Originally Posted by
Letters
I don't think anyone has ever argued that Wenger is either a master tactician or a good motivator.
But he has other qualities which in the early days more than made up for those failings. He has strengths and weaknesses like any manager does.
His strengths in the early days were a knowledge of the European and worldwide game which was unparalleled at the time. He brought in players which weren't on any other clubs radars. He had an eye for a bargain too, players with potential
And he brought in training and fitness methods which were, at the time, revolutionary. It has to be remembered that he came in at a time when there were still "drinking schools" in clubs and players would munch Mars bars and fried food after game. He changed all that.
You don't have to be much of a tactician when you have a squad as good as ours was in those days, and you don't need to be much of a motivator when you have captains like Adams and then Vieira. Off the field our transfer dealings were helped by Dein who seemed to be a shrewd operator. But now we don't have Dein and we don't have a captain. These days all clubs have a worldwide and sophisticated scouting network, Wenger can't now cherry pick players before other clubs even know about them. And all clubs now have sophisticated training and fitness regimes, most have now surpassed us.
So it's not that Wenger was once this towering genius and is now a bumbling buffoon. He has strengths and weaknesses like any manager. In the early days those strengths were revolutionary and gave us an edge, we were better technically than other clubs, we had better players, our players were fitter. His weaknesses were more than compensated for by those strengths - although there were hints of them, the failures in Europe with a squad which really should have won the CL. But now other clubs have caught up and overtaken us in those areas so all that is left are the weaknesses. The billionaires coming in, mopping up many of the best players and inflating the market didn't help of course.
I see Wenger's time with us in 3 stages:
1) The early days when his revolutionary techniques transformed us and made us, for a time, the best team in the country.
2) The middle era when other clubs were catching up, the billionaires started poking their nose in and we were going through a complex stadium move - in my view he did reasonably well in that era to keep us relatively competitive.
3) The last few years in which the money has been available to properly challenge and he is looking lost in an increasingly crazy transfer market. and players now seem to have lost faith in him
It's not that Wenger has changed, it's that he HASN'T changed in response to the way football has changed around him. He can't change and as PnG (I think it was him) rather astutely said one time, not many people are better at doing their job in their 60s than in their 30s and 40s. To quote The Simpsons, he used to be with it but then they changed what "it" was.
It has to be remembered that this level of expectation we have comes from his early years with us. Yes, we won titles before Wenger but we never expected to challenge every year. 5th and the FA Cup would have been considered a pretty decent season back in the day, some people on here need to go back and read Fever Pitch to remind themselves what it used to be like. Although "what it used to be like" was football being a sport of course, players being local heroes rather than bought in prima-donna mercenaries who will be off the first time someone waves an even bigger bag of money at them. There have been other changes at the club and in the sport which you can't entirely lay at Wenger's door.
I've never liked the personal abuse directed at him but when he signed that new contract though he must have known that things would get nasty if we didn't challenge this year so on his head be it. But I don't think the changes he made in his early time with us and that places that took us to should be dismissed or diminished. Never thought I'd see Arsenal do some of the things we did under Wenger in those early years, the Double (twice!), an unbeaten league season and all with a style of football which puts that team up there with any of the great sides in history in my opinion. It's a shame how he's gone from revolutionary to anachronism but I guess that's what happens when you stay still for too long while all around you moves on.