- Feeble fans fade away as Arsenal saunter on: it’s too easy
- Arsenal’s “expected points” in the last six. Just how well are we doing?
By Tony Attwood
In March the Football Facts website ran the article, Arsenal won’t win the Premier League for these five reasons … I won’t bore you with those reasons, because whether the reasons were correct or not, Arsenal didn’t win the league, as you will well know.
But what does annoy me is not so much how articles like that pop up with dire warnings about how everything is going wrong for Arsenal and the club is falling to bits, it is that they are just thrown into the mix and the story then dropped when Arsenal are winning.
Take for example, the MSN article with the headline “Arsenal injury nightmare as weakened north London derby team vs Tottenham named.” That self-same headline then turned up in the Star, while others started using “nightmare” as a buzzword until suddenly everything changed and we had Spurs slump to devastating derby defeat.
Indeed Football London, never one to miss a chance to reuse someone else’s line came up with “Spurs suffered a nightmare afternoon at the Emirates Stadium on Sunday.”
Thus fast as you can say “re-write” all the journalists who were writing off Arsenal a couple of days back have all had the same idea (or have simply been copying each other’s copy (althoughy I make no allegation to that effect) giving us such excuses as “Along with Burnley, Brentford and Everton, Tottenham went into this weekend as one of four clubs yet to give a single minute of Premier League action to a home-grown product this this season.”
The Telegraph have a fractionally different line, but in essencie it is much the same telling us that “Tottenham’s academy has been left behind while Arsenal’s gives Mikel Arteta rocket fuel”
And my point about these and multiple other articlse of this type is that first, they come out after the game, rather than being part of the publication’s longer term vision as to what is going on in football, and second, the win that we saw yesterday over Tottenham was due to Arsenal’s tactical superirority and the fact that Tottenham have not had the right sort of academy policy.
Interestingly, there are also some excuses about Tottenham being in debt in relation to the stadium, while when the stadium opened, we were told over and over again there was no stadium debt because their criminal (as we found out) owner was paying for it all. (Incidentally, Pres Trump has pardoned the criminal ex-owner, so he’s all ok now).
Now maybe it is true that Tottenham don’t have a clue how to set up and run an academy, but I think that if the journalists concerned truly thought that, they should have been writing articles about the notion earlier in the year, or maybe last year, or whenever their highly skilled investigative techniques revealed the facts.
But to come up with the idea after a 4-1 battering by Arsenal, and suggesting the problem has been there all along, contradicts what they were previously saying and belittles Arsenal’s wonderful season.
However we should note that HITC ran the article, “Is the Tottenham academy failing?” in 2018 – which is to say seven years ago, and it was quite a good piece. But I wonder why that thought hasn’t been at the forefront of commentary about Tottenham ever since. Publishing “Tottenham’s academy has been left behind while Arsenal’s gives Mikel Arteta rocket fuel” as the Telegraph does today doesn’t really tell us why this wasn’t published six or seven yeas ago.
The Academy at Arsenal is run by Per Mertesacker, who took on the project once he had retired from playing, and as far as I understand it, has dedicated himself totally to that job ever since, resisting any temptation to move elsewhere or become further involved with developing Arsenal’s older players. It was he, as I understand it, who clearly set out the fundamentals of his work as being football ability, physical development, having the right mindset in relation to football, fellow players and the club, and through that having a emphasis on respect, discipline, and humility.
Now having a giant of the game such as Per Mertesacker runninhg the youth wing of Arsenal is a huge advantage, both because he obviuosly know the game and the club fromtop to bottom, but also because parents of talented youngsters know that they are not only having their children go to a highly respected club (an unparalled 100 consecutive years in the top division dones’t do the club any harm in this regard) but also they know that Arslenal is a club which takes its young players seriously in having such an eminent man in charge of this part of the club.
The fact is that players can join Arsenal aged eight, and you can imagine the impact on parents as they look for a club if they know that Per Mertesacker is in charge of the youth wing. The Hale End academy, under Mertesacker’s guidance, then develops these players from there up to the Under-16s. After that, the players can join the development squads.
And this is not just theory. Remember Bukayo Saka joined the academy at the under-9s level.
It is this well-established structure that has been run for years by the same person, who is held in the highest regard in football, that gives Arsenal such an advantage in recruiting its youth players – and keeping them.
