Wenger is determined to win another title his way but what was successful in the past may no longer be the best approach. Sunday’s game against Leicester is his and Arsenal’s chance to show they still belong at the top

Arsène Wenger is 66. He cannot go on forever. He has not won a league title for 12 years and while a championship would offer redemption of a kind, the second half of his reign is in danger of being regarded by history as a time of drift. Deep down, he must know, as everybody else does, that Arsenal may never get a better chance to win a league title than they have this season as rivals falter. Sunday could be decisive.

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If Arsenal were to lose to Leicester, they would trail them by eight points. With 12 games to go, that would be an extremely difficult margin to make up. Win, though, the gap is down to two and it’s a four-horse race again. But it’s not just about mathematics or the specifics of this title race. As Arsenal have stuttered recently, it feels as though the past decade of Wenger’s management has been called into question.

Experience, football’s conventional wisdom dictates, is a positive. Experience teaches a manager how to react to certain circumstances, it provides a library of precedent, it lends perspective. We look at a manager’s lined face and grey hair and feel reassured.

Late style



None of which is necessarily untrue. But the reality may be rather more complex than that. Towards the end of his life, the literary theorist Edward Said became fascinated by the notion of “late style”, how an artist dealt both with age and decay and with an awareness of his own body of work and public reactions to that. In his book On Late Style – published in 2006, three years after his death – he points to those whose late works seem as though they “crown a lifetime of aesthetic endeavour”, the likes of Rembrandt, Matisse, Bach or Wagner.

His interest, though, is more in those whose late style “involves a non-harmonious, non-serene tension – a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness”. If Shakespeare, with The Tempest, can be seen as the perfect example of the former, Prospero breaking his staff becoming the emblem of the artist accepting the end of his days of creativity, Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken is the very opposite, undercutting his previous work and demanding it be reconsidered and reassessed.

Louis van Gaal’s work with Holland at the 2014 World Cup, perhaps, can be regarded in a similar light, his switch to a back three and a counterattacking approach a radical diversion from his earlier philosophy which inevitably called that philosophy into question – which, after last season’s dabble with a back three and with Marouane Fellaini as a deep-lying target man casts this season’s reversion to the original style of play all the more intriguing.

But Said is concerned with those who succeed. In football as in politics, most careers end with failure. The US writer Nicholas Delbanco’s 2011 book Lastingness: On the Art of Old Age looks at both those who thrived late in life – Sophocles, Yeats, Monet, Liszt – and those who slipped into repetitiveness, who lost their vital energy and invention, in which category he highlights Saul Bellow, James Baldwin and Norman Mailer.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest There are similarities between Brian Clough, pictured here with the European Cup he won for Nottingham Forest in 1979, and Wenger. In both cases a quest for trophies appeared to become a quest for style. Photograph: Bob Thomas/Popperfoto/Getty Images

The drift into self-parody



It is perhaps the coaches who stay longest at a club who are most susceptible to that process of diminution – or, at least, in whom the process can most readily be discerned. Brian Clough, for instance, changed after the split with his assistant Peter Taylor in 1981. He also lost his long-time coach Jimmy Gordon to retirement that summer, while finding himself restricted financially, partly by repayments on the loan taken out to build the new stand at the City Ground and partly by the largely unsuccessful signings of Justin Fashanu, Ian Wallace and Peter Ward for a combined £2.7m.

Forest could no longer go out and sign the likes of Trevor Francis, but Clough also stopped buying the likes of Larry Lloyd and Kenny Burns. The great side of the late 70s that, in the space of four seasons won promotion, the league, two League Cups and two European Cups, featured a core of difficult personalities other clubs had given up on, players written off elsewhere as drinkers or gamblers or awkward bastards.

By the eighties, the make-up of Clough’s squad had changed. “I didn’t mind naughty boys,” Taylor wrote in With Clough By Taylor. “Underneath many of them had hearts of gold – Brian was different from me. He preferred the good lads.” Perhaps it was the absence of Taylor, perhaps it was his mutually bruising experience with the wilful and articulate Fashanu, perhaps he was simply tired but Forest’s personality changed, from the rough-and-ready drinkers of the seventies to the good boys of the eighties with hair as neat as their passing.

Clough’s ambitions changed as well: once he had wanted trophies and had manipulated chairmen and pulled all manner of scams to achieve that goal; by the 80s, playing neat football was enough. Keeping Forest consistently in the top six was in itself an extraordinary achievement given their resources, but in the 70s he had smashed through those limitations.

A diminution of ambition



Wenger, although a very different character to Clough, has perhaps gone through a similar process. His great sides featured rough diamonds and hard men but more recently, with the constraints imposed by the repayments on the new stadium, there is a clear template of an Arsenal player: their squad is full of small technically accomplished creative midfielders. They might not have the neat side partings of eighties-era Forest, but there is a clear Arsenal haircut. And, as with Forest, there is a sense that, in the face of clubs with far greater resources, winning trophies has almost been forgotten about in favour of playing technically adept football in the manager’s image.

In part, perhaps, there is an element of self-parody to this. In his introduction to the 20th-anniversary edition of Infinite Jest, the writer and critic Tom Bissell observes that “all great stylists eventually become prisoners of their style”. It’s understandable that managers should fall victim to the same process: rather than asking how best to solve a problem, Wenger begins to ask how Arsène Wenger would solve the problem.

He has solved countless problems in the past, so he turns to past experience; there is a danger, though, that what was successful in the past will no longer be successful, either because of a false identification – that is, that a present problem resembles a past problem but is in fact different – or simply because circumstances have changed. The result is that Wenger becomes ever more Wengerian, that the experience of past success becomes – counterintuitively – an obstacle to future success. It may be that this is why, with a handful of exceptions, most notably Alex Ferguson, managers seem to be limited to a decade of sustained achievement at the very peak of the game.

In that, the media and public have a role. The need for narrative and readily understood personalities means that Wenger is encouraged to be Wengerian. However independent he may be, there must be an aversion, however subconscious, to being questioned about abandoning your principles. If Wenger had gone out last summer and smashed Arsenal’s transfer record to sign a holding midfielder, it would in a sense have been an admission that for years he’s been wrong and the public has been right; stubbornness sets in – and, as stubbornness becomes part of the Wenger personality, becomes self-perpetuating.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Arsenal’s 2-0 win at Manchester City just over a year ago, in which Olivier Giroud, pictured, scored the second goal, showed that Arsène Wenger does at times ask his team to sit deep. Photograph: Phil Noble/Reuters

Self-dissolution and the quest for validation



But there may also be something more subtle going on. What Clough and Wenger have apparently altered is what Ernest Becker in his re-reading of Freud termed the “hero-ideal”, the set of beliefs by which an individual derives meaning and a sense of self-esteem. It began with the quest for trophies and it became a quest for style.

Which is not to say trophies aren’t relevant – certainly in Wenger’s case. It is as though the only way to validate the 12 years of underachievement is to win a league title his way. And if he fails, then at least it is on his terms; the refusal to change approach, the refusal to spend big or to move away from a philosophy based on neat, technical midfielders – which Arsenal’s approach still is, even if they have got rather better at playing without the ball over the past year.

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After all, if as Samuel Weber said, “the pursuit of meaning; the activity of construction, synthesis, unification ... all this indicates the struggle of the ego to establish and maintain an identity”, then what better way to assert mastery when facing the dissolution of the ego than for the ego to dissolve itself by following to the ultimate the philosophy from which it derived meaning?

The modification of the hero-ideal in that context, the focus on the subjective ephemerality of style rather than the objective substance of trophies can be seen as a self-defence mechanism.

Or, at least, that’s the negative way of looking at it. It may be that the drip of major signings over the past two and a half years and the capacity to sit deep that’s been apparent since the 2-0 win over Manchester City in January last year is a sign of Wenger moving to fruition, to just that crowning of a lifetime of endeavour of which Said spoke.