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by Tony Attwood
The Football Observatory recently published a piece on the lifespan of a club coach . In essence, how long the average coach or manager of a football club lasts, before he or she is sacked or resigns.
And that is of particular interest because while Arsenal are most certainly wanting to hold on to Mikel Arteta not least for having given Arsenal the best run of results since 199/8 to 2004/5, some have been calling for him to be replaced.
In that earlier series of eight seasons, Arsenal won the league three times and came second five times, while winning the FA Cup four times. And of course now Arsenal have not won anything since the last FA Cup triumph in 2019/20 but the build-up across recent years has looked similar tothe triumphs under Arsene Wenger. What’s more both Arteta and Wenger have suffered from pundits and supporters endlessly telling the manager how wrong he had got it.
The 1997/8 league title was preceded by the club coming 12th, 5th and 3rd, which has some similarity with the recent run of coming 8th, 8th and 5th. Then in 1997/8 Arsenal not only won the league, but in fact did the double, winning the FA Cup as well. Bergkamp had joined the season before, and this was the season when he became the top scorer with 22 goals.
What is however often forgotten is that in both 1996/7 when Arsenal came third, and in the title-winning year that followed, Arsenal went out of the Uefa Cup in the first round. And indeed it took two more years in the Champions League before Arsenal was able to get out of the group stages. In other words success did not come all at once.
But there was clear signs of progress coming fifth, third and first in the league across successive seasons. And all this before Thierry Henry started making his mark – a mark which meant he became the club’s top scorer for seven consecutive seasons starting in 1999/2000.
And I do see parallels with the way Arsenal moved up the table before the titles came rolling along, being 12th in 1994/5, then fifth, then third, before the title in 1998.
Of course, such comparisons are never exact, but we might remember perhaps that in Thierry Henry’s first season people were saying that he was useless, and the signing of him, and the regular playing of him, showed that the idea of bringing in a French manager was fundamentally flawed. Indeed we might remember that Tony Adams did not particularly help the reputation of English football by making the comment about Wenger, having not met him, to the effect that, “He’s French – what does he know about English football?”
Wenger broke the mould by staying from 1998 to 2018, eventually hounded out by an appalling combination of raging journalists and Arsenal fans with short memories, to be replaced by a manager who was eventually removed after Arsenal managed just four wins in their first 14 league games.
However it seems that the notion of a manager staying at a club for a long time, in order to turn matters around (as Wenger did) is now not one that clubs want to know about. For The CIES Football Observatory data indicates the average tenure for a Premier League manager is fractionally over two years and one month, which is longer than the average tenure in other European leagues like the Bundesliga, La Liga, Ligue 1, and Serie A.
And although there is not much talk at the moment of sacking the manager at Arsenal, a year ago there was indeed such talk. In fact it was under a year ago when Reddit ran the question “should Arteta be sacked” and the answer came back “Yes 100%. He has no history of winning league titles, and lost two title races. We are performing worse in points, and open play chance creation.”
It was an interesting comment since in 2023/24 Arsenal gained 89 points which was their second highest total number of points in the league ever. The only time Arsenal got more points was in 2003/4 when you might recall we won the League unbeaten, and got 90 points – just one more than in 2023/24.
Actually having drawn that comparison there are a couple of other bits and pieces that might be noted about 2023/24 and that title-winning season exactly 20 years previous. In 2023/24 Arsenal scored 91 goals, which was 18 more than in 2003/4. And it was in 2023/24 that journalists took up the idea that Arsenal should buy a new striker.
Now the point is that in 2003/4 Arsenal’s top scorer was also the League’s top scorer – Thierry Henry with 39 goals. In 2023/24 Saka got 20. So a significant decline from the era of Henry at his best. Except that in 2023/24, as noted above Arsenal scored 18 more league goals without Henry than in the title winning unbeaten season with him!
What this shows us more than anything is that there are no simple solutions to footballing issues. (Actually it also shows us is that some people will write any sort of nonsense to get readers and sway opinion, and that is why most football articles don’t quote any facts, because they are based entirely on opinion.)
Anyway, some people want Arteta sacked, and maybe fancy the Premier League moving to the Italian model where last season 19 of the 20 coaches had been in post for less than a year.
And if you look at what happens to clubs after the manager is sacked you can see quite clearly that by and large replacing the manager doesn’t actually make things better.
