They used to have a joke at Arsenal, going back to the 2014 FA Cup final, that Arsène Wenger spent more time working on their yellow carnations than on tactics for the game. It was a bit of a cruel joke given that Arsenal actually won that final. But there was an extraordinary amount of faffing about, apparently, over Wenger’s boutonnières. The florists were called and there was all sorts of toing and froing before he ticked everything off. Then the football started and, after eight minutes, his team were two goals down to Hull City.
Wenger is what one of his former colleagues describes as a micromanager, someone who prides himself on taking on the smallest of tasks. Wenger combines trying to put together a winning football team with lower-level details such as arranging for the club’s masseurs to get fuel cards. He is not a great delegator and, even when there is no football on, he likes to involve himself at every level of the club.
A few of us met him before the Community Shield and engaged in some typical small talk about whether he had been away on holiday. Wenger looked bemused by the suggestion. “I had no break at all,” he told us. “I recovered at the training ground.” He was at London Colney every day, often with only the groundsmen for company.
His 19th anniversary at the club passed unhappily a few days ago and it is clear many Arsenal supporters no longer go by the old maxim “In Arsène we trust”. Some of the more ungrateful ones, and this is certainly an ungrateful business, volubly make the point behind his dugout at the Emirates and, though it often goes too far, it is easy sometimes to understand why they are frustrated and have come to regard Wenger as a diminished authority, with 11 years since his last championship.
The notion, however, that Arsenal will automatically become a better place by cutting Wenger free does make me suspect that not enough people have been looking closely enough at Manchester United’s various ordeals since Sir Alex Ferguson left and what can happen to a club when they lose the man who acts as the glue holding everything together.
Ferguson was another micromanager. It still eats him up, for instance, that he did not make more extensive checks about the hotel where United stayed before the 2009 Champions League final in Rome. The food was cold, it wasn’t served at the right time and a couple of players complained they didn’t sleep because the beds were uncomfortable. On every trip after that, Ferguson sent a member of staff to visit the hotel beforehand, with instructions to meet the head chef and “give him a jersey, give him a tip”.
In his final years at the club, Ferguson was better than Wenger at delegating jobs but United’s manager also liked to know every small detail about what was happening at his club. “His tentacles reached every corner,” as one colleague puts it.
Ferguson has even been seen at Old Trafford pulling out a few blades of grass from the pitch and – no kidding – sniffing them, in his almost obsessional desire to get the pitch exactly as he wanted it. He dealt with everyone and everything, including the cleaners, the cooks and the car valets, and in a strange way that style of management inspired the sense of togetherness and loyalty that he craved. Ferguson even took part in the National Lottery syndicate run by one of their laundry women. The last time he was back at Carrington, there was a message waiting for him on reception that Denise – “a Salford lass”, as he puts it – wanted to see him, urgently. “She said: ‘Where’s my effing money?’” His subs were six weeks overdue.
We have all seen what has happened to United since Ferguson left and how long it has taken the club to adapt without the man who spent more than a quarter of a century at the top of the empire. United are a big, scary club and they need a big, scary manager. They have one now in Louis van Gaal but it has been a long old slog and it is only now that there are signs of better times coming.
“For 26 years, everyone had been accustomed to seeing me walk into that training ground every morning,” Ferguson writes in his last autobiography. “To adapt to a manager with different methods and a new philosophy required a culture shift. A change of that magnitude would have affected the running of any operation, in any business.”
It would be the same at Arsenal, too, given the way Wenger’s culture has infiltrated every part of the club. It will have to happen one day but United’s experiences with David Moyes reiterate that the job will be substantially easier for the manager two places down the line. Wenger has moulded an entire club in his own fashion and, flicking through John Cross’s newly released biography of Arsenal’s manager, it is clear that nobody should imagine it will be a seamless process, or that it will be straightforward for whoever replaces him.
The author’s analysis is that “he [Wenger] likes to be in complete control of everything” and it does leave a sense of what faces Arsenal’s next manager. Everything the new man does will be compared to the previous guy. Every change will provoke discussion and, perhaps, uncertainty behind the scenes. Perhaps the new man might want to bring in a new style of play, as Van Gaal has at United. But that does not happen quickly and let’s not dress it up: the football at Old Trafford has been bland and undistinguished, for the most part.
The same deterioration could conceivably happen at the Emirates as well and it was intriguing to get Ferguson’s take on it at his recent book launch, a clear warning that Arsenal’s supporters should be careful what they wished for. “Arsène has taken a lot of flak,” Ferguson said. “But who’s going to replace him? Who’s going to make it better? It’s a very difficult position for anyone who comes in after Arsène and has to change the philosophy he introduced, and kept, for all those years.”
At the same time, that does not make the scrutiny of Wenger unfair and perhaps the most alarming part is that it did not require the meltdown against Olympiakos to realise how far Arsenal are away from being a fully grown-up football team. There is a recurring theme about the way everyone can see their flaws, yet so bewilderingly little is done about them, and it is startling that Wenger – lest it be forgotten, one of the genuine greats of his profession – is apparently now applying some loose facts to suit an increasingly flustered argument.
Wenger’s defence of David Ospina directly after the Olympiakos match was the classic example, stating that the Colombian had played 19 times last season and kept 14 clean sheets. He wasn’t even close; it was actually 23 matches and 10 shut-outs.
Wenger went even further at his last press conference, indignant that anyone could possibly focus on someone who had “been voted player of Copa América, best goalkeeper … he’s on the Ballon d’Or list. He was by far the best goalkeeper of the Premier League in the second part of the season last year.”
Yet this is absurd. Lionel Messi won the Copa América’s individual award. Claudio Bravo of Chile was named as the tournament’s outstanding goalkeeper and it is straying dangerously close to tragicomedy to suggest that Ospina was superior to David de Gea or Thibaut Courtois, to name just two, in the Premier League. Many observers, I strongly suspect, would not place Ospina in the top eight.
Yes, Ospina was one of the 59 names on the Ballon d’Or’s longlist but so was Ghana’s Christian Atsu, currently on loan from Chelsea to Bournemouth, and the Australia international Massimo Luongo, who spent last season at Swindon Town in League One and is now at QPR. Is Wenger seriously basing a goalkeeper’s credentials on the selection of a Fifa panel that includes the Premier League chief executive, Richard Scudamore, the Watford under-21s’ coach, Harry Kewell and, no offence intended, Pelé? If so, someone should probably point out that Gianluigi Buffon did not make it on to the list; that’s how reliable it is.
What Wenger does have is a brilliant knack of winning the next game whenever a mini-crisis is in danger of turning into a fully blown one. Every season, we wonder whether it will be his last and if he will get the happy ending he undoubtedly deserves. It is what happens after that point that should really trouble Arsenal’s supporters because the lesson of history is that the transition is rarely smooth. Their opponents on Sunday can vouch for that.
Criticism doesn’t really stack up when you see Sterling’s true worth
Raheem Sterling has had so much negative press during his brief career no doubt there will be some who do not want to hear that meeting him at Manchester City last week, for his first interview since joining the club from Liverpool, certainly shifted some of this correspondent’s preconceptions.
We are all probably guilty sometimes of judging people before we meet but, contrary to what you might imagine, there wasn’t even a drop of arrogance. On the contrary, Sterling was polite, slightly shy and there was no edge whatsoever.
A small thing, perhaps, but one director at Manchester City told me recently how after one event the club’s staff were pleasantly surprised to find him tidying up after everyone and stacking the chairs away.
Likewise, the photographer, Chris Thomond, was slightly taken aback to find Sterling asking if he wanted any help packing up his equipment and taking it to his car.
It might not sound much but it isn’t always like that on this beat and, as someone who has been interviewing footballers for a long time, it was certainly preferable to being kept waiting four hours by Teddy Sheringham without even the tiniest of apologies, Marlon King’s slightly sinister parting shot that my words better make him look good and the Premier League player who requested to one of my colleagues, for reasons only he knows, not to have his photograph taken with some disabled children.
Yes, Sterling’s departure from Liverpool was messy and, by his own admission, some of it could have been handled better from his side. Yet the people who know him best are bemused by some of the bad publicity and it is worth sharing the story about what happened recently when he heard about a four-year-old boy, Ben Willans, from Speke in Merseyside, who is battling an aggressive form of cancer, with only a 30% chance that his chemotherapy will work.
Sterling was so moved by the boy’s story he arranged to send him a video message as a surprise. He didn’t expect it to reach the newspapers and it does show a side to him that has not been greatly explored in the media. “I just said: ‘Stay strong for your family, remember to keep smiling and carry on being the soldier you are.’”
It’s too easy getting a bad name in football. It’s not so easy getting rid of it, but sometimes there are hidden layers.
