Arsene Wenger urged to stand against Gianni Infantino in FIFA elections

 

• How the League will now proceed to hear the ManC case
• Can ManC be thrown out of the League or is there a way around this fight?

By Tony Attwood

Since November 2019, Arsène Charles Ernest Wenger has been Fifa’s “Chief of Global Football Development” which as the name proclaims, involves him in overseeing the continuing evolution of the game.   

Whether it also involves him in pointing out the catastrophe of what Manchester City have been up to, in terms of the way that club has damaged the professional game, I don’t know, but it is possible.  I would imagine he has a few interesting things to say on the topic.

Besides, he is also chairman of FIFA’s executive team and so oversees reviews of tournaments and gives feedback to Fifa as a whole.  Whether he has had anything to say about recent developments involving Manchester City and the like I don’t know, but I would suspect his opinion has been sought.   His status as the elder stateman of the game is unchallenged.

He is also used to being treated with scepticism as he sorts issues out – and there is no doubt that there is a lot of sorting out to be within Fifa and Uefa given the way they have allowed Manchester City’s owners to manipulate the football world to its own ends.

But Wenger can deal with being an outsider.   In 1996, for example, when appointed manager of Arsenal there was total scepticism.   The phrase “He’s French, what does he know about English football?” still resonated.  Yet Wenger transformed Arsenal and the whole of English football thereafter, as well as ultimately performing the miracle of keeping Arsenal in the top four, while the club diverted all its cash into building the new stadium.

And it seems hard to remember now but he was the first foreign manager to win the League and Cup double, a feat he rounded off by being the only manager since the first campaign, to take his club unbeaten all the way through a season. 

So if we need a clean pair of hands to take over Fifa after the catastrophes surround Manchester City – remembering of course that Fifa, Uefa, the Football Association and the Premier should all have spotted what Manchester City were up to in the past, and dealt with it, rather than leave it this late in the day to realise just how many rules could be broken – surely Arsene Wenger is the man to consider.

Of course he is now 76 year old – and since that means he is almost as old as I am, I can have some sympathy if he has the thought that really, he has now been through so much, he’s had enough and doesn’t want any more.  But considering how Fifa and Uefa and the League have been twirled around Manchester City’s little finger, so that all of football has of late been dancing to City’;s tune, surely we need someone who can come in and get this mess sorted out.

And it is one hell of a mess, not just in terms of what has gone wrong, but how Fifa, Uefa, the Premier League and the FA have allowed it to go wrong, as it grew and developed under the noses of all those august authorities who seemed forever asleep at the wheel.

So far, the FA and League have been allowed to act as if they were surprised at what ManC got up to, but really it was happening under their noses all the time as the Mancs won trophy after trophy.

We are told the story we hear today began in February 2023, but really that is misleading.  For it actually goes back to November 2018 when Der Spiegel was publishing claims that Manchester City breached FFP rules.  This is now readily forgotten by the English media, embarrassed that they didn’t see this coming, but the history shows November 2018 as the start.