Arsène Wenger, George Graham and ‘British’ Football

This essay was prompted by this thread by the Twitter user Post-Liberal Pete (a name that I can only assume is an homage to their favourite Spider-Man villain Paste Pot Pete, but I digress) and, while it is not my intention to use this little account as an attempt to argue back with random Twitter accounts, this user is someone I’ve always found interesting (if not always correct) and the thread in question raises some interesting points and I think the time may be right, under my self-imposed rules, for a Wenger retrospective.

The thread is well worth a read in full but to summarise it briefly, Pete’s argument is roughly as follows: Arsene Wenger’s success at Arsenal has been grossly over-inflated since he retired and the high esteem in which he is held is the result of a cultural cringe towards supposedly sophisticated foreign coaches and that his overall record pales in comparison with successful British coaches like Bob Paisley, Brian Clough and, most of all, Alex Ferguson.

It’s an interesting argument, and certainly not one without its merits. To be sure, Wenger’s trophy record is, in bald terms, quite sparse by the standards of many others. His three league titles, seven FA Cups and seven Charity/Community Shields at Arsenal compares poorly with Paisley’s six league titles, three League Cups, six Charity Shields, three European Cups, one UEFA Cup and one UEFA Super Cup at Liverpool, never mind Alex Ferguson’s frankly absurd thirteen league titles, five FA Cups, four League Cups and two Champions’ Leagues (alongside some other titles I can’t be bothered to list) at Manchester United. (It does, however, rank pretty well compared to Bill Shankly’s haul at Liverpool, a managerial stint that Pete does praise.)

Even at Arsenal, Wenger sits oddly in the history of Arsenal managers, overshadowing the landmark tenures of Herbert Chapman (1925–1934) and George Graham (1986–1995) but potentially without deserving it. Chapman took a club that had only been promoted to the First Division six years previously because of quite naked corruption by their chairman Henry Norris and who had won zero senior trophies and turned them into one of the most exciting and tactically sophisticated teams in the world, before dying midway through the 1933–34 season, as the team were in the midst of completing a hattrick of league titles. Graham, meanwhile, took over a team stuck in a fifteen-year trough after the Double of 1970–71 and transformed them into something that was, if not loved, then at least respected.

Graham’s team probably has the most modern misconceptions about it. If you were to ask most people today to sum up that team then they would probably reach for an analogy to Sean Dyche’s current Burnley team, something helped by that team’s tight defence, a rampaging Ian Wright up front and a perception that the players were a certain kind of English/British stereotype. (This is not something helped, admittedly, by players like Tony Adams, Ian Wright and Ray Parlour playing up to that stereotype in different ways, or Paul Merson’s periodic complaints about foreign managers in the Premier League.) But, while towards the end of his tenure, Graham’s Arsenal did come close to that stereotype: very negative and almost entirely reliant on Wright for goals, during their most successful periods that wasn’t particularly the case. The famous back four/five pressed high up the pitch and Alan Smith acted as a non-scoring target man around which creative players like Merson, Anders Limpar, David Rocastle and Michael Thomas could flourish. With its kind of defensive solidity, aggressive press and structured formation, it’s really not all that different from what Arrigo Sacchi was doing at around the same time with Milan. (Albeit I think it’s fair to say that few people would call Nigel Winterburn the equal of Paolo Maldini.)

The sophistication and brilliance of Chapman’s sides are also often, and unfairly, forgotten, although in this case it is probably more fairly because of age. But his invention of the W-M revolutionised the game, not just tightening up at the back to make the defence almost impregnable but his use of Alex James in the centre-forward role saw the deployment of a false 9 decades before Lionel Messi’s success made it a playable option on Football Manager.

So what caused this overlooking of Chapman’s and Graham’s sides as against Wenger’s? Well, in the first place I think it is age. Although my Grandfather could tell me in wistful tones about Cliff Bastin, David Jack and Eddie Hapgood, I would hazard a guess that there is no-one alive today with an adult memory of seeing those players play. Combined with the poor state of football statistics, we are instead left with the bald facts of goals scored and games played, along with archaically written match reports. I have no way of telling you, for example, what Alex James’ xG Assisted was. Although it’s not nearly as pronounced for them, Graham’s teams have a similar problem: it is often forgotten that football was a primarily spectator sport until the mid-1990s and most of their games were not recorded in their entirety.

By contrast, I can go on Youtube and find five minute compilations of Denilson’s (2006–2011, 96 appearances) passing range. Although there are some gaps, the vast majority of Arsenal’s games under Arsene Wenger were televised in their entirety and are just more available for contemporary consumption. We must also not forget that, as mentioned above, football was a spectator sport rather than a televised one until the 1990s, whereas now (in a long term trend greatly exacerbated by COVID) it is almost entirely a form of televised entertainment and a global one at that. The statistical insight, video replay opportunities and general discussion around the game are thus completely different, making comparison between the eras very difficult.

Pete wants to lay the blame squarely on a British cultural cringe about their football, asserting the existence of a commonly-held belief that a thing can only be good if it was imported from outside. Arsene Wenger, with his studious and unprepossessing demeanor, thus becomes the ideal personna to put on all of the ‘modernisation’ English football has undergone in the past 20 years. He certainly fits it better than Alex Ferguson, who was not a revolutionary figure but rather the last of what seems a now-dead breed: the disciplinarian Scottish manager.

Pete is without a doubt onto something here. In contrast to the bombastic exceptionalism of many on the political right, a kind of reverse British exceptionalism has taken hold in many sectors of British life and nowhere is this more pronounced than in the world of ‘sophisticated’ football analysis. Simply put, if it’s British then it must be worse or at least kind of dumb or laughable in some way. As an example, I remember the idea that Brendan Rogers might take over from Arsene Wenger in 2018 being laughed out of town, something which maybe looks less sensible given the subsequent trajectories of both Arsenal and Rogers personally in the seasons since. Similarly, while it was certainly possible to find negative and vaguely racist comments about him on Twitter, when Pep Guardiola arrived at Manchester City the vast majority of fans and commentariat lined up to praise him as the man who was finally going to bring the true gospel of “good football” to the unenlightened masses.

In this context, I have often wondered whether there would be such continued support for Mikel Arteta if he wasn’t a trim, handsome Spaniard with such wonderful hair. Part of this is, no doubt, branding. Big clubs nowadays need a ‘thing’, a ‘style’ by which to sell themselves. And Arteta certainly fits that role better than someone like Sam Allardyce, a sweaty-faced man who looks like a small fart smells. This perception of the cool, calm European coach against the deranged and unsophisticated British coaches is certainly not helped by the way that a small number of British coaches inexplicably hung around Premier League jobs despite repeated failures (Mark Hughes, Alan Pardew and Paul Lambert being prime examples) or British coaches failing dramatically when given big jobs (David Moyes at Man Utd and Roy Hodgson and Rogers at Liverpool). Furthermore, there are prominent British coaches who do genuinely play a kind of aggressive, long-ball game that we have now decided is ‘bad football’: Tony Pulis and Sean Dyche come to mind.

It is also not helped by the way that certain British coaches and players do play into the unsophisticated stereotypes about themselves. I have already mentioned the former Arsenal players who do this (in their own different ways, of course) but the prime example is Sam Allardyce. Allardyce has carved out for himself a very successful (and no doubt lucrative) niche as a John Bull type pundit, always on hand to offer a particularly gruff kind of comment on foreign players and managers who don’t like it up ’em, or complain in self-pitying tones about how he and his British compatriots supposedly can’t get jobs anymore. Given his personal and public support for leaving the EU and Guardiola’s recurrent public declarations about the importance of liberalism and Catalan independence (never mind that Catalan independence is not a particularly progressive project and that Guardiola’s choice of employers renders his public protestations rather moot — that is a topic for another time), this rather neatly cements the divide between the unreconstructed English supporters and coaches and their more sophisticated replacements.

I have no doubt that this persona reflects something true about Allardyce’s personality and I don’t want to try and police how he chooses to self-actualise. But there was a point, about a decade ago, where Allardyce faced a choice. He could cultivate the kind of public personna that he has. Or he could have been the guy who introduced Prozone and advanced sports analytics to the Premier League in a systematic way (Steve McClaren had previously occasionally consulted the company from time to time at Man Utd). He could be the guy who first used xG (although he called it the “Position of Maximum Opportunity”) when coaching his players’ attacks. He could be the guy who took Bolton Wanderers — Bolton Wanderers! — to regular top 10 finishes and the last 16 of the UEFA Cup. He could be the guy who got Youri Djorkaeff, Bruno N’Gotty, Ivan Campo, Jay-Jay Okocha and Nicolas Anelka to play the best football of their careers. It’s true that Allardyce’s Bolton sides were hardly Tele Santana’s Brazil but a midfield of Fernando Hierro, Ivan Campo, Jay-Jay Okocha and Kevin Nolan were hardly uneducated hoof-ball merchants. But, no, he chooses to play up to the stereotype instead.

And that stereotype is like most stereotypes in that it is not without truth but obscures more than it reveals. In his thread, Pete is right to point to a period from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s as a golden age of English dominance of European football. Between 1975 and 1985, the European Cup only didn’t have an English finalist twice (in 1976 and 1983) and three different clubs won the title seven times (Leeds made the final in 1976 and failed to win, while Liverpool lost the 1985 final in the tragic circumstances of the Heysel disaster). Of course, we should note that this was a time when the European Cup was an unseeded straight knockout competition, meaning that it was easier to make the final via a lucky draw. In their second win, for example, Nottingham Forest had relatively easy ties against the champions of Sweden, Romania and East Germany and a semi-final against an Ajax team far removed from their heyday a decade earlier. That being said, it was undoubtedly a period of English dominance, or at least the dominance of certain English teams (many of them filled with Scottish and Irish players, of course).

And these teams did not achieve success with a kind of mindless blood and thunder aggression. No, they played aggressive and intense but tactically sophisticated football under the tutelage of people like Bob Paisley and the legendary duo of Brian Clough and Peter Taylor. Players such as Alan Hansen and Kenny Burns were amongst the greatest passing centre backs of their day, far from the stereotype of unthinkingly aggressive British defenders. Similarly, John Robertson was surely one of the most naturally talented figures of his age and hardly a hard-running technically weak player.

Of course, people like Paisley and Clough eschewed talk of tactics as poncey overthinking but, as Jonathan Wilson noted in his biography of Clough, this was probably because Clough seems to have (for whatever reason) regarded ‘tactics’ as a synonym for the kind of negative, defensive football so associated with Italian teams of the period. But they were tactics, to be sure, and highly effective ones. With its hard-running, intricate attacking play and aggressive style, Jurgen Klopp’s gegenpressing is directly influenced by this era of English football, a fact that he and the other theorists of gegenpressing have mentioned before. Perhaps this comes from the history of the game in Britain as primarily something for physical recreation and a strain in British culture where being “too clever by half” is the worst thing you could say about someone.

There is no doubt that there were ‘problems’ with English football in this era. For example, successive club and national team managers could not quite work out what to do with Glenn Hoddle and there is no doubt that managers up to the early 2000s were overly-wedded to the idea that 4–4–2 was the only rational way to set up your players. But these kinds of problems are hardly unique to English football: Gunter Netzer and Bernd Schuster had recurrent problems with the West German national teams; and it’s easy to forget now that Arrigo Sacchi faced massive cultural resistance in Italy when he shifted his Milan team from the sweeper system to a flat back four. Similarly, the obsession with 4–4–2 was not unique to English coaches: Sven-Goran Erikssen’s refusal to shift from it was probably responsible for England not making a serious run at the 2006 World Cup. And Wenger himself stuck to a 4–4–2/4–2–3–1 long after it had been rendered mostly obsolete at the highest level.

The aforementioned Paul Merson attracted much mockery online when, while working as a pundit on Sky, he criticised the hiring of Marco Silva as Hull City manager because the club should have hired an experienced English coach instead of a fashionable foreigner with a skimpier CV. Of course, those comments came with an undercurrent of xenophobia that I personally find unpalatable but, in the years since, it’s not obvious to me that he was all that wrong about Silva.

(Where there is a kind of uniquely-offensive English disease, I think it probably comes in the perception that England have some kind of divine right to have won more trophies than they have done. In reality, a World Cup and a few semi-finals over the decades really isn’t a bad return for a country of England’s population.)

Bringing this back to Wenger, I think a lot of his mystique and subsequent reputation comes from the circumstances of his arrival. In this context, Pete severely understates two things: the damage caused to English football’s development by the Heysel ban and the uniquely bad generation of English players who came to the fore after the 1990 World Cup.

At this time, the influence of Charles Reep and Charles Hughes really bore fruit. Their statistical analysis of English football led to them concluding that a long-ball game was the best way to maximise your chances of winning. Why this is wrong has been discussed elsewhere at length but it’s worth quoting Jonathan Wilson on this at length:

“Reep’s analysis shows that 91.5% of moves in the games he studied had 3 passes or fewer and that logically, this would mean that 91.5% of all goals should come from moves with 3 passes or fewer. However, Reep’s analysis found that fewer than 80% of goals came from moves with 3 passes or fewer. Therefore, Reep’s own work shows that moves with 3 passes or fewer are less effective than those with 4 or more. And these figures do not even take into account the goals scored when long chains of passes have led to a dead-ball or a breakdown or even the fact that a side holding possession and making their opponents chase is likely to tire less quickly, and so will be able to pick off exhausted opponents late on. It is, frankly, horrifying that a philosophy founded on such a basic misinterpretation of figures could have been allowed to become a cornerstone of English coaching. Anti-intellectualism is one thing, but faith in wrong-headed pseudo-intellectualism is far worse.”

However, these ideas proved enduring and was the upbringing of a whole generation of players. Combined with the management of Graham Taylor (a lovely man but a limited tactician), it produced an England team in the early 1990s surely unmatched for their tactical unsophistication and technical failings. At the same time, English teams were coming out of a period where they had been unable to develop their players and tactical styles through regular games with European opponents, sticking English football in aspic for nearly a decade. Furthermore, at the time there genuinely was a drinking culture in English clubs, none more so than Arsenal, which did mark it out from its European competitors.

And when Wenger arrived he wasn’t just opposed to these currents in private but was so very publicly. And not only that but he convinced several of these old-fashioned English players to come with him on this journey. His style was also such a marked contrast with his contemporaries: softly-spoken, he was not a raging disciplinarian like Ferguson. I am perhaps revealing too much of myself when I say this but one of the most attractive things I’ve always found about Wenger is the way he and his charges have talked about his coaching, about how what he tried to do was help the players develop themselves personally and professionally, a marked improvement from the kinds of shouty hazing that I experienced myself (at, it should be said, a markedly lower level) and was common amongst managers at the time. Coming at a time when British culture was moving towards valuing this kind of leadership, it struck a chord and is probably one major reason for his enduring appeal.

But aside from these off-the-pitch reasons, I think Pete is unfair in his dismissal of Wenger’s competitive record. Wenger definitely could be tactically naive, contributing to Arsenal’s relatively poor European showings throughout his tenure. But it is spurious to deny that his teams at times played unbelievably good football. At least initially, this was built upon the foundations George Graham had established, particularly the defence of Seaman-Dixon-Adams-Keown-Winterburn but at first it didn’t look like Wenger had problems bringing in his own replacements: Lauren for Dixon, Sol Campbell for Adams, Gilberto Silva for Parlour etc. By the time we get to the legendary ‘Invincibles’ season, all of that back five had been either bought or promoted from the academy by Wenger.

Of course, then we enter a time that a lot of Wenger-skeptics point to. The period roughly from the loss in the 2006 Champions’ League final to the signing of Mesut Ozil and Alexis Sanchez in 2013 and 2014 does mark a significant downgrade of Arsenal’s horizons. I first want to offer some limited defences: there is another universe where everything else went the same way but Arsenal won the Champions’ League in 2006 and the 2007–08 and 2013–14 league titles, all trophies that I contend were well within the team’s grasp. In 2006, the entire game plan was thrown off by an early red card. In 2007–08 the team was similarly thrown off by the horrific injury to Eduardo da Silva and club captain William Gallas’ childish antics in the aftermath. In 2013–14, the team should have taken advantage of the league’s other big teams collectively shitting the bed but suffered injuries and couldn’t peak at the right time.

Add those three trophies to Wenger’s haul and does the picture look different? Of course, this is ultimately a reductive game (“But if Hitler wasn’t a genocidal maniac and instead a cuddly children’s entertainer, would that change your opinion of him?”) but my point is that Arsenal were actually closer to big trophies in those years than many people remember but on several occasions the butterfly flapped its wings at the wrong speed.

We should also note that this was a period where, unbeknownst to the fans, the club was under severe financial strain, forcing them to become a selling club and being unable to renew the contracts of players such as Mathieu Flamini. And during these fallow seasons of 2006–07 to 2015–16, Wenger coached the team to successive Champions’ League placements. Obviously, this fact has become something of a punchline in recent years but it is, firstly, something that no other English team managed during this period and, to be sure, a status that the vast majority of Arsenal fans would take back in a heartbeat.

But I don’t want to expend much energy defending the second half of Wenger’s reign. It is undoubtedly a dramatic slippage in the club’s fortunes. In a way it’s oddly similar to the division between the good and bad seasons of The Simpsons. At first you might be inclined to dismiss the bad post-season 11 episodes as merely a disappointing tail end to an otherwise-brilliant show but then you realise that those first 10 seasons constitute less than half of the show’s episodes, turning your perception into a mediocre show that started promisingly.

My own personal theory is that Cesc Fabregas is probably the worst thing to happen to Wenger at Arsenal. Not because of his pure talent, which is considerable, or because of his personality, which I personally find charming. Rather, the problem with Fabregas lies in what he ‘taught’ Wenger about the future of football: namely that it wasn’t going to be about tough, big athletic men running around but diminutive midfielders pinging passes to each other.

Of course, Wenger’s successful teams were hardly long-ball guys but, if you watch their games back now, it’s thrilling to see how much of their game involved raking crossfield balls, players running in behind and aggressive defenders and midfielders. One of my favourite anecdotes about that period of Arsenal is Jason Roberts being advised by his manager that his team couldn’t expect to outplay Arsenal and instead had to go out there and kick them, advice which looked a lot less wise when they were lining up in the tunnel next to Lehmann (6’3”), Campbell (6’2”), Vieira (6’4”), Gilberto (6’1”), Pires (6’1”), Bergkamp (6’0”) and Henry (6’2”).

But those players were replaced by players like Fabregas, Flamini, Denilson, Rosicky and Hleb, all highly talented players (to different degrees) but ones which were ultimately not quite as good as their predecessors and who genuinely could be kicked off their game. When added to players like Jack Wilshere, Abou Diaby and Robin van Persie never quite hitting their full potential because of injuries and the ultimate disappointment of youthful prospects like Philippe Senderos, David Bentley and Nicklas Bendtner, the decline and failure of the team is obvious. The fact that Barcelona and the Spanish national team were having such success with the type of football Wenger wanted but couldn’t get his sides to play must have been torture for him.

In the end, Wenger was caught between a number of problems. Firstly, his own fading powers. Secondly, a new generation of players for whom advice to play their own game wasn’t enough. Thirdly, the departure of David Dein and new, disinterested, owners who pushed too much responsibility on Wenger’s shoulders. And finally just a compounding mediocrity about his sides. And in the world of football this kind of stasis takes on a life of its own, until now the club has become a complete embarrassment.

So where does this leave Arsenal? Well, not in a very good state. In their thread, Pete advises Arsenal fans to think of themselves as like Inter and not Barcelona. Fair enough. After all, Arsenal don’t have the advantages Barcelona have of receiving about 40% of their domestic league’s television revenue. I too find irritating Arsenal fans’ (of whom, in case it isn’t obvious, I consider myself a member) insistence that the team play “good football.” In the first place, what is “good football”? And I don’t mean that facetiously. Secondly, no team is entitled to “good football” and the only reason that phase is increasingly deployed nowadays is branding.

(The absolute apogee of this, by the way, is Juventus’ recent appointment of Andrea Pirlo as head coach, whose credentials consist of him being a classy player, looking good with a glass of wine in hand and having coached the U21 team for fifteen minutes. His 30-page coaching thesis was a strange name-dropping grab bag of famous coaching names, with the vague assertion that he was “inspired” by them. It’s bizarre and I hope it fails quickly to prove the folly of this kind of stunt hiring.)

But, on the other hand, you can’t will an attitude on a fanbase and it seems unlikely that things will change. I personally am not quite willing to write off Mikel Arteta just yet but it seems unlikely that Arsenal will be troubling the top of the table for a long time. And then, what makes them different, or ‘bigger’ to use the correct jargon, from teams like Everton and Aston Villa? Nothing really and the current owners aren’t showing much indication that they care.

It’s all a shame and it makes me nostalgic for my youth, when the club won things and, in a vague but nonetheless meaningful way, stood for something: whether that be the beautiful Art Deco stadium, the quasi-aristocratic Hill-Wood family running everything, the cosmopolitan playing staff and the studious man at the head of it. The kind of man who was as comfortable being asked about the death of David Bowie in a press conference as Alan Pardew’s next line up. It’s all gone now, like dust in the wind.

And I think, ultimately, that’s what Wenger means to me, a memory of a club that I could love unconditionally and not be slightly embarrassed or irritated by. I still call him “Arsene” in conversation and, not entirely jokingly, refer to him as my uncle. It’s sentimental and ultimately meaningless, of course. But so are all of these sorts of things. And that’s why I love him, in the same way that Liverpool fans will always love Bill Shankly more than Bob Paisley, despite the latter’s more impressive trophy haul.

So, so long to Arsene Wenger and his Arsenal. You may not have been perfect, or nearly as special as some people claim. But you were mine for a time and I will always love you for that.