Lance Beauregarde
One day, a man – let’s call him Arsenic Vinegar – and his wife, Mrs Vinegar, were in the car, driving up the M1 for a holiday in Yorkshire or Cumbria or somewhere. Everything was going fine until they got to those roadworks at Luton that have been going on forever and don’t show any signs of ever being finished (which, in and of itself, is a pretty good metaphor for the state of affairs at Arsenal Football Club, but I’ve put a lot of thought into this story, so let’s stick with it). Needless to say, the traffic started to back up, and things looked grim.
‘Look,’ said Mrs Vinegar, waving her phone in Mr Vinegar’s face, ‘the traffic report says it’s going to be bumper to bumper all the way up to Leeds. We should think about taking an alternative route.’
‘Absolutely not,’ Mr Vinegar replied. ‘I’ve got the route all planned out. We’re staying on the M1.’
‘But we could be stuck here for hours,’ Mrs Vinegar protested.
‘Tell me then,’ Mr Vinegar snapped, ‘what route should we take? Give me the names of some top quality A and B roads that are currently available.’
At this point, Mrs Vinegar got the TomTom out of the glove box and started fiddling around with it. ‘Here,’ she eventually said, ‘I’ve got an alternative route all mapped out. All you have to do is follow the instructions.’
‘Listen,’ Mr Vinegar snapped, ‘either we get there on the M1, or we don’t get there at all.’
‘But―’
Before she could finish, however, Mr Vinegar had put his fingers in his ears and was shouting, ‘I can’t hear you’ at the top of his voice.
In 2005, Arsenal won the FA Cup. Of course, as Arsenal fans, we were all delighted, but none of us realised at the time that it was actually one of the worst things that could possibly have happened to the club. After beating Man Utd in perhaps the most one-sided final in the entire history of one-sided things, Arsène Wenger publicly praised the spirit and tenacity of his players. Privately, however, he was hugely embarrassed. As the French journalist Philippe Auclair claims in his biography of Thierry Henry, Lonely at the Top, away from the glare of the media, Wenger was so mortified by the manner of the victory that he vowed that from then on, he would rather lose beautifully than win ugly. And losing beautifully is exactly what he’s been doing ever since.
Some would argue that the lack of silverware over the last eight years is, in fact, attributable to the huge investment in the new stadium, the lack of a dodgy billionaire sugar-daddy, and the resulting lack of funds to be able to compete with the other big teams in the transfer market. Whilst I agree with this to the extent that it explains why we have not challenged for the title or the Champions’ League every season, it does not explain why we have not even been able to win first place in an Arsenal FC lookalike competition. It does not explain, either, how Swansea, Tottenham, Portsmouth and Birmingham have all been able to win trophies during that period. By the way, who was it that Birmingham beat in the 2011 Rumbelows Milk Carling Coca-Cola Worthington Capital One League Cup final? Oh yes, that’s right: f***king Arsenal!!!
Now, on one level, Arsène Wenger’s love of the beautiful game is admirable, almost to the point of being romantic. ‘What makes daily life interesting,’ he once mused, ‘is that we try to transform it to something that is close to art.’ Let’s be honest, only a serial killer or a Chelsea fan could not be moved to tears at the sheer beauty of such a poetic statement, but on another level, a level that exists in real life and doesn’t have its head shoved so far up its own arse that it can see out of its mouth, it is just frustrating. The fact is, there is room for beauty and art in football, as Barcelona and Spain have shown over the last few years, but, as Bayern Munich demonstrated with their demolition of the former in last season’s Champions’ League, there is also still a need for good, old-fashioned pragmatism and tactical nous. This is not something Arsène Wenger seems to be willing to accept.
The second problem with the man they call Arsène (because it’s his name) is that, just as he has no interest in winning silverware unless he wins it the right way, he seems also to have no interest in signing a player unless it is for a price that he thinks is reasonable. For this reason, in recent years we have missed out on the signatures of Juan Mata, Xabi Alonso, Gonzalo Higuain, Gustavo, Gary Cahill and, of course, the mighty Mark Schwarzer. His obsession with getting a bargain is so extreme that if you were to put Pele and Lionel Messi together in a bag and they somehow managed to conceive a child, and that child grew up to be a better player than the two of them combined and was then offered to Arsenal for ten pounds, Arsène Wenger would probably turn him down on the grounds that, as far as he was concerned, £8.72 would be a more reasonable price.
The signings of Mertesacker, Arteta, Podolski and Cazorla all seem to indicate that he has moved away in recent years from his previous insistence that the Arsenal squad should be comprised entirely of unborn foetuses – ‘We don’t sign superstars, we make them’, he said back in 2007 – and this new focus on bringing in experience is promising, but he has not yet moved away from the idea that it is a) okay to walk away from a deal if the selling club’s valuation is above what you think the player’s true value is and b) that it is actually possible to put an objective valuation on a player anyway. In his defence, he is not wrong when he claims that the transfer market these days is crazy. After all, a market where the combined value of Andy Carroll’s last two transfers comes to £50 million, despite the fact that he has giant bags of sand for legs and the hair of a South American drug baron’s henchman from a ’90s American cop movie, doesn’t make any sense, but that is the market, and Arsène Wenger either needs to accept it, or just not think about it and let the board worry about the financial side of things instead. Or just f**k off.
At most football clubs, the role of the manager is to manage the team and let the people behind the scenes worry about the finances. If whichever manager Chelsea have this week was to ask Roman Abramovich to sign a player, he wouldn’t add ‘but only if you can get him for [insert price here] or less’ to the end of the sentence. But when Arsène Wenger asks his board to buy a player, he does so with precisely this caveat, and because the board members are all in love with him and want to run away with him to Mexico and spend the rest of their lives diving for oysters and taking long walks along the beach, they say ‘okay Arsène.’ And it is holding the club back. Arsenal will only be able to move forward when he accepts that sometimes you do have to pay slightly over what you think a player is worth. He also needs to give the board permission to take the shackles off when negotiating with other clubs, because, for some reason, they seem to be too scared to do it without his blessing.
The sad truth, however, is that, at his age, he is probably not going to do this. It doesn’t matter how many statements Ivan Gazidis makes to try and back him into a corner, or how many fans politely ask him at games if he wouldn’t mind spending some money, or how many times Steve Bould threatens to nut him if he doesn’t dedicate more time to working on the defence, he will not change. He’s in his sixties, is now the longest-serving manager in the Premier League and it doesn’t seem as though there is anyone at the club with the balls to challenge him. And it doesn’t matter how many times Arsenic Vinegar’s wife waves the TomTom in his face and tries to get him to take an alternative route; he will remain stuck there on the M1 with his fingers in his ears, shouting ‘I can’t hear you!’ The only way that car is ever going to get anywhere is if she opens the door and boots him out. That was a metaphor, by the way.
