Could Arsene Wenger be the next head of Fifa?

 

By Tony Attwood

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Arsène Charles Ernest Wenger managed Arsenal from1 October 1996 to 13 May 2018.  He won the league three times, was the only person ever to lead a team through an unbeaten Premier League season, and won the FA Cup an absolute record seven times.   His nearest rival in that cup-winning regard in that regard took 13 years longer than Wenger to get to seven, and won most of his cups in the 19th century, when the competition was somewhat less intense and the number of clubs involved a lot smaller.

Obviously Mr Wenger won’t recognise my name, although I do have a very small claim to fame in his regard as it was that I who suggested to the chairman of the board that we ought to have a statue of Mr Wenger at the stadium.  That was in the same meeting that I suggested putting up the Chapman statue with Chapman looking up at the ground as if to say “I did that”.  It took a while but both statues are now there.

Arsène Wenger managed the club across 22 years starting in October 1996.  His win record in the league was 57.2% wins across 1235 league matches – well over double the number of matches his nearest rival at Arsenal managed (Bertie Mee, 539 games).  His win rate including cup games was 60.34%.

It was also fascinating how Wenger’s win rate went up as his career developed: 28.9% with Nancy, 48.4% with Monaco, 56.3% with Nagoya Grampus Eight, and 57.2% (excluding cup games) with Arsenal.

If Wenger were to move jobs as is being suggested at the moment, there would be an outcry from Saudi Arabia which is one of the countries that has a very close relationship with Infantino.   But we should remember that it is often noted that the Saudi Arabian government has invested around one billion dollars in Fifa and its projects, and I suspect if that is the case the Saudi government would not take the current chair being replaced by Mr Wenger very readily.    And while we are at it, it is often said that Aleksander Ceferin might be playing a part in who takes up what position in the future.   

Now of course I am not in any way an expert on international football affairs any more than I am on the politics of Slovenia – it is just that I guess if I had to trust anyone whose name is being mentioned in relation to the current situation, Mr Wenger’s would be top of my list.  He has a certain calmness about him, as well as a spectacular knowledge of world football, and that gives me a certain confidence.

But maybe I am influenced not just by the calm and dignified way he behaved when rebuilding Arsenal, but also the way, despite the endless criticisms, he carried his work through at a time when Arsenal were spending every penny they could borrow on building the new ground.

However if more is wanted beyond such matters, and although I am not religious at all myself, I suspect I would note the fact that he puts his view of the world down to his upbringing in Alsace in a Roman Catholic family might have given him a deeper moral philosophy than we have seen in some of the football leaders whose rule we have been subject to in recent years.   Besides he was the most successful manager in Arsenal’s history and the longest serving manager in the history of the Premier League, so he must know something!

But if there is one thing above all else that draws me to Wenger as the man to sort out Fifa, it is the way he changed not just Arsenal but English football.   Whether you look at the way the scouting system was organised or the diet the players were given, he was at the heart of the changes introduced at Arsenal.

The criticism of his time at Arsenal comes from his failure to keep Arsenal at the top after the unbeaten season, yet this point tends to forget or ignore the way the money he had available was cut in order to pay for the stadium.   But he kept Arsenal at the top through changing what the players ate, how and when they trained, and let us never forget, the introduction of World Wide Scouting, which I seem to recall we discussed a number of times on this site – alongside noting seven FA Cup wins.

But there was more to Wenger – it was, in my view, down to him, that the Premier League began to dominate world football, simply because other clubs noted his reforms and introduced them, into their club formats.

So many of Wenger’s innovations are commonplace today: so commonplace in fact that it seems hard to believe that he initiated them.   We would be shocked if Arsenal approached a game now without having inside information on how the opposition club played, yet it was Wenger who introduced that – against one might add – a lot of opposition.  “You don’t win games by watching videos,” became a common jibe in France – until people realised what he had done with Cannes.  Likewise, people laughed at his insistence on the importune of getting the players’ diet right, while at the same time changing their positions.

I think it is fair to say that whatever innovation Wenger introduces these days, no one laughs.