Latest Articles
Rafa Casting Shadow Over Pardew?
22 comments
If we were Alan Pardew, we'd feel a whole lot better if Rafa Benitez took a job far away from the Premier League. He looks the most vulnerable to a Spanish coup...
Why We Should Reluctantly Laud Pulis...
9 comments
Although Tony Pulis has been widely criticised for Stoke's style of football, he has also reminded us that there is more than one kind of successful manager...
All Articles
I had always been firmly in the Arsene Wenger camp when it came to how a football club should be run - a voice of reason and sense in an hysterical football world.
But recent comments by John Giles on the Irish radio station Newstalk questioning the Frenchman's increasingly directorial (of the boardroom variety) pronouncements have given me pause for thought. Throw the former Irish international's comments in with Wenger's recent suggestion that Arsenal fans expect too much in transfer windows - always wanting to see big name players and not having enough patience to accept young players with high promise, if a low profile - has rather reinforced my reservations.
Giles feels that Wenger has crossed over - that he sounds more and more like a board director and less and less like a football manager. Given Wenger's central role in building up the club and his logical belief that attempting to match the transfer and wage outlay of the likes of Chelsea and Manchester City would lead to ruin, this is somewhat understandable.
However, that closeness between the manager and the board, the fact that they appear to sing not only from the same hymn sheet but also in the exact same key, means that the critical creative and financial tension between a manager who is focusing solely on winning games and winning trophies and a board that is concerned about the bank account is missing.
We can all respect what Arsenal have done and indeed what they are trying to do - but fans do not support football clubs so that they can see a balance sheet displayed on a open top bus by the bean counters at the end of every season. But because of his deep and laudable involvement in the development of the club in almost every aspect, including its financial strategies, Wenger has become a football club board director's wet dream.
By not only dancing to their tune, but also singing along with increasingly strident gusto, Wenger lets the money men off the hook. He gives them such an easy ride that it is almost impossible to see a situation in which they might ever want to oust him - despite the sense of unease among many of the club's paying "customers."
Wenger may still do enough as a manager to keep Arsenal in the top four, but he now seems to lack the hunger and ambition, nay the belief, to achieve anything more.
And while he may still wear that long and rather silly coach's coat, it no longer hides the fact that underneath it, his suit looks increasingly that of a board director.
Paul Little - follow him on Twitter
Post Comment
