Arsenal take huge gamble rookie Arteta will pay off
After the experience of Unai Emery did not deliver, the north London club look to have been seduced by the promise of a blank page
It was 20 years last month that Blackburn Rovers benefactor owner Jack Walker was forced – or so he felt – to sack his manager Brian Kidd who, in post for less than a year, had suffered relegation from the Premier League and made precious little impact in the second tier.
More than anything, Walker was enraged at his players, upon whom he had spent a lot, but the results were the results and Kidd had to go – and he has never been a manager since. He is now the elder statesman at Manchester City, where he has fulfilled different backroom roles for over 10 years. If you watch the Amazon Prime documentary closely you can see him looking on stoically in the corner as Pep Guardiola launches one of his pre-match whiteboard word blizzards.
Yet when he was appointed as a manager of a top-flight club for the first time in December 1998, Kidd looked like a serious choice – he had seven years under his belt as an assistant to Sir Alex Ferguson as Manchester United took shape as a trophy-winning machine. That proximity to a bona fide managerial genius, all that time at the master’s shoulder watching him work, can be a powerful influence on a club in search of a manager, with no clear idea of where to start.
The same impulse must have been the driving force in Arsenal’s appointment of Mikel Arteta, a man with no managerial track record, unless one counts a single game when Guardiola was serving a Uefa touchline ban.
None of the Arsenal executive team charged with appointing a new manager was in his current role when Arteta retired at the club in 2016. None has any more than the word of others that the
Spaniard is more capable now than he was when both sides got cold feet in the summer of last year and Arsenal opted for Unai Emery.
This may be the dawn of a great rookie manager, but it should also be recognised for what it is: a giant punt on an assistant coach who has been given one of the biggest jobs in Europe on the basis of no managerial experience of any kind. It is a watershed in the process for appointing elite club managers, and the success or otherwise of Arteta will define whether it launches a trend for seeking out the facsimiles of successful coaches, or quite the opposite.
Comparables? Bob Paisley had never managed before he was promoted – reluctantly – from assistant to manager at Liverpool in 1974, although his career progression, like that of Joe Fagan after him, was at the heart of one of the game’s most successful dynasties. You could say the same of Walter Smith, promoted from assistant at Rangers in 1991 to continue the club’s dominance. Jose Mourinho, hitherto a career assistant, was promoted to manager of Benfica in September 2000. Otherwise, as far as first jobs go in management, it is hard to find another like Arteta.
Guardiola and later Tito Vilanova were both managers of Barcelona B, competitive in the Spanish league system, before they progressed to the real Barcelona. So too Zinedine Zidane, who managed the equivalent side at Real Madrid before becoming assistant and then manager of the senior team.
Steve Mcclaren, David Wagner and Julian Nagelsmann have all been appointed from assistant or coach of junior sides, but none of them at a club the size of Arsenal. Joachim Low, perhaps the most celebrated promoted assistant of all, was first a club manager – and not a particularly successful one.
It is a sign of where the appointment process has reached that the allure of a manager who has never made a bad decision – because he has never had to make a decision – offers a greater attraction than those who have made thousands, good and bad.
There will always be at Arsenal the attraction of the thunder-crack “Arsene who?” appointment. In other words a managerial silver bullet: an inspired appointment that solves all problems – playing style, recruitment, image – for a generation.
That is a harder case to make for Chris Wilder or Eddie Howe or Sean Dyche, all of them burdened by the baggage of the millions of missteps and perceptions that are held about them, accrued over the course of a career.
It is not so much their Britishness that is the problem in moving to a bigger club, just that it can be easier to believe in the promise of a blank page than the reality of all the imperfections that inevitably go into a career. These are also older, experienced figures, less likely to be dictated to by the layers of management that have accumulated at Arsenal.