Wenger keen to stay ... if Arsenal want him
If this great British club are ready to appoint their first manager in more than 20 years this summer they could opt for a wild card – step forward 29-year-old Julian Nagelsmann
Arsène Wenger has hinted he wants to stay as Arsenal manager – possibly for four more years.
The Frenchman’s future is uncertain following his refusal to sign a new contract beyond the summer, combined with the club’s poor campaign.
But in the wake of Arsenal’s 5-1 Champions League defeat by Bayern Munich, Wenger has given the first sign that he still sees a future for himself at the Emirates Stadium.
When asked to elaborate on Friday’s comments that he wanted to carry on in management next season whether at Arsenal or elsewhere, the 67-year-old said: “If you have a team maybe you can employ me. That’s not a threat, my preference is always to manage Arsenal. I think I have shown that. But I am adult enough to analyse the situation.” Wenger has long been believed to be a master of his own destiny but his latest remarks suggest there is a chance Arsenal could take the decision for him. The man who joined the club in 1996 believes he has a number of years left in him and could even surpass Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement age of 71. “Ferguson has some other interests in life,” he said. “He was older than what I am today, he was four years older and retired at 71. I’m 67. Maybe [I’ll manage for] more, or maybe less. I don’t know, everyone is different. I do not want to take anything away from Ferguson, he was an unbelievable manager, but had enough. I’m not at that stage.”
Arsenal’s mood could not be lower after their humiliation in Germany, a result that Wenger concedes will take considerable time to get over. “It will never be quick,” he said. “We will keep that with us for our whole lives. But if you dwell too much on the past you forget to prepare for the future.”
Arsenal will look to avoid a banana skin tomorrow at non-League Sutton United in the FA Cup fifth round.
“I analyse with clarity, as much as possible, what happened [in Munich] and will see how to find a solution preparing for the next game,” said Wenger. “The future gives you hope and the next game is part of the future.”
By October 1996, Arsenal had already tried unsuccessfully to appoint as their manager the late, great Johan Cruyff, who had been sacked by Barcelona in the summer of that year having gone two seasons without winning a trophy, which tells you something about football’s shorttermism even then.
Cruyff would surely have been a brilliant appointment too, and high profile even in an English game that was still so inward-looking that few had heard of Arsène Wenger, a French league title-winning manager. Yet Cruyff never worked as a manager again after 1996, even though he was just 49 that year, and had won seven major trophies in eight years managing Barcelona.
The then 46-year-old Wenger went on to have the decade of his life – three Premier League titles, four FA Cups and runner-up in a Champions League final – and it makes you wonder if that old wisdom that a manager peaks for just 10 years is true after all. There are exceptions of course, with Sir Alex Ferguson the most notable and Jose Mourinho eager to buck the trend, but never has the job been so consuming or intense as now. The appointment of Wenger in 1996 caused English football to rethink what it wanted from a manager, and also what it could do without. He offered a knowledge of football and footballers, beyond Britain, and he could speak to those players in a range of languages as well as prolong the careers of those English warhorses in the Arsenal squad whom he inherited. The Wenger story has been embellished over the years but in terms of management he signalled the beginning of the end of the fulminating gaffer, the raging tyrant of half-time who assumed in the minds of his players a position of shop-floor seniority. It was the end of the dressing room echoing a traditional workplace, a trope that was still being enacted even then by the new well-paid Premier League generation obliged to live according to norms established in industries sadly dying, or being killed, out there in the real world.
Wenger might not be at the forefront any longer, but he ushered in the era of the super-athlete in the English game. The new training ground he planned at London Colney was once the ultimate modern template although it is starting to age now, as those post-war social housing utopias quickly did, in comparison with 21st-century versions at Tottenham or Manchester City. He gave out caffeine pills to his players in the early days, another idea that has come and gone, although you do wonder if the effect of them on Paul Merson ever truly wore off.
If this summer is to be the end of Wenger, and that great British club Arsenal are about to appoint their first manager in more than 20 years, they cannot simply go out and find a carbon copy of the 46-year-old Wenger of October 1996, bespectacled, shy and bursting with ideas.
Rather the club can ask themselves which norms they would be prepared to break this time in order to create the similar rejuvenating impact that Wenger had when he was that bolt of electricity through a dozing club.
How about once again appointing a name from outside the usual run of managers? How about sacrificing some more of those sacred cows of managerial appointments? What if the man in question was really young? In Germany this year, the standout young manager has been Julian Nagelsmann, who saved Hoffenheim from relegation last season and has taken them up to fourth this time. Nagelsmann is 29.
He was a youth team player at 1860 Munich and then Augsburg but had his career ended by a knee injury and never played professionally.
He worked his way through the coaching levels at Augsburg, first under Thomas Tuchel, and then at Hoffenheim, as well as at 1860 Munich, and in October 2015 he was appointed, aged 28, to become Hoffenheim’s head coach for the start of the 2016-2017 season.
Last February, with the team one off the bottom and seven points from safety, Hoffenheim manager Huub Stevens resigned with health problems.
Nagelsmann won seven of the last 14 games and kept the club in the top flight by a point. This season he has excelled, including a 17-game unbeaten run, the longest in Europe’s top leagues.
He plays high-tempo football. He works with director of football Alexander Rosen, who, at 37, has joked in the past that his and Nagelsmann’s combined ages are less than that of Wenger.
The likelihood in the summer is that Dortmund will sack Tuchel, who seems exasperated at his lack of control at the club, and they are looking at Nagelsmann. Perhaps one day he will even be Bayern Munich manager.
Certainly if he is ambitious then it will be hard to repeat the trick next season at Hoffenheim given that in the summer he will lose captain Sebastian Rudy, a free agent in July, who, along with defender Niklas Süle, will go to Bayern next season.
At first knockings it feels absurd to suggest Arsenal appoint a manager born one month after Lionel Messi. Nagelsmann is younger than Petr Cech, Santi Cazorla, Per Mertesacker, Laurent Koscielny and Olivier Giroud. Neither does he have any Champions League experience, which might be considered a prerequisite.
The received wisdom is that he is one big job away from being capable of taking on Arsenal, but what if that one big job propels him beyond Arsenal’s reach? What if this is his peak 10 years beginning now?
Any consideration of who should replace Wenger would naturally lead the club to look at the up-and-coming Bundesliga managers, such as Tuchel, 43; Ralph Hasenhüttl, 49, at RB Leipzig; and Niko Kovac, 45, at Eintracht Frankfurt.
Nagelsmann feels like a wild card because clubs such as Arsenal do not take chances like that on a largely unproven coach born at the end of George Graham’s first season in charge at Highbury. Arsenal do not take risks.
The club can ask which norms they would be prepared to break this time