For a large part of the last two or three years, if you believed Arsene Wenger was doing alright at Arsenal, as this writer did, it was slightly tricky to prove it.
You had to draw upon the details, the marginal and intangible gains to do the job for you. The talent-level in his squad was clearly improving, player by player, you’d have to point out. And so were his individual games and results, even if, ultimately, his team ended up in the same place at the end of every season as when it hadn’t been very good at all: trophy-less and fourth.
As is the way with these things, very few people took very much time to digest these elaborate arguments, whether because they didn’t want to bother or because they didn’t like the idea of them. So, correspondingly, they didn’t matter to very many people either. To many, Wenger had just miraculously “lost” his ability to bring out the best from a good team and that was it.
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It was a bit like Arsenal and Wenger’s steady progress over the last few years didn’t exist. Except, crucially, it did, as I’ve explained and, specifically, it was building to something which arrived this weekend.
This weekend, finally, Wenger’s Arsenal team arrived in the realm of tangible success; definitely real, pundit-proof success. By which I mean that even the least interested observers—sleep-walking ex-players paid to watch—have now been forced to recognize that Arsenal really is doing alright under Wenger, and there can probably be no greater proof of something being massively obvious than that.
The clincher was the win against Liverpool on Saturday. It was a game which ended 4-1 to Wenger’s side that meant that a top four place was almost certainly safe for another season, but it also meant a lot more than that too.
Via four different goalscorers, Arsenal overtook Manchester City to move into second place in the league; meaning that, yes, it really does look as though it will finish above fourth this time. With goals and more nebulous excellence from Alexis Sanchez and Mesut Ozil, Wenger’s side beat Liverpool and secured the fact that it has beaten its three closest rivals (Liverpool, Manchester City and Manchester United) on consecutive occasions—no longer, then, can it be considered a soft-touch in big games.
Add in last season’s FA Cup win and this season’s FA Cup run (with the good chance it has of winning that competition in successive seasons) and the pattern is not just clear, but statistically undeniable: progress that you can write down in numbers as well as letters is being made. The awkward phase of having to defend Wenger with nuances that no-one cared for is now seemingly over.
And no wonder, because this hasn’t just come out of nowhere. The tangible has emerged precisely out of the intangible.
First came the steady build-up of quality players and squad depth over the last three years: in Arsenal’s post-stadium-debt moment, big money could be spent at last. What happened next was a delayed response, whereby the extra potential brought in by buying new talent didn’t immediately transform the club into a winner: last season it finished fourth and this season it started very slowly, while looking for a long time as though it would finish no higher than ever. But this is how it had to work.
You don’t immediately start winning just because you’re good. You almost always have to be a contender first, so as to understand what it is to be a contender.
For instance, you need time to realise that if you’re close enough to the top for the “big games” to make a real difference to your season, you might have to play it a bit safe in some of those big games. Or, perhaps, you simply need to start believing that you are capable of beating other good teams, even if you don’t then and there. See Arsenal’s 2-0 defeat to Chelsea earlier this season, where it surely took confidence from how much closer it got this season than last, where it lost 6-0.
This is how winning tends to work. It’s a process, not an event.
This is why teams that were suddenly injected with oil-tinged money a few years ago (Chelsea, Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain) didn’t win the league in their first and sometimes even second seasons as elite-level-spenders. As well as building up a few transfer-windows’ worth of good players, they had to learn (or re-learn) how to be a major contender first, like Arsenal seems to have now.
For the most part, only once you’ve made that kind of slow, intangible progress do you arrive at the tangible stuff Arsenal has just found (such as 15 wins from 17 games.) Mere technical superiority does not equate immediately to explosive success; you’ve got to work at it, and probably tolerate a lot of people saying you’re doing badly while you do.
Now, at last, Arsenal and Wenger look set to taste the good bits of being good. The tangible bits.
Ethan Dean-Richards is a London-based writer. Follow him on Twitter