Opinion: If Wenger stays….

Illness, mental fatigue and new job function have combined to make writing a lot more difficult in recent weeks. Funny thing about my new job role is that my Team Lead is an avid Arsenal fan and getting to a new desk and you have all the first days at work goose pimples. So my Team Lead calls me and this conversation ensues

Team Lead:  Hei, I hear you own an Arsenal blog right?

Me: Yea, I do. Who told you?

Team Lead (Frowns at being asked a question back and still frowning he asks me): Doesn’t matter who told me, I want to know what you think about Olivier Giroud.

Me (no more as confident as I was when I asked him ‘Who told you’) – After I found my voice, I lent him my opinion which I feel is not a popular one but I said it anyway. Giroud is a good second striker that is not helped by the weight of responsibility he solely carries which in turn is Wenger’s fault. So if you are going to blame Giroud, I only think it’s fair you blame the manager just as much.

So when he called me yesterday to ask what my opinion on Wenger staying was, now more confident in my own abilities I told him, you know what? I haven’t written for a while so I’ll write about it.

I’m a huge Wenger worshipper, always been, most likely would always be but I broke ranks and started to question if he should remain manager of the club after the Everton loss.  At least I hung in till recently, a sizeable amount of fans have wanted him out for years I believe, for the first time I started accepting that Arsenal without Wenger in it might not be a bad thing after all. However Wenger’s conversation with beIN Sports put this whole contract saga into some perspective.

Asked in an interview with beIN Sports, broadcast on talkSPORT, whether he would stay or go at the end of the season, Wenger replied: “Look, I have said that many times already, I have given my word to this club and that I want to continue where I am…. that means to stay.” – Arsene Wenger

We all know you can get a bank loan on Wenger sticking to whatever he says and signs, a man that can refuse to sign a midfielder last season because Abou Diaby was returning from one of his long term injuries is a man that you can trust alone with your wife on a very cold Russian night.

So I decided to ask a few of my friends on Twitter and via email if they wanted Wenger to stay and a larger percentage wanted him to remain at Arsenal but the results also show a sizeable amount want him out. To make it clearer, I was scared when we had just 30 votes. Of the first 30 votes, 16 wanted him in and 14 wanted him out, almost 50%. I suspect Wenger must have discovered the survey and got some of his strongest supporters to get involved which reflected in the last set of votes.

With Wenger I feel we have a situation similar to having a smart kid at home that you know if only he would put in a little more effort would be the best at what he does. The ingredients for success are there, we have an amazing stadium, a huge local and global fan base that is willing to pay top dollar to watch and follow their team, we are situated in a prime position in one of the best cities in the world which makes us attractive to sponsors and we now have sponsorships deals that are just as good if not better than our rivals, we also have in Wenger a very knowledgeable manager who if only would put in the extra effort in player acquisition, squad management and tactics we would be a much better side than we currently are.

It’s amazing to see that almost 80% of the fans that took the poll think that Wenger needs help in the form of having a Director of Football. I read somewhere that when Dein was leaving Arsenal, Wenger asked him ‘do you want me to resign too?’ and Dein asked him to stay on.  That’s just shows how the relationship between Wenger and Dein was and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that two of them working together brought some of our most glorious years.

If working with someone else on deals, transfers, salaries etc brought the best out of Wenger how come he is unwilling to try it again. Or does Wenger feel that bond with Dein can never be recreated with someone else? I feel Wenger does too much; the most important man at Arsenal is him. Maybe if he focused solely on on the pitch matters and allowed other aspects of the club like player negotiations, clubs wage structure, setting up a better scouting network etc. we would get better results on the pitch.

I love Wenger’s socialist wage structure but is it still practicable in modern football especially with the kind of competitors we have in the premier league? Are we not stuck with players like Diaby, Bendtner, Park and Chamakh until he left on our wage bill because we pay too much to players that contribute very little? Wenger says the decision on wage structure was a board decision but we all know the amount of influence he has there. There is an excellent article on Arsenals wage structure here and it makes for good reading http://bergkampesque.com/2013/01/09/the-beauty-and-horror-of-arsenals-socialist-pay-structure/ . Truth is Wenger needs to delegate some of his responsibilities and he needs to trust the people whom he delegates them to, to take decisions that are in the best interest of the club.

The result from the survey question above just goes further to buttress the fact that Wenger needs to either improve his use of the transfer window or completely delegate it to someone else and fans even consider it more important than his tactical ability.  Three transfer windows have gone now and we have failed to replace Van Persie or get a second striker for the club, we had to wait till the last day to magically get Ozil, Andrey Arshavin ,Nacho Monreal and Kim Kallstrom were also last minute deals.

To hear the manager say this after the Kallstrom signing to be honest goes right to the top of one of the most unintelligent things I have heard from a very intelligent person

“It crossed my mind,” Wenger said, when asked whether he had thought about pulling out of the transfer. “But I would not have signed him if we’d had two or three more days to do something. It was 5pm on Friday night, so it was sign him or nobody. We had to sign him in these conditions.

The statement speaks for itself as to how our transfer business is being coordinated and you would expect that if Wenger decides that he will remain at the club then he should please change how he approaches the transfer market. I don’t think paying over the odds is correct either but I believe the transfer market is largely reactionary and one player sale might trigger a lot of price increases elsewhere.  That is why it is important to identify the players you need early, negotiate deals early, have an excellent pre-season that affords them quick integration and then start the season strong while others are still trying to make last minute transfer business.

Change is needed for us to be successful and it seems we are not changing our manager soon, the only hope we now have is for our manager to change.

So Boss, that’s my answer to your question about the manager and I even got 52 of my friends to join in with a survey so I guess I deserve a pay rise right? Thanks to everyone that participated in the survey. Sincerely appreciate. Cheers!

Here is a link to the survey results if you fancy still taking a detailed look. http://polldaddy.com/surveys/2082255/report 

Thanks for reading our post, Interact with us on the comments section on any of the survey results you would like to comment on or if you fancy twitter we are @canoncrested. If you follow, we always follow back. Cheers

N.B If you notice some scroller about a store on the site, it’s because we are setting up our store which should be up soon and there would be some really cool Arsenal Merchandise to purchase there so lets all look forward to that.