Sunday 15 May 2016 09:56, UK
With no trophies and Tottenham set to finish above Arsenal for the first time in 21 years, pressure is building on Arsene Wenger like never before. Is his time up? Adam Bate looks at the reasons for his success and why there’s little reason to expect a repeat…
One of the key moments for Biff Tannen in the Back to the Future series was when he got hold of the Grays Sports Almanac that revealed the winners of every forthcoming sporting event for years to come. Tannen was transformed into a visionary, armed with the information that his contemporaries craved. Success became a formality.
Perhaps that's how it felt for Arsene Wenger when he arrived in England in the autumn of 1996. He'd been a top-class coach in his native France, of course, but in the Premier League his encyclopedic knowledge of superior markets and ideas dwarfed that of his new peers. As an intellectual Gulliver in Lilliput, it didn't take too long for his impact to be felt.
By his own admission, Wenger was left bemused by the fact that he could assemble an entire squad for the price quoted to sign Graeme Le Saux from Blackburn. And so, he did just that. Nicolas Anelka had already been acquired for less than £1m. Patrick Vieira joined from AC Milan for just £3.5m. And that was just the transfer market.
On the training ground, the focus on muscle toning was new to old pros. Sharper sessions timed to the second. The introduction of periodisation. Conditioning work. Nutrition ideas from Japan. Dieticians such as Yann Rougier. Regular attention from osteopath Philippe Boixel. None of it seems outlandish now but these changes were significant at the time.
"When we had the first pre-season under Wenger, it was completely different from anything I experienced in my whole career," Nigel Winterburn told The Independent. "There were footballs all over the pitch! 'What? Footballs!' It was unheard of, a football session on the first day back off pre-season training. I had never heard of it."
It's difficult to appreciate the context. The previous example of a foreign manager at such as high-profile club had been when Dr Josef Venglos was appointed by Aston Villa in 1990. He arrived just weeks after taking Czechoslovakia to a World Cup quarter-final but was still 'Dr Who' to the press pack. Villa's players didn't enjoy the post-match warm downs.
Venglos was a pioneer but having taken over from the successful Graham Taylor, only wins would've earned him patience and he couldn't get them. Wenger's combination of better ideas and better players brought improved results and so the story was very different. Experienced players such as Winterburn, Tony Adams and Martin Keown bought into it.
He harnessed this existing defence and fused it with a much-improved attacking unit. The likes of Marc Overmars and Emmanuel Petit helped Arsenal to a league and cup double in 1998. A remarkable achievement in itself, but what puts Wenger on a level few have reached is that he built another team too. Only Vieira and Dennis Bergkamp were still first-choice picks in the Invincibles of 2004.
That Arsenal side, the team of Thierry Henry and Robert Pires, remains the only one to go through an entire Premier League season without suffering a defeat. That they did so by playing some of the most exciting football this country has ever seen only adds to the achievement. But 12 years on and the wait for the next Premier League title goes on.
What went wrong? Undeniably, there have been external factors. It got harder as opponents rose up like never before. With Chelsea emerging as a genuine force, Arsenal were no longer competing with only Manchester United. Liverpool had their moments too and more recently there has been Manchester City and Tottenham to contend with as well.
It got harder as the club managed the transition to the new stadium. Supporters were tolerant in that respect, noting the manager's complaints about the financial doping of others. But that sympathy has long since dissipated, giving way to a more troubling thought: that the real issue for Wenger is that so many of his advantages have now been neutralised.
He had enjoyed what is known in marketing as 'first-mover advantage' - the benefits that stem from being the initial occupant in a market, gaining control of resources others cannot. But now others have caught up. It's Wenger's strength no more. He is a victim of his own success given that his ideas and principles are now so ubiquitous they do not set him apart.
I've been tremendously loyal to the manager. I'd like to stay that way if I could, but I'm just finding that the solutions are getting harder for him to solve.
Former Arsenal forward Charlie Nicholas feels it is a problem. "I've been tremendously loyal to the manager," Nicholas told Sky Sports. "I'd like to stay that way if I could, but I'm just finding that the solutions are getting harder for him to solve. It's not easy to find the right players but this is where we have always loved Arsene.
"He's always found magical players or turned them into magical players. He's always had that talent. Now that talent seems to be becoming harder. You can't get Nicolas Anelka now for half a million or Thierry Henry for £8m. But other clubs seem to find them. And if other clubs can find them..."
Perhaps it's prudence that persuaded him against moving for Anthony Martial. Certainly, globalisation has opened things up to allow Newcastle, Leicester and West Ham to swoop upon the French market in recent years. Wenger knew about them all. He just didn't know whether to sign them. His recent risk-free acquisitions have arrived for north of £30m.
Where once ignorance of others might have protected Wenger against criticism, allowing it to appear as if World Cup winners such as Henry had been plucked from obscurity, the game has now changed sufficiently to allow Arsenal fans to implore him to sign Gonzalo Higuain - and then feel justified when seeing the Argentine score over 30 goals in a Serie A season.
Arsenal have these funds and with the stadium having long since ceased to be a viable excuse, Wenger can no longer point to the financial advantages of club rivals. Particularly when Leicester are champions and, perhaps more damagingly, Tottenham are above them in the table, too. It seems St Totteringham's Day won't be coming this year, but perhaps another day has arrived.
In Back to the Future, the results in Tannen's Almanac only went up to 2000. He'd secured his legacy by then but the magic touch was gone. Wenger managed to extend his success into the new millennium but the fear is that he too no longer has the answers. The fear is that Arsene Wenger is a man out of time.
