ON THE eve of last season, as Arsene Wenger sat down to chew the football fat, he was in such a relaxed and obliging mood it did not feel too impolite to ask him about his reputation for stubbornness. There was a small pause. Then came the knowing smile. He realised what people thought. He understood the image he presented was probably not his best side. He laughed at the notion that when he was an overnight success he was praised for being forward thinking and creative but the years of frustration made him look obstinate and bloody-minded.
Spool forward to the beginning of this season and events forced the man who was apparently the Premier League’s most stubborn operator to take an about-turn. The sale of Samir Nasri, in particular, to Manchester City, where Arsenal play tomorrow, made him reassess his Arsenal master plan. Wenger had to be flexible enough to shake off a philosophy he clung to like a leech and come up with a new idea. Fast.
It was a painful manoeuvre but a necessary one. The concept of growing a team, of developing starlets together into a unit that could mature together, has been bulldozed by the billions that separate the wealthiest clubs from the rest.
Losing Nasri on top of the half-expected departure of Cesc Fabregas, two key players who should have their best years ahead of them, made Wenger rip up the manual he had believed in so vehemently. When he accepted Nasri’s head was turned beyond the point of no return, he gave up on the dream that had obsessed him from the point Arsenal left Highbury in 2006.
“It was a big blow. To me and to the club,” he says. “You know why? Because the financial difference between us and teams like Man City has become too big to hope to keep the players for eight, nine, 10 years. Okay, we lost Thierry Henry, we lost Patrick Vieira, we lost players before but they had played for eight, nine years at the club. It’s the first time that we lose players at an age where they start to produce, like Fabregas and Nasri. They were both born in 1987 and are 24 years old. That’s when you start to become a football player.”
In an interview with L'Equipelast month which coincided with Wenger's 15 years at Arsenal, he elaborated on why this obligatory shift in ideology saddened him. "The hard thing is the feeling that something is ending. You had a project with guys that you took on at the age of 18 and they leave at the age of 23. For the first time since I have been here I lost young players who were reaching maturity. I suffered because it is painful to separate with key players who you have invested a lot in; it's painful when the results are not good enough. We are fighting with clubs that have far superior means. We cannot account for the difference in the financial potential of clubs like Manchester City and ourselves."
That he feels it so personally explains why he has not been shy in questioning City’s commitment to financial fair play.
This week, back at Arsenal’s Hertfordshire training ground, Wenger admitted he sanctioned Nasri’s sale with considerable trepidation. “You have to do the right thing for the club at the end of the day but it is always painful to lose players at 23 or 24 years old. We knew that we would lose Fabregas and I thought at the time psychologically it may be too much as well.”
It certainly looked that way as his team imploded. But Wenger has been able to integrate players of experience – the kind he was not keen to sign while committed to project youth – into the group.
Comparing the line-up who defeated Everton last weekend to the selection given the trouncing of their lives the last time they went to Manchester, there are some notable changes. Thomas Vermaelen (aged 26), Per Mertesacker (27), Mikel Arteta (29), Alex Song (24) and Gervinho (24) all enhance the team beaten 8-2 at Old Trafford.
If Wenger still harbours some disappointments about how he had to make emergency repairs, he does a good job of hiding it. “I am personally completely happy with the team I have,” he said. “There is a good, good spirit there. The game on Sunday will show how far we can go. I’m sure this group will fight absolutely 100 per cent to go as far as they can.”
For all their improvements Arsenal still have a way to go to convince the football world that they can spar toe to toe with City. Arsenal will be able to wave their Champions League knockout ticket in front of a team who lost theirs but there could be no greater example of how England’s football map has been redrawn than the chant City’s fans sang lustily when these teams met in the League Cup: “You’re just our feeder club.”
It is not the first time Arsenal have been viewed in that way. In the late 1990s it was Barcelona and Real Madrid who turned the heads of the talent moulded by Wenger. Emmanuel Petit and Marc Overmars were the first of a handful who went to the Camp Nou. Nicolas Aneka left for the Bernabeu. For Wenger it was frustrating enough to lose players he wanted to keep to the giants of La Liga. But being picked off by a Premier League rival is a greater worry. Nasri followed Gael Clichy, Kolo Toure and Emmanuel Adebayor and the challenge for Arsenal is to block off that exit route.
Wenger will rendezvous with another who got away at the Etihad – albeit in a different way. He fondly remembers tracking a young Yaya Toure, who trained and trialled with Arsenal in his teens. He played in the red and white shirt in a pre-season game at Barnet in 2003 as a second striker. He missed the best chance of the match and, as Wenger recalled with a grin, was “completely average” on the day.
“I have known him since he was 15,” Wenger says. “We had an agreement with him to come here but the problem was that we had to wait long enough for a European passport. He was impatient and went, at the time, to Metalurh Donetsk.”
The younger Toure brother first came to Europe via a feeder club further down the food chain, Beveren in Belgium, who had a link with a football school in Ivory Coast. There he played alongside Gervinho, Emmanuel Eboue and Paris St-Germain’s left back Siaka Tiene. “It was quite interesting because his generation played for two or three years at Beveren. All of the players have made big careers. But in two years there was not one offer for one player.”
Yaya Toure’s development into one of the finest midfielders of his generation is no surprise to Wenger. “We knew he would be a top-class player. The only problem with Yaya was to fix him into a position because he can play everywhere. He can play centre-back, as a second striker, as a midfielder and for a long time we didn’t know where to play him.”
Now the focus is on stopping him. And a few more besides. Finding the balance between weathering City’s attacks, while trying to force their own game on a side with a 100 per cent record at home in the league, is more than enough to occupy Wenger.
Somebody proposed that, if Manchester City put six past United, who put eight past Arsenal, the sums were not optimistic. “So that’s 14 together,” muses Wenger. “Fortunately it doesn’t work like that. You could say as well that Chelsea have beaten them and we have beaten Chelsea so it could go the other way as well.” Seems the not-so-stubborn Wenger has an answer for almost everything.
