FFor much of the last 14 of his 22 years at Arsenal, Arsène Wenger was filled with frustration. The freethinker who brought trophies and glory to Arsenal in his first eight years at the club, ushering in a revolution around the world. first division With his use of data, his focus on scouting, his commitment to technically complex football and his careful attention to the diet and lifestyle of the players under his supervision, he suddenly transformed into a sarcastic nutcase. The sideline fiddling with the zipper of his parka, the irritable responses at the press conference, the comical insistence that he “almost” signed every successful player in Europe, the disgusted throwing of the small water bottle while his once invincible team lost another lead, endured another wasted another challenge for the title: the visual history of the late Wenger has become, in its own way, a series of clichés, a kind of carousel of actions for any once great manager on the brink of collapse. professional disintegration.
The cause of Wenger's great distress during this long decline, of course, was what he memorably described as “financial doping”: the emergence – first with Roman Abramovich at Chelsea, then with the Abu Dhabi United Group's takeover of Manchester City – of a new class of billionaire club owners who turned the Premier League into a simple tilted spending contest, seemingly perpetually, in favor of teams controlled by plutocrats.
Season after season, Arsenal struggled valiantly to live out the Wengerian truth of thrift and delayed gratification, selling off their best players, patiently paying for the new stadium at Ashburton Grove, raising ticket prices to keep in touch with the money boys. . Chelsea and the Manchester clubs feasted on all the trophies; Arsenal fans had to pick through the crumbs of their club's responsible balance sheet. The Gunners may have lost the art of winning the Premier League, but their bottom line was world-class.
Wenger's press cuttings from this period are filled with the anger of a man who feels that the tide of history has definitively turned against him. “It is a satisfaction for a club to live within its natural resources,” he stated. saying in early 2009. “We live in the real world. The city is in a different world.”
A few months later it was at it again: “I am always insisting that in our work you must live off your resources, because it is always defensible that you earn money if it is linked to the income you obtain within the club, it is not defensible if it is not linked to income. done within the club.”
Papa Arsène became a lone voice honking in the fiscal desert. Philosophy, reason, morality, pleasure: Wenger appealed to them all in his attempt to convince the Premier League to rein in spending and force clubs to live within their means. Until the end of his time at Arsenal, he remained deliriously stubborn in his commitment to the club's self-sustaining business model (“I believe, and I take full responsibility for it, that we can be competitive in the way we run the club”: that's from 2011).
Wenger's economic thinking was formed at an early age, from the values he absorbed from watching his parents work in their bistro in rural Alsace. For Wenger, childhood in the starched world of Duttlenheim in the 1950s was, as he writes in his autobiography, “an education in ingenuity, tenacity, passion and physical exertion.” Self-control, responsibility and resistance were the most appreciated values; exaggeration and recklessness were despised.
The word “excesses” appears three times in the first 20 pages of Wenger's autobiography, and not once is it used in a positive way. From those early years in Alsace he learned to find beauty in austerity, in material and cultural deprivation. When he was a child, his soccer team played “without jerseys, without a coach or referee,” and in the town, he writes, “we didn't have much. “Sometimes I wonder if my passion wouldn't have been born from that frustration: that small world, those few words we exchanged, those games our team lost, that field that seemed so small.”
For much of the last two decades, Wenger's long project of creating a new model for club football in England and Europe, one in which self-sufficiency is paramount, the scope of the financially possible has real limits, and creativity be defined by the negotiation of material limitations – seemed doomed to failure. The war for the soul of sport was lost. Football had run out sovereign wealth funds, gas baronsand private equity buffoons, all those Abramoviches and Mansours and Al-Khelaifis applauding unsmilingly from on high as their expensively assembled squads whipped hapless opponents to the ground. The future, apparently, belonged to the rich.
The future, at least for now, still is: after all, Manchester City are on the verge of winning their fourth consecutive Premier League title. But as the season draws to a close, it is worth reflecting on how significantly the regulatory culture of European football, and English football in particular, has changed in the last six months.
The Premier League, of course, has changed a lot since Wenger's time at the Emirates. Even Arsenal's long-standing commitment to the self-sustaining business model has evolved. The club enjoyed 16 consecutive profitable seasons until 2018, earning almost £400m along the way, but the impact of the pandemic era on box office receipts and the loss of the Champions League have seen accounts fall in numbers. reds in recent seasons (although Arsenal most recent results predicts a return to “a self-sufficient financial base” with continued participation in Europe). There are a lot of wild tweaks in game management these days: VAR! An expanded World Cup! An expanded Club World Cup! Body cameras on referees! Blue cards! No more blue cards! – which can often seem like football authorities are as clueless as fans about the future direction of the sport.
But in the area of financial regulation, the last six months seem to herald real change. After years of clumsy inaction, the aggression with which the Premier League has pursued breaches of profitability and sustainability standards – albeit motivated by a spirit of regulatory competition and designed, in part, as an action to nullify the efforts of the government imposing an independent sports watchdog has been truly surprising. The double blow of the new anchorage and equipment cost The rules provisionally approved ahead of the Premier League's annual general meeting in June have been another shock to the senses. These rule changes promise a future that, while not completely egalitarian (the Premier League will remain a league of financial blimps and simple balloons), will impose a measure of restraint on the spending of the biggest and richest clubs. Since leaving Arsenal, Wenger has held the position of FIFA's Head of Football Development, an elevated role from which pontificate on the state of the football universe. But his true legacy is in the Premier League and it continues to grow.
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The fact that it was Manchester City who voted against the move to “anchor” each club's spending on wages and transfers to a multiple of the latter club's television revenue suggests that the league is finally moving in the right direction in basic issues of fairness and competitive balance. After the sleaze and recklessness of the post-Abramovich Golden Age, the Premier League appears, despite the objections of the bigger and better-resourced clubs, to be entering a progressive new era of fiscal prudence and restraint. Regulation, accounting and litigation will be the hallmarks of this new era, in which clubs will rise and fall as much by what happens on the books and refereeing chambers as on the field.
On the other hand, these changes come at a time when, for some of the billionaire-owned clubs, all the early profits of the plutocratic government have already accrued and a new regime of fiscal responsibility has been established. At Manchester City, for example, trophies, television riches and millions of new fans who adore them are assured. The club made a profit of £80m last financial year, comfortably the highest in the league, and earned £122m from player sales: the fiscal strength bought by financial doping has been fully incorporated into the corporate bloodstream, giving the Sky Blues a structural advantage. over less wealthy rivals who will endure for years, perhaps even decades, even under the austerity of a more tightly regulated league. Arguably, clubs that achieved success under the old rules will not lose as much under the new regime. By now, their position at the top of the sport may be unquestionable, and new rules to prevent other pretenders from taking the sugar daddy's path to glory could simply end up blocking the ambitions of smaller clubs, ossifying the existing order in the sport. European football. A more parsimonious future may simply be a recipe for more spring nights in the Champions League with Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, PSG and the rest of the usual suspects.
And yet. It is possible to maintain some optimism, to imagine that this new era of regulation and moderation will encourage clubs and managers to find perfection and success within the constraints of a new economy, to do more with less. “The beauty of sport is to respect the rules and win,” Wenger once said. saying. “People who don't should not be allowed to win.” For a long time, this seemed like a losing proposition, doomed to failure by a small circle of super-rich clubs capable of bending the reality of the sport to their own unlimited financial will. But over the past season, the future Wenger spent all those years fighting for – an alternate reality in which the rules are designed to extract silly money from sport – has suddenly, if precariously, appeared.
Squad cost ratios, anchoring, a crackdown on reckless spenders, a new spirit of activism rising up the football pyramid – will all this create a new playing field for England's top flight or simply freeze the hierarchy embedded in the Premier League since Two decades of laissez-faire regulation and casino spending? Has Arsene Wenger Did he finally win the culture war over the money he lost as a football coach? We're about to find out.
