• Has football got a little too serious? Or are our players not focused enough?
• Today’s suggestion for the Arsenal team tonight

By Tony Attwood

It would seem as if my daily ravings on this site about Arsenal having developed a method of progression up the league, while spending only a fraction of the money ManC has spent, has actually reached eyes and ears beyond the blog itself.   For the Press Reader webs pages are running “Strug­glers can end doom spiral by copy­ing Arteta” while the Telegraph has “Manchester United can end doom spiral – if they copy this Arsenal template.”

Now I must admit I don’t mind if other publications use ideas we’ve been proposing for some time, even though they don’t acknowledge us.  For I can still rejoice in headlines like “Mikel Arteta’s north London repair job is cause for encouragement, but Old Trafford must first free itself from overpaid, mediocre players”.   Plus headlines like Strug­glers can end doom spiral by copy­ing Arteta” and Manchester United can end doom spiral – if they copy this Arsenal template.

And I don’t mind, because that is only half the story and if that is all ManU do, they’ll stay jut where they are in the league.  We had the doom spiral it under Unai Emery who wasted the entire transfer budget on one player who in the end we had to give away for nothing, so Arsenal know what this is all about.

But at last the media has now picked up on this and are running advice to clubs saying “Les­son one Be bru­tal with under­per­form­ing, over­paid stars.”   Finally they tell us that [Manchester] “United have rewar­ded mediocrity” and they mention in this regard “Joshua Zirkzee, Manuel Ugarte, Diogo Dalot, Harry Maguire and Luke Shaw.”  And finally they have realised that “Arsenal had a sim­ilar prob­lem when Arteta took over in 2019. Mesut Ozil, Shkodran Mustafi, Sead Kolas­inac and Sokratis Papastatho­poulos were on big wages, and were all fail­ing to offer what Arteta wanted.”   

So Arteta simply told the players that they did not figure in his plans and if they could find themselves another club, they should do so.  That got the agents skipping from pillar to post desperately searching for a club that would take the player, so the agent could still earn some money for doing not that much.

Then Arsenal returned to the way they had of running the club under Wenger, rather than the cockeyed approach of Emery, namely by bringing through their own youth team graduates while buying others to work around the core.  This saved a fortune and also gave the club a new Arteta/Arsenal identity.  

Then before we knew what was happening, up popped Smith Rowe and Saka and the new signings.  And the key point here was that each was told about the overall new plan which involved younger players.   Older players were expected to help the youngsters develop their talent, rather than have a clique of older men who considered themselves superior to the up and coming youth players.

Of course as every writer knows, you can’t copyright or trademark ideas, so everyone could see exactly what Arteta was up to.  But others did not copy the Arsenal revolution because a) it was clearly a plan that if it worked would take several years to reach fruition and b) they didn’t have enough young players coming through to make the project work.

But at Arsenal youth and reserve team coaches were empowered by the notion that they were part of the grand plan – they were nurturing the young men who could and would win the league.  Thus while some idiot fans were copying journalists and calling for Arteta to be sacked because he didn’t have the “winning mentality” (as shown because his team came runners’-up three years running), the board knew where Arteta and Arsenal were going.

Now none of this is secret.  There has been no prohibition on journalists writing up details of this revolutionary approach, and that for a simple reason.   Most PL clubs are focussed on buying players as the way to the top.  Arsenal’s revolution was focussed on getting rid of such men.  Those who were left loved Arteta, because they immediately saw that he had singled them out for part of his new approach.

And what is so wonderful in all this is that it can be written and spoken about openly, because other clubs don’t have the time, patience or indeed ability to build a team in this way.  So the club came runners up three times in the league as the ManCs spent their way to the titles.  No one questioned where the money came from – but the League was getting ready to drop the Mancs into really deep trouble.

The point is of course that Arteta had a six year plan of getting rid of the old guard, bringing through the youngsters, while waiting for the authorities to star their action against ManC.   And indeed somehow Arteta convinced the board to wait.  That was the best part of the trick..

So everything was linked: the redevelopment of the youth system, getting rid of the old guard, and the exposure of the financial corruption utilised by the owners of ManC.  Of course no one quite knew how the timetable would work but it was clear that ultimately the League would have to challenge ManC or else no other club would ever win the league again.   Indeed the top clubs were by now talking about leaving the Premier League unless something was done about ManC.   In fact ManC knew what was coming but in their arrogance they felt they were untouchable. 

Yet the sheer volume of charges against ManC came as a total and utter shock; the club simply couldn’t believe it.   They had won the league four years in succession as Arsenal had risen to three consecutive second place finishes, but Arsenal clearly could not overtake Manc and this reinforced ManCs view that no one could challenge their financial approach.

My understanding is that a small number of clubs wanted an earlier legal assault on ManC, but were persuaded to wait until the unified attack could come.  It is probably fair to say that as a result, Manchester City really didn’t know what had hit them.