First Wenger created then he took all the GLORY... FURY
Now Arsenal will learn just how hard life is without their legendary manager
‘WHEN THE FLAK RAINED DOWN, WENGER TOOK IT ALL, BUT IN THE END APATHY GOT HIM’
LIKE many great men, Arsene Wenger became in his later life the victim of so much that he had pioneered in his earlier years. One of English football’s most significant agents of change, he became stranded in quicksand in recent years, increasingly powerless as new ideas rose up all around and overwhelmed him..
English football’s French revolutionary, he could not keep up with the new breed who swarmed the barricades. Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp — and before them the great iconoclast, Jose Mourinho — made him look outdated and wan and when he announced on Friday that he would leave, no one knew whether to acclaim his exit as a mercykilling or a regicide.
When Wenger arrived at Highbury in 1996, he soon came to epitomise modernisation and education in a game that still owed more allegiance to mud-bath pitches and terraces that swayed and surged with the passion of the masses than it did to half-and-half scarves and the middle class, all-seater takeover of the prawn sandwich generation that sets its tone today.
He transformed what it meant to be a pro footballer, what you had to eat, what you had to drink or didn’t have to drink, how you trained, how you lived. Paul Merson’s mimes about going out on a drinking session were left behind. Wenger’s philosophy changed the way people in England looked at the game and how they thought about it.
Most of all, the Arsenal sides of his first decade at the club played beautiful football. They were the forerunners of Guardiola’s Manchester City side that has just blitzed its way to the Premier League title. Many said Guardiola could never win the English league playing football his way but one of the reasons he knew he could was that Wenger had already done it.
Guardiola acknowledged that debt on Friday when he talked about Wenger’s influence on the game. ‘The Premier League is the Premier League because of what he has done and his vision,’ Guardiola said.
He was right: Wenger changed the face of English football.
He intellectualised it. He helped to make it cool again. He helped to make it more attractive to a wider audience and he rid it of much of its insularity. Sure, his arrival coincided with the boom in the English game that followed the Taylor Report and the success of Bobby Robson’s side at the 1990 World Cup but he, more than anyone else, showed it a foreign manager could not just be accepted but thrive in England.
He was the first foreign manager to win the English league and his success, as well as the wage explosion in the Premier League, encouraged many others to follow. English dressing rooms, once so closed and parochial that Graeme Le Saux would be mocked for reading The Guardian, became cosmopolitan.
None of that will change now that his end at Arsenal is near. His work is done and it will not be reversed or wiped out. Wenger was the best ambassador there could ever be for the influx of foreign players and coaches into England because it was so obvious he made the football experience better. Those who followed owe him a debt, too.
He did not win the Champions League and that remains a regret both for him and for his supporters but that kind of triumph can be fleeting. History will be kind to Wenger because of the change he brought to English football and because he masterminded the Invincibles season of 2003-04 when his Arsenal team did what no one thought could be done in the modern era and went the whole season unbeaten.
His impending departure leaves our game most of all with a deep sense of gratitude for what he brought to it but it also asks awkward questions about the nature of dissent in English football and whether it can ever be justified for supporters to behave towards a figure like Wenger as many Arsenal fans did late in his reign.
The atmosphere at the Emirates has been toxic for some time. To sit in the press box during the years of his decline and stare out at the fans in the rows nearby has been to see faces screwed up with anger and hear voices fuelled by what sounds like hatred.
Some fans hired planes to fly banners over stadiums where Arsenal were playing, urging Wenger to quit. Wenger Out placards became commonplace. It became a running joke that at almost any demonstration anywhere in the world, someone would be holding a banner calling for the resignation of Arsenal’s greatest manager.
That has shaped the view of Arsenal as a club, too. For some it has defined Arsenal supporters as ungrateful, spoiled and entitled. They won the FA Cup in three of the last four seasons and are in the semi-finals of the Europa League. Not bad for a washed-up manager and a team in decline.
But it would be wrong to be too hard on Arsenal supporters. In a football nirvana, they would have been endlessly patient. They would have reminded themselves constantly that even if they were falling behind their rivals, they were still being managed by one of the greats of the game, a man who had dedicated much of his life to the club, still competing for trophies.
Football doesn’t work like that. There is a difference between being a fan of the game and a fan of a club. There is an argument to say that those fans who have been calling on Wenger to go for the good of the club for the past five years or more were right.
The manner of the dissent was wrong and cruel and disrespectful but perhaps it is idealistic to expect refined opposition to a manager. When Southampton fans wanted former manager Ian Branfoot out of the club, one fanzine printed a picture of him on its front page under the headline: ‘Hope you die soon.’ A speech bubble coming out of Branfoot’s mouth read: ‘Bet I don’t.’
Thankfully, the rancour between Wenger and Arsenal supporters never quite reached that level. In the end, it was apathy that killed him. Empty seats worried the owner far more than plane banners.
The resurrection that those of us who remained loyal to him hoped for never came.