THE football manager who can manage his or her inevitable decline and return for a second or third peak is a rare beast.
It’s possible to carve out a long career as a short term sprucer like, say, Carlo Ancelotti or Neil Warnock, but for dynastic managers with philosophies and long spells at single clubs, it’s the sort of task that only a master like Alex Ferguson has been able to pull off. Of the other great Premier League managers, Pep Guardiola is finding out right now whether he’s capable, while Jose Mourinho is only emerging from a long mid-career slump that looked irreversible, as recently as earlier this year.
The other figure to consider is Arsene Wenger, owner of one of the stranger career paths in football management. An urbane revolutionary when he arrived at Arsenal in 1996, Wenger won three league titles and four FA Cups in his first nine years at the club as well as reaching the final of, and almost winning, the Champions League. But from then until his departure in 2018 it was meagre fare, with just three more FA Cups, by then a reduced honour, added between 2014 and 2017.
Unsurprisingly for a fanbase who had enjoyed such aesthetic dominance in the early 2000s, such a long spell of incremental slowdown was hard to take, and Wenger’s departure was generally seen as a sad but necessary decision.
"I don't want to go in that direction, it's hard to say that. He won an important competition that you cannot deny. To be Arsenal coach you have to be good"
Jose Mourinho's response to Eric Dier calling Mikel Arteta 'most exciting young manager in Europe' pic.twitter.com/OwCpMtuEyM
— Football Daily (@footballdaily) December 3, 2020
Unai Emery’s Arsenal won 5-1 away at Fulham in October 2018 and the travelling fans sang “we’ve got our Arsenal back.” Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal won 3-0 away at Fulham in September 2020 and… there were no travelling fans because of the global pandemic but they may, given it was the opening day of the 2020-21 season and Arsenal had won the FA Cup a month earlier, have sung “we’ve got our Arsenal back.” In truth you can’t get anything back, you just have to prepare better for the future.
Liverpool spent the 1990s trying to work out what alchemic brew of boot room memories and “just 5-a-sides at Melwood really” would bring the title back to Anfield when all they needed to was face the future and completely revolutionise their recruitment strategy while bringing in a manager with a personality big enough to handle expectations. Easy when you know how.
And, surprisingly enough, that’s sort of the situation Jose Mourinho is now in at Tottenham, a club who are distanced enough from their glory era that they could make cold but necessary decisions like replacing Mauricio Pochettino with the Portuguese and allowing the new manager some leeway in the transfer market. The Tottenham bench, so long a balsa wood collection of reserves and semi-prospects is now bristling with options as the club head into the north London derby on Sunday on top of the league.
Mourinho has never lost a home game to Arsenal as a manager, one of the gold standard records he maintained even in his darker days at Chelsea and Manchester United. Study Mourinho’s DNA and a dominant strand is his refusal to allow Arsenal’s supposed aesthetic superiority to knock his own teams off their stride. And that was Arsenal then, not 14th place December 2020, 10 goals in 10 games Arsenal.
Arsenal go level with Dominic Calvert-Lewin in the Golden Boot race
— Duncan Alexander (@oilysailor) November 29, 2020
That lack of creativity is clearly haunting Mikel Arteta as he prepares for one of the toughest derbies Arsenal have faced in years. No team in England’s top four tiers has had fewer shots after half-time than Arsenal this season (46), while against Wolves Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang received fewer passes from his team-mates than goalkeeper Bernd Leno did.
That game was notable for the number of futile crosses Arsenal delivered and the increasing number of people who know how effective crossing is as a tactic (spoiler: not very) were alarmed by the manager insisting that “… if we do that more consistently, we're going to score more goals. If we put the bodies we had in certain moments in the box, it's maths, pure maths and it will happen.”
In a sense Arteta is right, a lot of football can be reduced to numbers and analysed insightfully (#puremaths) but most of those indicators suggest that Arsenal are currently trapped in a timid vicious cycle that may well see them flirt with their first bottom half finish since 1995. It’s all a long way from the Wenger era where from his first season through to 2015-16 the club enjoyed 20 successive seasons finishing in the top four. Simply changing the manager to try and outrun systemic issues within a club is papering over the cracks at best.
The fortunes of both Arsenal and Manchester United since their dynastic leaders departed prove this point. Mourinho famously said that finishing second with United in 2017-18 was one of the greatest achievements of his managerial career. People smiled at the time, but look at how he’s getting on now at a club set up to aid him on and off the pitch.
There’ll only be a couple of thousand fans in Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on Sunday but they will be there to witness the continued revival of Mou. He was special once, and now he may well be special again.
