Monday 16 August 2010

The Arsenal Culture

Why does Arsene Wenger keep his job? Five years without a trophy should be enough to see any manager of one of Europe’s ‘top clubs’ unceremoniously dumped. It doesn’t seem to work that way at Arsenal, where Wenger’s grip on the driving seat is strengthened as each season passes.

The temptation is to attribute Wenger’s apparent unassailability to the quality of football that his leadership inspires: the team has for several seasons been many football followers' 'second favourite team' for the simple reason that the game it plays is beautiful to watch. Why else is there still a waiting list for season tickets for the Emirates? But, against this, George Graham’s reign was equally secure until his personal integrity was called into question, and Graham’s Gunners played a version of the game that was as functional and aesthetically unattractive as the current regime’s is fluid and beautiful.

It is not as though Wenger’s methods and preferences have left supporters and neutrals blinded by beauty. Everybody knows why the trophy cupboard has been bare for half a decade: the obstinate refusal to sign either a dogged holding central mildfielder (think what a difference Mascherano might have made) or a top-flight specialist striker (Drogba, Torres, Eto’o, take your pick) has been to blame. Sometimes the refusal to face reality has been unusually stark: signing an Arshavin when you need a Pavlyuchenko seems unforgiveable after you’ve seen how a Reyes doesn’t solve your goalscoring problem.

No, if you want to understand why Wenger enjoys such impregnability in the face of failure, you have to look a lot deeper. In fact, you have to understand the culture of the club, and, more importantly, how deeply in tune with that culture Wenger really is.

It is well-documented that Arsenal have won nothing since their FA Cup victory over Manchester United in 2005. This has coincided almost exactly with their move to a new stadium, generally considered to be the most disruptive event in a club's history short of going into administration. With crowd capacity doubled and a new generation of corporate entertainment facilities in place, Arsenal's revenue for home games is now higher than that of any other club in the world. While the club has been playing a financial long game, investing in a platform for future success, Wenger has studiously avoided issuing the standard set of managerial excuses about lack of transfer funds – indeed, he has appeared to take a perverse delight in being under-resourced, using the situation instead to justify the necessity of deploying the bargain talent he has so assiduously nurtured.

Since his arrival at the club in the mid-1990s, Arsene Wenger has managed the financial aspects of his job like an expert banker, making a multi-million pound profit on the purchase and sale of all but one or two players. This is in sharp contrast to the management style of Arsenal’s peer group, the clubs who would consider themselves the natural incumbents when a European super-league finally emerges. And it is here that we see the cultural uniqueness that sets Arsenal apart: where ‘success at all costs’ has become the norm, ‘stability at all costs’ is the club’s unwritten rule.

What is the basis for this approach? It isn’t simply parsimony – no club too mean to run with the pack would have embarked on the Emirates project. It runs much deeper than mere accountancy. It stems from a profound conviction, inculcated since the days of Herbert Chapman, that the club naturally, as a matter of right, belongs at the top table. The key to survival for any management regime, from the boardroom down to coaching the Women's XI, is the preservation of that grand delusion, and to do so without spending too much.

The conviction itself is not particularly unique, but its source certainly is. Manchester United share the conviction, but in their case it stems from a quasi-religious faith occasioned by the miracle of the post-Munich resurrection. Arsenal don’t have their martyrs (Duncan Edwards, Tommy Taylor) or latter day saints (Best, Law, Charlton, Cantona et al), the men on the pitch are instead factors of production, foot-soldiers and NCOs in a long drawn out historical process of exploitation and dominance. The most that any Arsenal player can hope to achieve by way of status is that of legend, and in hindsight, no more.

The point is amply illustrated by the story of Charlie George. Born and bred an Arsenal man, this local hero scored the goal that won the double and was the most naturally gifted player the club had ever produced. But he was a North London yob at heart, cut from exactly the same cloth as the undesirable elements who packed the terraces in the 1970s. The boy was dangerous, a tribune of the plebs whose heroic status might have proved destabilising in an era of flux. He had to go, and go he did. At almost any other club the departure of such a figure would have been unthinkable, but at Arsenal it caused little more than a ripple of discontent. It was as though the supporters unconsciously acknowledged an underlying principle of the culture of stability: no player can ever, even for a season or just one match, be allowed to become bigger than the club.

And this is why Wenger fits the bill so perfectly, and why his tenure is not, for the time being at least, in question. He doesn’t rock the financial boat, indeed, he helps to keep it afloat, deferring at all times to the priorities and machinations of his boardroom betters; he provides compensatory diversion in the form of stadium-filling beautiful football; his facial expressions are a public demonstration of contrition whenever the team loses – never a mention of the opponents’ ability to wield greater financial muscle in the transfer market; and he keeps the club at the top table through consistent, almost mechanical, Champions League qualification. In short, he is exactly congruent with the Arsenal culture, delivering status and stability with aristocratic ease.

Does this mean he is untouchable? Of course not. If the day comes that Michel Platini devises a formula for the composition of the new European Super League that excludes a trophy-less Arsenal, then Wenger and his delightful passing game will be shown the exit with immediate effect. His replacement will be a ‘proven winner’, a man who delivers silverware by hook or by crook.

3 comments:

  1. Part 1:

    Arsene Wenger was appointed by an Arsenal Board that was still in the process of refining the long-term-view culture that now underpins every commercial decision the club makes. It has always been an essential part of its ethos not to make snatched decision for the sake of short-term gain, and increasingly, since the beginning of the 1990s, it has admitted to its Board professionals from commerce and the Law, including, most recently, the ex-CEO of corporate legal firm Travers, Smith, Braithwaite, who sold Aston Villa to Randy Lerner. In 1996 Wenger replaced a manager, Bruce Rioch, who appeared to have found his feet in his comparatively new role and was beginning to stamp his authority on the role; he certainly didn't do anything wrong. An ex-international who commanded considerable respect from players and other managers, he was responsible for the arrival to Arsenal of Dennis Bergkamp. Suddenly he had gone, replaced by a man with degrees in Electrical Engineering and Economics, fluency in three languages and competency in three others, with next to no profile in England at all, having managed clubs in Japan and France. Within two years his Arsenal team had won the Double and since his appointment fourteen years ago he has become the most successful- and longest-serving Arsenal manager in the club's history. These are the elements that have punctuated his time at the club, which explain how he has 'survived' a trophy-less six years, why all but a few Arsenal fans forgive him this drought, are willing to practise patience, and presumably, why the Board's approach towards him is similar: His team play a scintillating, attacking style of football that any fan in the world would take pleasure in watching: it largely explains why, in the middle of the worst recession since the 1920s, Arsenal continue to sell out 60,000 seats for the majority of games, continue to announce a waiting list for season tickets and can charge £90 for a single seat at the Emirates. The club is in rude financial health, at a time when we are beginning to see the effects on clubs including Manchester United, Liverpool, Cardiff City, Sheffield Wednesday, Crystal Palace and Portsmouth, to name just a few, of decades of overspending and financial mis-management.

    Part 2 follows.

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  2. Part 2:

    Wenger has a scouting network, with considerable focus on French-influenced north African countries that continues to deliver boys of between fifteen and twenty to the club; these have to possess the qualities which Wenger demands and he and his team then mould and direct the player according to the criteria laid down. They are invariably acquired for next-to-no money and if or when sold on to another club, a significant profit results. Wenger rarely purchases established 'star' players at the extraordinarily-inflated prices paid by other of Europe's leading clubs; he frequently refers to this feature of the game, wearing his economist's hat. Arsenal have failed to qualify for the Champions League once since Wenger began; his budget isn't based on an assumption that the club will do so at the end of each English Premier League season. The wages at Arsenal are two-thirds, maximum those of their close rivals; this punter can only assume that the types of players Wenger introduces to the club believe in the philosophy he conveys to them, in the notion that under his and his coaching team's tutelage they are best-placed to improve as players, that fierce loyalty to him and the discipline he administers ('two strikes and you're out' has been applied to a small number of talented, but, by Wenger's definition, wayward players consistently since he began at the club) will stand them in good stead, that £60,000 a week is probably enough to survive on. His players never discuss him with the press, even those who have moved on to other clubs; his manner and relationship with each individual can only be based on unusually firm foundations, with the support and guidance he offers to lads with an average age when they first meet him of around seventeen crucial elements in this. A coach whose team plays football that attracts, inspires and delivers success (finishing in the top four of the EPL has come to constitute 'success' in the last decade, especially if the team, like Arsenal, consistently advance to the later knock-out stages), creates revenue streams for the club that would warrant the appointment of someone to focus on those as a day job in itself and whose approach to commerce is congruent with that of the members of the Board of the club which employs him. It appears likely that Wenger will decide that he has had enough of being Arsenal's manager before the club decide that he must be replaced by a 'hook-or-by-crook' silverware winner, whether or not the current trophy drought continues.

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