Some clubs just threaten others; Arsenal find new brilliance within

 

• A move toward a new style of club financing and a fair approach to football
• Forest v Arsenal: the line up and the various score predictions for today’s game

By Tony Attwood

Successful businesses, whatever their area of work, never stand still, and football is no exception.   If journalists and supporters have noted how one player works the ball out of defence to launch a new attack, then so have rival clubs and the next time we meet, they will be implementing, a new tactic to counteract this approach.

Although not all clubs manage to get this “constant evolution” approach right.   We might consider ManU, for whom the Guardian has come up with the description: “Elite-level incompetence.”    And then there is Manchester City’s problem.  It hasn’t brought their downfall yet, but maybe there are signs that “elite arrogance” will eventually do just that.

As for Nottingham Forest whom we played yesterday, well, their problem is more basic: their inability to score a goal in their own stadium.  And if we look back we see that they were one of those teams who got more points asway from home last season than at home.   Mind you they were not the only one.  Tottenham Ho pulled the same trick,   So while Arsenal got 47 points at home and 38 points away, keeping the all-important home crowd happy, Tottenham got 15 points at home and 36 away.  Not clever in a new stadium that has not yet been paid for.

Nottingham Forest last season got 20 points at home and 24 away.   And such patterns can and indeed will result in nervousness when a club plays in front of its own supporters.  For such results generate more and more anxiety and nervousness both in terms of the players and the fans – and the result of that is, well, worse results.

Meanwhile, as we were recently reminded, Etihad Airways, Manchester City’s main sponsor, is threatening to sue the Premier League after the club was found guilty of 115 financial rule breaches.

Most publications have mentioned this, but the issue of what happens thereafter is not one that very many publications and commentators have taken up, perhaps because they have been told not to touch the story.

But I suspect that if ManC do go down that route, it would bring the Premier League (if not the rest of the leagues) grinding to a halt, as you really can’t have the sponsor of one club suing every other club, and expect business as usual.   And given that such cases tend to ramble on through the courts over a period of a year of two, that could lead to the shut down of English football. 

And it was that concept which made me think that somehow these matters are going to be sorted out simply by the rest of the league getting so fed up with the Mancs that they (the other 19 clubs) all resign and set up a new league without inviting ManC to join.

But at least there are some other issues around to keep us occupied today, such the tale of the “secret creativity guru who has helped transform Arsenal”   This turned up on TCE and tells us of German Castanos who has helped introduce “some of Mikel Arteta’s left-field methods.”

Now “left field methods” is a disparaging phrase often used by journalists to describe creative novelties – a subject that is often looked down upon in the UK, where novelty is looked down upon and “learning the basics” is praised.  Indeed new creative tactics are still often described insultingly as “clever-clever” approaches which never really work out.  Solid reliable English people don’t get involved in such psycho mumbo jumbo, but instead engage in solid reliable hard work.

But Arteta, like Wenger before him, is not tainted by such one thousand year old Anglo Saxon thinking and Castanos has been patiently re-writing the training manuals over recent years.  Indeed some of the move through the repeated second place finishes to top of the league can be put down to him.

As a result the way in which the Arsenal playing style has evolved under its owners and senior management in recent years has been very different from that of virtually every other club, and it is this radical re-thinking that allowed Arsenal to challenge the “Money is Everything” approach of the Abu Dhabi United Group and win the league last season.   

For while most football clubs, and indeed most of England’s education, does this year what was done last year, successful companies including Arsenal has been rethinking the entire world of training and player development.   And in this regard the club has moved way beyond the standard thinking in the UK .  A thinking which suggests that innovations, especially those in psychology, are really just tricks, and that the solution to any problem is always to work harder and simply “get down to it” whatever “it” is.