These days just about every club is looking to work the Arsène Wenger way.
Spot them young, buy them cheap, pay them in washers, win the league. What
could possibly go wrong? Well, now they know.
Given at least five years and a brilliant technical staff, unearthing and
nurturing fine talent, Wenger’s methods might work at another club, up to a
point. The point at which the players start doing the numbers and, like
those at Arsenal, realise the going rate for a Champions League footballer.
Mathieu Flamini is the first, but he will not be the last. Alexander Hleb
intends to buy out his contract for a move to Inter Milan despite Arsenal’s
objections and, if he goes, what price Cesc Fàbregas and Emmanuel Adebayor,
unless Wenger can quickly placate them with replacements that demonstrate
that there will be no loss of potential next season.
Take Adebayor. The striker insists that he is happy at Arsenal and talks as if
he sees his future there, but for how long? At a leading club, certainly one
who qualify for Europe’s top competition each season as Arsenal do, the
reward for a striker scoring 30 goals is roughly treble Adebayor’s £35,000 a
week. It may be argued that his form in this campaign has been a one-off,
but suppose he does it again next year. Will he still be happy earning
roughly a third of what Fernando Torres is paid by Liverpool?
We do not buy superstars, we make them, Wenger says, but his way is about to
be tested like never before, as is the cosy logic that Champions League
football can be attained without breaking the bank.
What Wenger has pulled off these past ten years is little short of miraculous
and by making it look so effortless, he has given the impression that every
club can do it.
Well, every club cannot and Wenger may not be able to for much longer, either.
Before each season there are gloomy predictions that this will be one in
which Arsenal fall out of the top four and year after year Wenger confounds
those who doubt him, but like the forecasts that Wimbledon would not be able
to maintain top-flight status while selling every good player they had to
break even, eventually the prophesiers were proved right.
Timing was always Wenger’s forte. He knew when to ditch a player and he knew a
good deal. He did not want to lose Nicolas Anelka, but the money paid by
Real Madrid was astronomical. Thierry Henry and Patrick Vieira were
dispatched at precisely their moments of decline. The portent of this crisis
was Ashley Cole’s transfer to Chelsea. Everything that is happening to
Arsenal now was predicted by that event and its significance was overlooked
because Wenger struck a hard bargain for William Gallas, while Cole took so
long to settle at Stamford Bridge and was adequately replaced by Gaël Clichy.
Cole left over money and was reviled, but the same driving force was at work
in Flamini’s transfer to AC Milan and is present in Hleb’s longing for
Inter, just as it will one day feature for Fàbregas and Adebayor. There is a
tariff for a world-class footballer and Arsenal will not pay it. Hleb may be
making a huge mistake and his uniquely ambitious style of play may never be
indulged so lovingly by a manager again, but he is not moving to be in a
better working environment. He wants to earn more and equates inflated wages
with a greater chance of success. Looking at this season’s Champions League
finalists, who could argue?
Is it still possible to succeed the Wenger way? Yes, in a limited fashion.
Wenger has taken it farther than anyone could imagine because he began with
the basis of George Graham’s defence, and the way he built from there was
little short of genius. A manager with less wit would never have been able
to forge a Champions League team out of that philosophy and even Wenger is
finding it increasingly problematic.
“How you going to keep them down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree?’ the
song asks. If a Frenchman no longer has the answer to that, who does?
McClaren’s no mug
Steve McClaren, the former England head coach, was helping Dave Penney, a
friend, to coach Darlington last week. Do your own jokes, you know you want
to. Yet in the build-up to yesterday’s Barclays Premier League climax, much
archive footage was shown of the previous time the title race went to the
final day, in 1999, and the same man was standing next to Alex Ferguson as
Manchester United won the league and later the treble. So he cannot be a
mug.
And, since being sacked by the FA in November, McClaren has spent a lot of
time travelling in Europe, finding out why PSV Eindhoven produce so many
good players, inspecting Espanyol, who have been punching above their weight
in La Liga, thanks to an outstanding youth system.
And while the BBC’s decision to employ McClaren at Euro 2008 was mocked, at
least he will be there, watching the talent, spotting the innovations,
taking the pulse of the game as played by Europe’s best. It shows a man that
wants to learn, and that surely deserves a second chance somewhere.
Scally’s bottom dollar
A report placed before the European Parliament proposes that football’s
television revenues are shared equally throughout the professional and
amateur game. That is ridiculous and will never happen, but it does bring to
mind the story of Paul Scally, the Gillingham chairman. In 2002, when his
club had a berth in the second tier of English football – for only the
fourth year in their 85-year history – Scally was incensed at a plan to
split a £90 million windfall equally between the Football League clubs. He
led calls for the second tier to resign in protest.
Subsequent years have not been kind to Gillingham and this season the club
were relegated to what used to be known as the fourth division. We may find
Scally’s take on wealth distribution has slightly altered, too.
Nutter is not alone
Some people still believe that Zinédine Zidane is going to be the next manager
of Queens Park Rangers, which goes to show that he isn’t the only nutter in
football.
High price, little return
Fredrik Ljungberg is being offered £3 million to leave West Ham United.
Together with an annual wage of about £4 million and his transfer fee from
Arsenal of £3 million, this amounts to roughly £10 million for 25 league
appearances, or £400,000 per game. No doubt Alan Curbishley, the manager,
will find a way of portraying this as a sizeable achievement. Which in many
ways it is.
Platini’s final folly
“I am extremely pleased that, at my request, all fans travelling with a valid
match ticket can use this to enter Russian territory.” And with this
statement of utter self-aggrandisement, Michel Platini, the president of
Uefa, takes credit for solving a mess of his creation. With Moscow fixed as
the final venue, Platini would have known of the impending Russian visa
crisis the moment four English teams reached the Champions League
quarter-finals.
If Chelsea defeated Fenerbahçe, there had to be one English team in the final
and possibly two. Did he act then? No. When English teams took three of four
semi-final places, the odds increased again. Platini stood still. It took
him until five days after the second semi-final, when many fans had overpaid
on visa applications and the administration for the final was on the brink
of meltdown, to strike a deal with the Russian Government and smugly take
the credit.
An exceptional and unprecedented gesture he called it. I can think of another
one, but then Platini would not have a job.
Ebbsfleet’s rosy future
There may be hope for Ebbsfleet United yet. A fine turnout at a victorious FA
Trophy final and a decent transfer budget courtesy of the nearly 30,000
members of MyFootballClub.co.uk are the positive benefits of the recent
takeover, while democratic day-to-day decisions are a step up from the
structure of many rivals. The best news, however, is that even Will Brooks,
the creator of MyFootballClub, admits the idea of having subscribers, and
not Liam Daish, the manager, pick the team may have been misjudged.
In a recent poll, only 15 per cent said that they wanted outright control of
player selection, which is the aspect of club policy that turned Ebbsfleet
from a bold vision of a cooperative future into a bad reality-show joke.
Right now, Daish picks the team, the fans run the club. If it stays that
way, what’s not to like?
Language barrier
Only one person will know for certain the terms by which Sam Bethell, the
Chelsea groundsman, referred to Patrice Evra, the Manchester United
defender, before their spat at Stamford Bridge, but looking from outside, it
seems likelier that a man running across a pitch that was under repair would
be called an idiot, rather than an immigrant – and as any FA inquiry will
have only two conflicting stories on which to base judgment, that will
surely be its conclusion, too.
The logic is that had Bethell wished to abuse Evra in racial terms, he would
surely have used cacophemism rather than euphemism.
Pay and display
Why the fuss about the last four being the minimum requirement if a tournament
campaign under Fabio Capello, the England manager, is to be deemed a
success? Previous managers have often got away with low expectations. Having
agreed a salary that would suggest that Sven-Göran Eriksson’s mind held the
answer to all the conundrums of international football, the FA then
professed delight with results that failed to attain stages of the
competitions reached by Terry Venables in 1996 and Bobby Robson in 1990 (not
to mention Alf Ramsey in 1966).
Capello is fantastically rewarded because his record suggests that he is
superior to his contemporaries; to demand a return on the investment is only
sensible because, otherwise, what is the point?
Reds short of readies?
Rafael BenÍtez, the Liverpool manager, wants £15 million for Peter Crouch, a
striker he bought for £7 million and has rarely played in significant
matches over three seasons, while offering a heavily conditional £10 million
for Gareth Barry, of Aston Villa, an England regular and a mainstay at his
club. There can only be one explanation for this. Liverpool have squat.
Games galore for Gold
It is interesting to note that, after Birmingham City’s relegation yesterday,
David Gold, the chairman, will get his 39th game. And his 40th, 41st, 42nd,
43rd . . .
