’t have the finances to compete with Chelsea, Man C, Real Mad etc.  So we bring through the youth team.  Mr Wenger has shown himself to be adroit at doing this, and is willing to put up with endless abuse from “fans” about his use of younger players.   But he can do that because he has the knowledge and insight, and the team working with him who can do this.   Nurturing Jack Wilshere from the age of 9 has been quite a feat.  But a new manager would probably only be here for a couple of years.  Would he be able to continue that process?  Would he be willing to?  I am not too sure.  Would he keep the youth structure together?  Probably not.

10.  A couple of days after Mr Wenger got off the plane and arrived at Highbury, a pack of journalists took up position on the steps of the main entrance calling for him to make a statement about “the rumours”.  The rumours were disgusting and disgraceful, and had not one ounce of truth in them, but that didn’t stop the press.  Indeed it never does.

So strong was the action by the press that these foul and baseless stories are still repeated by supporters of other teams on a week by week basis.

The board advised Mr Wenger not to go out and talk to the journalists outside, and I have been told that they were worried that Mr Wenger did not fully appreciate what the press was like in England.  But he went out and faced them.

“What do you have to say about the rumours Mr Wenger,” shouted a journalist.

Mr Wenger smiled.  “What rumours?” he said.

“The rumours Mr Wenger.  What do you have to say about them?”

“What rumours?” asked Mr Wenger, a smile on his face, and his arms crossed.

So it went on, until the journos got bored and went away.  Mr Wenger had won that round, because no journo dared say what the rumour was, since if he did he would immediately get a slander writ against him and his paper, and he would lose his job and the paper would lose £££££££.

They were testing him, to see if he would be so stupid as to mention the rumours and so allow them to follow up.  He didn’t, he won.

Would a new manager, perhaps with less of a command of English in his first days, be able to face this?  Would he want to be condemned on day one with a wholly false set of stories about his private life and the reason he had left his previous job?

I suspect not, not because of his cleverness, but because the knowledge of the press in England is widespread, and without the money to buy off the press, and with the hatred of Arsenal that the press now show, these people would know just how awful it would be here.

So I believe we have a problem, and finding a new manager is going to be tough.  We need to get this sorted over time, and find someone as unknown as Mr Wenger was when he came to us, but just as brilliant.  I don’t know who it is going to be, but it is not going to be someone famous coming in suddenly to take over.  If Mr Wenger were to leave because of the bile and hatred thrown at him by the AAA we would certainly be stuck with a third rater.

Mr Rioch anyone?