Almost 20 years at the top is a hell of a feat. Arsene Wenger is the current king of club management.
After the retirement of Sir Alex Ferguson, Wenger is the longest serving manager in the league by quite some distance. Roberto Martinez is next in line.
And so when we slam Wenger for his transfer policies, we really have to bow to his longevity sometimes. Sometimes we get it wrong. Sometimes he gets it wrong. But more often than not, Wenger leads his club to where they need to be.
And he does it through his love of football. His values are old-school. He loves the taking part, not necessarily winning. His policy is about bringing through young players, playing the sort of football that is cohesive – that is, trying to build out from defensive situations and turning them into attacking situations. Not by counter attacking, but by building. But building an attack you can set up camp in the opposition half. When you do that, you control the game. When you control the game, 90% of the time you win.
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It’s not that simple, of course – as Wenger himself has found out over the past 11 years. He hasn’t won the title, and only managed a few FA Cups.
But for Arsene, it’s about art, not business. Football is about winning, sure, but it’s about more than that too. It’s also about feeling good.
Why else would you play the game? When you’re growing up and you kick a ball around, you enjoy doing it.
You don’t do it simply because you’re likely to win. You do it because you want to be happy, you do it because you enjoy doing what you’re doing.
And that’s Wenger all over.
So much in life changes for you as you get older. It changes as you get more into the thing you’re doing. As you get better at something, as you delve deeper into it, as you become blinkered, you start to get tunnel vision.
As a football coach, that must be about getting results. How do you set your team up to win? Not how do you set them up to play well. There’s a difference. Winning doesn’t mean playing well, and as Arsenal prove season after season, playing well doesn’t mean winning.
Some coaches master that art. The art of winning, and not of playing nice football. Jose Mourinho is the obvious example. At the moment, Manchester United fans might tell you that Louis Van Gaal specialises in the same sort of thing.
But that just shows how subjective all of this is. Manchester United fans demand to be entertained. They don’t want to lose, but they don’t want to win 1-0 after not really pushing forward in search of the goal.
United fans will tell you they haven’t played well, but Van Gaal has a different definition of what that means. Van Gaal thinks his team has played well when they follow his instructions.
Wenger is in the middle. This season he has created a backbone to his team. He’s remembered that even if you play well you won’t win, and you can’t even play well all the time.
So why not create a solidity in the side that means that you can play well and win most of the time, but when you don’t play well, you don’t lose.
That’s the Wenger paradox. In some ways he’s child-like, he manages Arsenal for the enjoyment it gives him when his team plays well. But he’s realised that he gets no enjoyment at all from losing and playing badly. So he’s matured into a coach with a pragmatic side.
His years at the top have given him experience and know-how. Maybe it’s about time we trusted that.
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