Imagine this. Forty per cent of the maxi taxis at their terminals in Port-of-Spain painted vividly in the colours and symbols of Manchester United, Arsenal and Chelsea. That is what a taxi stand looked like in Freetown, Sierra Leone, when I was last there about 15 years ago.
I had the opportunity to visit the West African country four times, as lead for journalism and media management training courses. The locals’ passion for English Premier League football became obvious. Manchester City hadn’t yet begun their period of dominance.
It was in Freetown in February 2008 that I experienced one of my lows as an Arsenal supporter. Radios blared BBC Sports’ commentary seemingly from every shop that Saturday, as title-chasing Arsenal looked set to win away at Birmingham City. I couldn’t listen to the end. When I caught up later, I found out that a Birmingham player had broken the leg of our Croatian striker, Eduardo, and Arsenal had dropped two points in the last minute and in calamitous fashion. Arsenal never recovered, falling to fourth. Man U won the title that season.
In those days, Arsene Wenger’s team played beautiful, intricate football, but lacked physicality. They were nothing like the title-winning, unbeaten Invincibles of 2004—a team that, in the words of Liverpool great Graeme Souness, could out-football or out-brawl you, depending on what you brought to the party.
The great French midfielder Patrick Vieira—Senegalese by ancestry, Trinidadian by marriage and an elegant beast in his prime —remains my favourite Arsenal player of all time. Arsenal subsequently developed a reputation as a team that could be bullied, and sometimes teams took that too far, as broken legs for Eduardo and another player, Aaron Ramsey, demonstrated.
In August 2011, a fabulous Manchester United side mannersed Arsenal 8-2 at Old Trafford. Even United manager Sir Alex Ferguson, Wenger’s great rival, seemed embarrassed for the Gunners boss as Ashley Young curled in the eighth.
Arsenal reacted in a way that turned out to be significant. The mauling in Manchester took place a few days before the summer transfer deadline. On deadline day, Arsenal signed five players. One of them was 29-year-old Everton midfielder, Mikel Arteta.
Arteta quickly emerged as a no-nonsense leader in the dressing room, taking charge of fines for players being late and being unafraid to speak his mind to the manager. Wenger made him captain in 2014.
Even when his legs went and nimbler players replaced him in the starting lineup, he took his place on the bench without complaint and remained an influential presence. He built a strong and unbreakable bond with Arsenal, retired from playing as its captain and blubbed like a baby when that day came.
Fourteen seasons later, Arteta became the first manager in the Premier League era to win the title with a club he had previously played for. There are a number of lessons to draw from that. The first is that the American owners of Arsenal continued to view Arteta as a high-yield managerial investment, even if the yield was not immediate. I confess that I wanted him gone after three seasons. He has completed six and a half.
The board and owners correctly concluded that second, second and second isn’t failure or choking … it is consistency, particularly when he was up against his mentor Pep Guardiola (except when Liverpool won the previous season). Pep, Manchester City’s former manager, is the most successful of the Premier League era. Arsenal weren’t “bottling”—British slang for choking. They kept knocking. Perspective.
United by comparison had some big swings in the same period—final positions 6, 8, 15 and 3. Apart from one honourable exception who Facebook-tagged all his Arsenal-supporting friends congratulations on winning the title, my United-supporting friends have been among Arsenal’s loudest critics. The prism through which we ought to view that is that they’re indirectly reacting to their own team’s decline.
Arteta prioritised old-fashioned footballing values. Defensive toughness and physical robustness, the philosophy of the Invincibles, and of George Graham’s title-winning sides of the 80s and 90s. He has a strong foundation to try to build on, but can he do so? That depends on how acute a World Cup hangover his players have.
Regardless, his is a teachable lesson that goes beyond football.
