Back in the old days – well, as far back as the start of the 21st century, there were three established ways of making a football club very successful.

Method One had been established for a long old time. It worked brilliantly, but was a very long term device, and offered no guarantees of success. It was worldwide marketing. Real Madrid were the originals, and Manchester United were the first (and arguably the only) English team successfully to copy the model.

For both Man U and Real Mad the combination of a large (and regularly full) ground, and the manufactured appearance of “romance”, resulted in the sales of products worldwide generating the money that allowed the club to purchase virtually any player they wanted. (It is also a reason why such clubs can never afford a prolonged drop from the top, as sales can drop much more quickly than they can be picked up again later).

Method Two: the benefactor model, had been around for a very long time when Chelsea took it to new heights, and its approach is simple: one man owns the club and pours money into it. And if it doesn’t work, he puts more in. Basically it appeared to mean one could do anything, and I remember one newspaper abandoning its pre-season “who will win the league this year” article after the Chelsea takeover happened, since the universal opinion seemed to be that Chelsea would win everything this year, next year and every year until the owner got bored.

The third method however was more subtle, and much harder to pull off: it was known as worldwide scouting. After Arsène Wenger arrived scouts were sent to every continent where football was played, seeking out the youngsters who might one day become Arsenal stars. No one had ever seen anything like it before, the English football establishment scoffed, and it was an amazing success.

As an approach worldwide scouting is much more sophisticated than the other approaches in that although it costs money in terms of scout’s salaries it is much more under the club’s direct control than worldwide marketing, and not at all dependent upon the whims of one man as the benefactor model does).

The evolution of these three approaches left many other clubs watching from the wings. Clubs such as Liverpool, Everton and Tottenham who had had some success in the past found that even if they had a fair amount of worldwide fame (as Liverpool had) they could not compete with the worldwide marketing pull of Man U, the benefactor money of Chelsea (quite the opposite as it turned out) or the extraordinarily extensive scouting network of Arsenal.
And so through the 21st century we’ve watched the three models progress. Man City have taken the Chelsea model to ever greater levels, and if there is going to be a clawing back of the financial advance through FFP, we haven’t really seen it yet.

Man U’s marketing machine has marched on, and the latest deals (particularly including the Chevrolet deal) have had eye watering sums attached.

But what of Arsenal’s worldwide scouting? It was sophisticated, and could produce stars out of both youngsters and players who had been around a few years but who seemed to be going nowhere. Yet it had weaknesses. Indeed the fact that Arsenal have often found themselves playing catch up in order to enter the Champions League each year suggests that maybe worldwide scouting can’t cope with two giant benefactor clubs and the marketing masters in the same league.

Part of this problem has been the fact that worldwide scouting is something which many other clubs have attempted to emulate. As Gilles Grimandi, the chief scout in France, has said, in the early days, he’d go to a French third division game and watch the match along with a few hundred local supporters. Today he says, there is a special enclosure for scouts, and you have to get there early to make sure you get a seat.
Worse, worldwide scouting is easy to disrupt. If a club notes that Arsenal is taking an interest, they can readily call the benefactor clubs and alert them, knowing that Chelsea and Man City can always put in a bid twice the size of Arsenal’s.

And even if that failed, they could come back later and buy the players once established. The departure of Fabregas and van Persie are testimonies to this problem.

And yet somehow, despite these issues, Arsenal’s approach has had something of a renaissance. True, the club has been spending money on players, but it has always done that. More to the point the production line of young talent seems stronger than ever. Some are found overseas (Gnabry, Zelalem, Ryo, Eisfeld, Bellerin), some are picked up at the start of their British careers (Ramsey, Walcott, Oxlade-Chamberlain, Jenkinson), and some come up through the Arsenal ranks (Gibbs, Wilshere, Hayden, Akpom).

When you look at the squad this way, what is interesting is the number of players who have been brought in, in their early days, or who have joined the club as schoolchildren, against the number who are transferred into the club as established players. I must admit I don’t have detailed figures on this for every club but my general observations suggest the percentage of homegrown players and those brought in aged under 20 and who are playing in the first team, is much higher at Arsenal than in most (if not all) other clubs.

Now this is particularly interesting given that it comes at a time when Arsenal have far more money available (because of the arrival of the new sponsorship contract money) than they have had since building started at the new stadium). It suggests that worldwide scouting has found a new lease of life just at the same time as the money has come pouring in.

If that is right, then what’s the cause?

First off I think that Chelsea’s early belief that setting up a youth academy backed by worldwide scouting on the Arsenal model, has run into the buffers. Yes, young men want to come to big clubs and earn unimaginable sums at an early age, but clubs like Chelsea where managers change regularly are now seen as far less attractive than clubs like Arsenal, where there is stability. Parents, who have as much say in where the child goes as the child himself, will look for stability since moving to a new club overseas invariably means moving the family as well.
The other problem with youth academies is that they take time to develop, and will always have a lot of failures. What benefactors want is results today, not the promise that “in five years time this boy will be brilliant”.
So, having come through a few years of difficulty, Arsenal, having stuck to their belief in worldwide scouting, are really seeing the benefits. Nothing can exemplify this more than the discovery of Zelalem and Gnabry, two players who appear to be coming to Arsenal at the same level of ability as Cesc Fabregas.

In the early days of the Wenger revolution I remember hearing one noted commentator say, “There are players today in Arsenal shirts who we could never afford today.” Vieira, Henry, Pires had all come in on reasonable transfer fees. After a few years with Wenger, they were way out of reach – but delivering for the man who had liberated them.
Now it seems Arsenal can sign almost anyone – and there’s nothing wrong with paying £42m for Ozil. But there’s also not much wrong with bringing through Zelalem and Gnabry. Worldwide scouting is still producing the goods and as a method of competing with the benefactor clubs it looks like being as potent as ever.