How Long Will Arsene Wenger Force Arsenal To Stand Still?

Posted Saturday, October 08, 2016 by umaxit.com

"Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose" is a phrase that Arsene Wenger should have a reasonably good grasp of, hailing, as it does, from his native France. The phrase, now given esteemed status as a proverb, translates as "the more things change, the more they stay the same," providing an accurate description of the sort of purgatory that Arsenal find themselves in.

Their rivals at the top of the Premier League have markedly changed, as has the nature of English football, but Arsenal have retained the remarkable ability of staying the same, plotting a course of dramatic peaks and climactic troughs in every season but, ultimately, as ever, settling into third or fourth position.

Arsenal's tumultuous collapses over the February and March period of each and every season have now become so contrived, so glumly expected and so pitiful that Morrissey would struggle to write lyrics to fit the melancholy. And the continual disappointments seemingly mirror the Wenger psychodrama that begins to play out at this stage of each season; the manager becomes visibly more withdrawn, more strained on the touchline and tetchier with journalists.

Yet this season is the one in which Arsenal were supposed to win the league, with Chelsea, Manchester City and Manchester United struggling. Instead, they have been overtaken by Leicester City and Tottenham Hotspur, leaving Wenger more frustrated and launching defensive pronouncements that are more ridiculous than ever.

"I built this club with hard work and without any external resources," Wenger said ahead of the second leg with Barcelona. "There was no money from anyone. Now I am even more motivated than the first day I arrived." The level or refraction, of nonsensical argument and of irrelevance is staggering. Wenger did build the club to where it is today but the state of the club today is the inherent problem.

Arsenal have moved forward since Wenger arrived, back in the last century, but the club has not moved forward in any respect in recent years. Those calling for the Frenchman to leave his post hold no dispute with the work done in the 1990s and the early 2000s; they are enraged by the lack of good work done since, trundling along with money in the bank and, in the main, pretty football without any real success.

The issue of Arsenal's healthy bank balance and relative lack of transfer output is one that infuriates supporters and beguiles observers. Other than using surplus funds to subsidise the lowering of ticket prices, surely there is no better way for a football club to spend its money than on better players.

The brief elation at the signings of Alexis Sanchez, Mesut Ozil and Petr Cech over recent seasons act more as anomalies than any shift toward a policy of buying established players ready to improve the first team. Wenger has allowed Arsenal to slide into a state of mediocrity. They have no established top-class striker, a lack of central midfielders capable of performing at the highest level and only one centre-back, in Laurent Koscielny, that would even fall on the radar of any of Europe's leading clubs.

How Long Will Arsene Wenger Force Arsenal To Stand Still?

The insistences by Arsene Wenger on Per Mertesacker and by a number Arsenal fans on Francis Coquelin act as signifiers for the wider malaise. Mertesacker seems to be the personification of Wenger's outdated and romanticised notion of football, believing that, in the breakneck Premier League, a defender without any marked physical attributes can think his way through the game with anticipation, positioning and a footballing worldliness alone.

Coquelin, too, has benefited from the old Arenal fables, appearing out of nowhere at a time of crisis to seemingly solve a positional problem. But reports of Coquelin's ascension have been greatly exaggerated. He is, and continues to be, a solid Premier League player but Arsenal need so much more than that, and they have done so for years without Wenger acting. The Wenger method of bringing young players into the club, developing them and then plunging them into the first team is noble but when even Barcelona and Manchester City aren't shopping for Arsenal's youth talent anymore, it is resoundingly time to spend—something Wenger seems incapable of doing.

Wenger, for all his manifest faults, remains a fantastic manager, who has often gone without credit for managing to get some truly mediocre sides safely into the top four and through the group stages of the Champions League. Though top four and the first knock-out round in Europe is not enough for Arsenal anymore. They must aim higher, but the players and manager look incapable of doing what is necessary to get over the line.

Trailing in the league to Chelsea and Manchester United is one thing but trailing to Leicester City and Tottenham marks the ultimate indication that Wenger's Arsenal have stood still; they are stagnating. The question now appears, how long can this continue?