Supporting a football club is usually a communal experience. This remains the case even at a time when the big European clubs are no longer rooted in local communities, and draw players and fans from across the globe. My affiliation with “the Arsenal” has served as a point of connection to dozens of strangers. But its greatest impact on my life has been on friendships that were not formed through a shared love of Arsenal, but deepened by it. And these friendships have, in turn, deepened my commitment to Arsenal, and to football.
For those who don’t inherit a football team as a matter of geography or family tradition, supporting a club is an active choice, one that can be made for all kinds of reasons. Since 1996, anyone choosing rather than inheriting Arsenal has likely done so in part because of Arsène Wenger, who joined as manager that year. They might have been attracted by Wenger’s emphasis on attractive, attacking football; by the brilliant players he recruited; by the team’s success in the first decade of his tenure.
Or, like two of my Arsenal friends, they might have been French. Most French football fans, if they support an English team, choose Arsenal not so much because Wenger is French but for his record of signing French greats like Patrick Vieira, Robert Pires, and Thierry Henry.
This year, after a long period of decline — Arsenal’s last league championship was in 2004 — Wenger was eased out. I thought immediately of my two French friends, whose very different attitudes to Wenger express so much about the nature of the man, and of modern football.
One friend had moved to London in the 1990s, and soon became an Arsenal season-ticket holder. When we first met, in 2011, I was shocked to discover that he was not a fan of Wenger. In those days veneration for Wenger was still the norm among Arsenal fans.
“Wenger is overrated,” my friend said. It turned out that he knew Wenger personally. “He reminds me of a type of person I’ve worked with” — he ran a hedge fund — “He is the sort of investor who says, ‘I am right, it’s the market that’s wrong.’”
I had always admired Wenger for having a philosophy; but viewed from another angle, this philosophy was really dogmatism. The manager’s job was to win championships, and Wenger wasn’t getting it done.
No win in sight
The years that followed made my friend look prescient. Wenger’s insistence on his beliefs became almost comically stubborn, while Arsenal came no closer to winning championships. He refused to fill what seemed to everyone else to be obvious holes in his team — the absence of a top-class goalkeeper or central defender or any sort of defensive midfielder. He was loyal to players despite season after season of stasis or underachievement.
In 2011, my friend had been the exception in not admiring Wenger. By 2016, when Arsenal lost the league title to Leicester City — debunking Wenger’s claim that the reason for their decline was the money spent by wealthier clubs — a majority of fans believed that, if not overrated, Wenger was certainly over the hill. Whenever I met another football fan, Arsenal or otherwise, they would ask me, “Are you #WengerIn or #WengerOut?” With some shame I’d admit that I too was now #WengerOut.
Each time I did so, I thought of my second friend, also French, Arsenal-supporting and working in finance, and also the only person I knew who still supported Wenger. As undergraduates in the United States we had spent countless weekend mornings in an Irish bar watching Arsenal lose or draw. It wasn’t that this friend thought Wenger was still the best person to deliver success — it’s just that he had a different understanding of what is valuable in football.
The third ideal
What should a football club and its manager aim to do? It is easy to establish three distinct and often competing visions. One sees football as a business, a form of entertainment like movies or pop music, and aims only to expand the market and maximise profit. Another is motivated primarily by a competitive urge: a football club exists only to win football matches. A third ideal is romantic and often aesthetic: football is a source of beauty and joy.
Wenger is often placed in the third camp. In truth, he was a highly competitive person who detested losing, and he had a greater interest in the management of his club’s finances than any modern manager. He was not personally indifferent to money either, negotiating for himself one of the highest salaries in world football.
But at a time when football has become less a sport and more an industry, the players have become ‘brands’, and the biggest clubs exist either as pure profit machines or as reputational laundromats for autocratic regimes and petro-billionaires, Wenger stood out for his ideals. He loved winning, but he loved football more. To him, being a manager meant the chance to help individuals transform their lives, and to mould a group capable of creating moments of transcendence. Asked to define his job, he said: “I am a facilitator of what is beautiful in man.”
Philosophical position
Most Arsenal fans resented Wenger’s dislike of the transfer market; his persistent refusal to upgrade the team by buying new players. They mocked the loyalty that underpinned this attitude. There is little doubt that Wenger’s approach cost Arsenal on-field success. But, as my second friend reminded me, it was still worth respecting, even cherishing. For “Wenger’s philosophical position — internal development over horse-trading — is the only thing stemming the tide of the commodification of the modern footballer, who is treated like a financial asset instead of a human being.”
I have spent much of the past year in London, and have transitioned from long-distance to stadium-going fan. Arsenal usually won at home in Wenger’s last season, but they were now a mediocre team that did not even play beautifully. My Wenger-sceptic friend had been proven right. When Wenger announced his retirement, the encomia that followed were marked by relief as much as appreciation. At his last home match, the mood was nostalgic; fans sang of the long-retired Henry and Vieira, and achievements 15 years in the past. The suggestion was that Wenger would be remembered for his trophies.
As club football becomes ever more commodified, I hope that others will, like my second friend, remember Wenger for what was rarer than on-pitch success: that, to appropriate a phrase from the economist E.F. Schumacher, he practised football as if people mattered.
The writer is based in Bengaluru.
