Tuesday, September 7th, 2010 « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. Supporting the Lord Wenger; coach of the decade

Wenger’s theory and practice of football – part 2

By Tony Attwood

I pointed out in part 1 of this article that Wenger brought to Arsenal a new approach to football, not just in the style of playing, but also in the style of coaching, of economics, and of running the club.

However the world changes, and football was not blind to what Wenger had done to Arsenal. When he had joined us, the club had been in a poor way. Bergkamp was putting in performances far below his magnificent best, Wright was playing out on the wing and wanting a transfer, and we had a manager who thought that the way to manage was to be a traditional hard man. Only the Graham back five were still in place, and that was all that saved us.

We qualified for the Uefa cup on the last day of the Rioch season and celebrated as if we had just won the treble.

Then, after Wenger joined, in just a couple of years the club had become utterly different, successful, bubbling with a new style of football, and amazingly buying in a young Frenchman for £250,000 and selling him for £25m just a few years later. Arsenal had set a new level, and everyone got ready to catch up.

The catch up came very quickly. As Wenger said in one interview, when he arrived in England he could send a scout to a second division game in France and the scout would be the only scout there. Now, he said, you have to fight for a seat.

So part one of the changes meant it was necessary to search further afield for talent, or study players in much more detail and find someone who had been overlooked. This was not a total revolution, since Wenger had been looking as far afield as South America from the start, and there is a story that when Steve Rowley met Arsène Wenger for the first time, Wenger asked him to go to northern Brazil to watch a player, and Rowley was shocked – he normally tended to go no further than Luton.

But soon there were 12 Arsenal scouts in the UK, and the club introduced what has become known as world-wide scouting with individual scouts covering north America, Mexico, three in South America, one in each of Scandinavia, Iberia, France/Switzerland, Germany and central Europe, Italy, Slovenia and Croatia, and one for the Netherlands/Belgium.

Arsène Wenger had worked from the position that all players who hold EU passports or are entitled through through a parent or grandparent, are eligible to play in the Premier League.

But not only did the EPL catch up with this notion, two other changes happened. First Chelsea showed a new way of financing a club, and everyone knew that there was a world beyond England. By 2010 over 260 foreign players were playing in the EPL (compared with 11 named in the starting line ups of the first Premier League weekend in 1992-3.)

Out of this development three more changes occurred. First it became wholly obvious that Chelsea could buy anyone they wanted and had no need of a youth policy. Second the Home Office were doing their bit to make life more difficult, tightening the rules on bringing in players from outside the EU. And third, as we have noticed, everyone was scouring France looking for the talent that previously Wenger was alone in watching.

Wenger needed a way around this and he looked at countries in the EU where players can get EU nationality with greater ease (in the UK it takes five years and a citizenship test). Belgium, Spain and Portugal all fitted the bill, and experiments were undertaken. One of the most radical was the Beveren Experiment where the entire club was taken over and used as a developing ground for players from the Ivory Coast. Uefa eventually passed a rule saying that this could not continue.

This was however not enough. Several elements of the old theory (food, speed, lifestyle) were still in place, but we needed more. Unfortunately the players from the opening of the new academy were still not ready for the transition – not because of any failure of policy, but because they were simply not old enough yet, and worse Arsenal’s reputation had now started to work against them.

Very early on Arsenal became known in France as a French club that happened to play in the EPL. As such a lot of French players wanted to play for Arsenal, and as Wenger’s reputation grew, so that desire to work with him intensified. That was in our favour.

But while almost every player under the sun wanted to work for Wenger, and would willingly go to Arsenal, as soon as anyone got a sniff that Arsenal wanted a player the value went up. To be fair the same happened with Chelsea, but there it was for a different reason, and the consequences were quite different.

If Chelsea wanted a player the price could go up because Chelsea could afford it – and quite often they paid. If Arsenal wanted a player (the selling club argued to itself) it was because the player was far better than the club had ever realised, and so the player was clearly worth a lot more. Quite literally managers would think, “Goodness, that guy must be better than I thought – in which case I am not letting him go for a miserable £5m”.

It is often argued that within such a scenario there is no harm in paying the inflated price asked for just to get the player. But the argument within Arsenal is, I believe, that once a club of the high international profile of Arsenal is seen to pay over the odds for a player then you not only pay more than you should on that occasion, you will pay an even more inflated price next time. A selling club sells a £5m player for £8m to Arsenal. Everyone notices, and the next £5m player Arsenal wants is put up to £10m and so on. Price inflation. Ask Chelsea and Man City – they know all about it.

In short the argument will be, the club will want more because Arsenal are asking, and since Arsenal did indeed pay way over the odds for X last year, it is worth holding out until the last minute because they will be the ones to blink first.

Worse, it became clear that Chelsea wittingly and unwittingly were changing all the rules of transfers. Wittingly because they would on occasion appear to move for a player that they did not want, just to make life difficult for Arsenal to sign that player. Arsenal scouts are seen watching X, so Chelsea come in with an enquiry. Chelsea can always pay more than Arsenal, so the club hold out for the Chelsea figure, whether the offer is real or no.

And unwittingly through the action of agents, and their allies in the popular press and in the blogs, who endlessly talk up possible transfers of players. The agents tips off the journalist that his player is talking to a big club, and the club that has the player under contract immediately inflates the price.

Money was available for the players, but not an infinite amount so it became a balancing act – continuing keeping the club at the top, while finding ever more obscure players to join the team without having to pay insane prices, and waiting for the first bunch of talented youngsters to come through.

In other words the key elements of the Wengerian philosophy remained true, but key elements, were under attack on all fronts. Players were much harder to find because everyone was now scouring Europe, the Home Office was making it harder to bring in players, Uefa closed down the Beveren experiment, Chelsea could afford everyone and drove prices up, while every club that heard Arsenal were interested increased the value of the player on the grounds that he was “better than I realised”.

Indeed there are even stories (although of course they might just be stories) that suggest that every time an Arsenal scout is seen at a ground, the club immediately phones Chelsea and Man City and asks if they want to buy.

Of course Wenger had never seen the transfer as the solution to all his problems, but this assault from all sides was probably greater than Wenger imagined might happen. Although very early transfers such as Ljunberg and Kanu had been successes, there were always transfers that didn’t work out (Pennant, Wreh…) For every Henry, Lauren, Wiltord, Vieira, there were players who had problems of one sort or another (Edu with his passport, and then a family that could not settle, Jeffers…). Compared with other managers Wenger was a wonderful manipulator of the market, but even he couldn’t always get it right. Reyes and Van Persie both joined us at the same time, remember.

I believe that Wenger has always known how blunt an instrument the transfer window is, and with the extra competition for overseas players, and the intensified scrutiny that all his moves come under it became impossible to find too many great gems.

So from here Wenger introduced a whole series of reforms which modified his philosophy and the whole outlook of the club. It was in fact probably the biggest reform ever in the history of any first division club.

I’ll describe it in the final part of this account of the philosophy of Wenger.

Part 1: The Wengerian philosophy

Part 2: Theory and Practice

Part 3: The Total Revolution

It is not Wenger, it is the Wengerian philosophy that matters

By Tony Attwood

The issue has been raised a number of times: this blog has gone totally over the top in praising Arsène Wenger, instead of recognising his faults.

Maybe there’s something in that, and if so, it is entirely my fault. So I thought I would go back, look at Wenger, and all he has done, and try to put forward a better analysis of the view that I have of our manager.

In what follows I call him a practical philosopher, and it is a term that one can argue with – but it is where I inevitably find myself starting when I consider Wenger and his impact on football.

Arsène Wenger has never set himself up as a philosopher, but I see him as one because he has a vision of what football could be like; a vision based on a theory and experimented with in practical form on a daily basis.

At once this suggests that “philosopher” is too narrow a term for Wenger has gone much further than philosophers from Plato to Marx, as he has built a practical example of his philosophy of football in action. For that I admire him, more than I have admired anyone else in 50 plus years of watching football. To me he has gone far beyond the one previous philosopher we have had in the club: Herbert Chapman. Wenger is not just the most successful manager we have ever had – he is much more than that.

In fact I would argue that because of the rapidly changing nature of professional football in Europe he has not only evolved a complete theory of how a football club should be run, but he has done this not once but twice – changing the practical application of his philosophy as the world of football changed.

In this article, I am going to deal with part one of his work at Arsenal – the initial philosophy. In my next article I deal with how Wenger adjusted his views following changes in the footballing environment in which he works.

So, my argument is that it is the philosophy of Wenger which is of vital importance. If the club gets it right, when Wenger goes they will bring in a new manager who will continue to implement and experiment with the Wengerian philosophy, just as George Allison and Tom Whittaker did from the early 1930s to the mid 1950s taking the Chapman philosophy forward for some twenty years after the great man died in office.

And in summary, that’s my point. Wenger like Chapman had a philosophy which he laid down and then implemented, and then left for others to develop further. It is the only way that great reformers work, and Wenger is the greatest of all the reformers.

The initial theory

Wenger, upon arrival to the club considered a series of reforms that not only would benefit the club in theory, but would also be rapidly achievable in practice. His view in summary seems to me, from the outside, to be…

1. That players could be fitter and extend their useful playing careers if they changed their diet, their drinking, and to some degree their lifestyle.

2. That the traditional notion that foreign players could not bring huge benefits to English clubs was fundamentally mistaken. This old view was based on a completely false idea that there was a peculiarly English way of playing the game and that somehow foreigners were unsuited to it either because they didn’t have experience of playing the game that way, or because they simply couldn’t play the game the English way. English football remains different from much of European football – that is so – but there is no reason why it cannot be played by Europeans.

3. Because English clubs did not go after foreign players they often overlooked great talent overseas. What’s more, because English clubs searched the British leagues for players, the cost of those players was artificially inflated because there were many managers after them in the closed market of Britain. Foreign players of great talent were available at much lower cost however, if only one knew where to look.

4. While there was a benefit of bringing in established players, if one worked with younger players they would be brought up in the Wengerian way of thinking, and so would be better. This policy depended on being able to spot not just talent now, but talent in the future, and build it.

This policy thus led to the setting up of a new approach to youth football, in which a team would be recruited at around the age of 9 or 11 and melded into a team that would play the same way as the first team, and would eventually contribute significant numbers of players to the first team. (This might sound obvious, but it was not so in the 20th century, when the tendency was to bring in the best players you could find and work with them. This approach was much more clinical – involving a search for young lads already showing signs of playing the Arsenal way).

Then, as the group got to 16 years old (when players from other parts of the EU could be introduced) they would be brought into the mix if there was seen to be a shortfall in that area. Thus we would end up not with an exclusively English team but (because of the restrictions on bringing in schoolboy players from outside the local area) a mostly English team.

Further, once the process was started, it would run continuously. Of course one could not expect each year to be a spectacular year, but once the first bunch had begun to mature, then each year new players would come through.

Since raising a player at the club is far cheaper than buying him in, (and also more reliable since one can see how he develops according to the club’s methods, and can mould the player into the club’s ethos) this would ultimately make the club much more profitable than other clubs who were dependent in buying in players from lesser clubs.

5. The overall effect of this approach would be to win trophies and to get the club into the elite group of Europe among the clubs who qualified for the final stages of the competition year after year (where Arsenal had never been) and keep the club there through taking these points and playing a positive attack orientated style of football.

And it has worked, giving the club its most successful period in football in its 124 year history – keeping it in the top four of English clubs since 1998 – a record far in excess of anything achieved in the 1930s. Indeed I have not checked every detail but I think that in terms of appearing consistently in the top four, Arsenal is now the most successful club of all time in England. (If not, then we are one year away from that record).

This then was the basic philosophy. However as time progressed the world of football changed, most notably with the advent of a new phase with the Chelsea approach to the benefactor model of football finance – an approach which had such an impact that ultimately it led to the financial reforms that became introduced by UEFA in 2010.

In my second piece on the Wenger philosophy and approach to football I shall deal with Wenger’s response to the changes in football which arose as clubs became more aware of what he was doing, and came up with their own methods of handling Arsenal, and in some ways, trying to make money on the back of Arsenal’s approach.

Part 1: The Wengerian philosophy

Part 2: Theory and Practice

Part 3: The Total Revolution

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