Arsenal vs Monaco – Are Things Really So Bad?

Arsenal vs Monaco – Are Things Really So Bad?

At the Arsenal Monaco match I saw a young supporter who I’ve seen off and on through this season. He is unmissable, not because of his physical appearance but because he wears a t-shirt that says “Enough is Enough”. He’s one of the anti-Wenger mob.

The fact he was there for the Champions League game wasn’t particularly significant – he seems to pick up a ticket when one of the regular season ticket holders on the North Bank isn’t there.


He stands there, watches the game, and keeps up a miserable appearance. He doesn’t applaud Arsenal goals. He just looks sour.

Of course he must have felt at home on Wednesday night, what with the dismay of some supporters and the booing of the team as they left the pitch (although at least Mertersacker still did his traditional walk around to the North Bank to thank the supporters, who were generous in their applause back).

But I wonder about this lad – just as I do about the person whose comments I saw on a blog complaining that Wenger had lowered everyone’s expectations so much that now some supporters found a top four finish as acceptable.

It wasn’t so much that I was wondering what planet these people were on, but rather what concept they had of the club that they claim to support.

This feeling was enhanced when I noticed that we are just approaching the anniversary of a period in Arsenal’s history when the club had one of its disastrous runs of six games without a win.

Arsenal’s history is littered with such runs – although what makes the one that I noticed memorable was that it happened under Herbert Chapman, the year after Arsenal had finished (for the first time ever) runners’ up in the league.

Now of course as supporters of Arsenal what we all want is another Unbeaten Season, another Double, another Champions League final, or failing all of that another trophy of some sort with another pot at the Champions League next season – secured of course by coming in the top four this year.

But none of this is ours by right. Arsenal is a club with a lot of income – last time I looked I think we were second in the league behind Manchester United. And to be fair they are a long way ahead of us in income because of their worldwide marketing which dates back to the 1950s. It’s not something we can catch up with in a few years.

Manchester City and Chelsea don’t have the income but they have the funding – a subtle difference – and can outdo Arsenal on any bidding war for a player. Indeed Chelsea are now moving into a new field in which they are buying up vast numbers of young players, whom they loan out and then managed to sell one or two on at a profit. A neat way around the FFP rules, although hardly the sort of trading in humans that I applaud.

So we are up there in financial terms with the big boys – but we don’t have an absolute right to be able to say, “we should be winning a trophy every year”, any more than the much wealthier Man U, or Man C have such a right.

Arsenal’s history was initially one of being very much a mid-table club. It took us 37 years in the league to win the first trophy (the FA Cup), and since then we have had periods of success followed by fallow periods.

Bertie Mee and George Graham did indeed take us to the highs, but then let us down again very seriously. Mee took the club to near relegation. Graham gave us mid-table finishes with the lowest number of goals scored, and the lowest number conceded. Terry Neill promised much but only achieved some success in the FA Cup. The Chapman/Allison era of coming first or second in something each year lasted seven eight years.

What Arsene Wenger has done is given the club stability at a new high level – but he is being held back not by any lack of ability on his part or ambition by the club, but by the fact that he is now not just competing with Manchester Utd in financial terms (as he did at the start of his reign) but also with the unlimited wealth of Manchester City and Chelsea.

Of course, one may wish for more finances for the club so that we can compete with the twists and turns of those two oil rich teams as they find their ways around the FFP regulations – in which case the problem is not Wenger but Kroenke. Or one can appreciate that we have the good fortune to watch the club during the Wenger era – the highest point of consistency in the club’s 129 year history.

Each week a new story about Wenger circulates: he is stubborn, he doesn’t do tactics, he is filtering off the club’s profits into his own pockets, we get more injuries than other clubs, we got those injuries (which actually we don’t always get) because he overtrains the players…

It is all nonsense. If you want to see what failure to make it to the highest level, ask a Tottenham supporter. Or indeed a Liverpool supporter in the last few years.

Football ebbs and flows, and if it didn’t it wouldn’t be worth watching. This year before the Monaco game we had played ten, and won eight. We had scored 22 and let in eight. If you want to throw out a manager who is achieving that, beware, because there are very few if any who could do much more with the resources Arsenal FC has.