Coaching Youth Soccer

When Arsène Wenger joined Arsenal FC as manager he set about transforming the club to such a degree that he changed the whole of English football.

By ditching the old ways of training and adding special diets to the mix – in addition to using a variety of coaches and experts unheard of in English football at that time – clubs throughout the country began to re-evaluate their structures. When his team won the League and FA Cup double in is second season after becoming manager, other clubs really sat up and noticed.

After Wenger took over he was able to start to change Arsenal into an attacking force to be reckoned with, without giving away any of their defensive capabilities.

The greatest achievement of his Premier League career – and one that will always be regarded as one of the finest feats ever – was to go through the 2003/04 season without losing any Arsenal fixtures.

While manay managers have been great players, Wenger himself had any great achievements in his career as a player.

His priority when he was young was education and the result is degrees in engineering and economics; also, he is fluent in Spanish, German and English as well as his native French; and his career didn’t start with RC Strasbourg – his home town – until 1978, when he was 29 years old. He only played for the first team on twelve occasions – in their title-winning season of 1978/79, including one match in the UEFA Cup.

There can be few football club managers anywhere in the world who are as identified with their team and their style of play as Arsène Wenger. In a profession in which staying in a post for more than two years should qualify you for a testimonial match, the urbane Frenchman has now been at Arsenal for nearly 13 years.

In any other country – that is one with no Sir Alex Ferguson in it – he would be by far the longest-serving manager. You can buy Arsenal tickets online and see his great team for yourself.

Arsenal play a lovely, silky game of football and, when they are in full flight, their matches show them as a comparable side to FC Barcelona. Unfortunately, they don’t match the Catalans in terms of finishing or defending. In fact, in those two departments they themselves can be matched by quite a few of the ‘lesser’ teams in English football.

It’s a real pity that a team that can pass like the current Arsenal squad somehow seems to come up short time and time again. Players with the ability of Fabregas, Arshavin, Van Persie, and Walcott should surely have won something in the past few seasons.

So where has it gone wrong? Or maybe it hasn’t gone wrong at all – as some Arsenal fans are bound to argue it’s just a question of time. Or economics. Or something else.

Of the three things that really strike me, the first is that it wasn’t just the quality of passing that I remember of that truly great Arsenal team from a few years back. Yes, Pires, Henry, Bergkamp, Ljungberg, etc could pass the ball – but the whole team had a solidity and physicality about it that just doesn’t seem to be there in the present one. Remember Patrick Vieira? Don’t you think of his hardness as well as his skill?. So often now when you see the two teams lining up for pre-match civilities the Arsenal team looks like a junior side compared to the team they’re playing against. That so-important spine running through the team doesn’t seem to be quite right.

Secondly, when you remember Ian Wright, Thierry Henry and Dennis Bergkamp you remember their ruthless precision in making almost every chance count; something today’s strikers are a long way from achieving.

Finally, and here Arsenal fans will be able to shed light on this – the lack of trophies seems to have coincided with the move to the Emirates Stadium. It’s wonderful to watch Arsenal fixtures at the the stadium – but Arsenal left Highbury in May, 2006 and haven’t won anything since. Has the financial impact of the stadium, especially in what we have to call ‘the current economic climate’, has had a dramatic impact on the manager’s transfer budget?

Although Arsene Wenger can take players of whom we know very little and make them into superstars, is it possible that this policy has rather been forced on him because most of the money is tied up elsewhere? Find out in the 2010/11 season by reserving your Arsenal tickets now.