Is it time for Wenger to consider his exit strategy?

As he approaches his 62nd birthday, Wenger’s future as Arsenal boss was being doubted like never before last week. You wouldn’t discount the possibility of Wenger clocking up 25 years at his club, like Ferguson, and managing on until his 70s. But Wenger has NEVER signed an established world-class footballer and has never even seemed to want to.

His belief in young talent and pure, passing football is admirable. But it is not enough to compete with the financial might of the Manchester clubs or Chelsea. And if he doesn’t think he is capable of making Arsenal a true force again, then he may start considering his exit strategy.

The great reigns in English football management have rarely had happy endings. Alf Ramsey was sacked by England and Bill Nicholson quit Tottenham as a victim of player power. Brian Clough simply went on for far too long, becoming a parody of himself and damaging his health as well as his reputation and legacy.

Had Ferguson retired in 2002, as he had intended to, the whole Manchester United empire could easily have gone into meltdown – instead of a further five titles and three Champions League finals. But the Scot trusted his instinct and perhaps learned a lesson from Bill Shankly, the last manager to build a true dynasty of greatness at an English football club – and yet never stuck around to see his club conquer Europe. Shanks was a lost soul after shocking the football world by retiring in 1974, leaving his assistant Bob Paisley to carry off three European Cups.

The two managers I spent most of my career playing under both met unhappy ends. When Bill Nick quit Spurs in 1974, the club were still reaching cup finals but the manager began to realise he had “lost the dressing room”. I know from grim experience that Bill believed players should have been happy to play for Tottenham Hotspur for nothing – you should have tried negotiating a contract with the bloke! But a few years after I’d left, he started having to deal with more bolshy modern players, who started demanding bonuses and appearance money, and he ended up thinking: “This just isn’t my game any more.” Three years later, Spurs were relegated.

As for Sir Alf, our World Cup-winning manager, he’d made too many enemies inside the FA. His was perhaps the only great reign in English football to end with a brutal, out-and-out sacking. In hindsight, he could have stood down after the 1970 World Cup, when England blew it against West Germany in the quarter-finals. Alf had stood up to the FA bigwigs so many times.

During the 1966 World Cup finals, he’d defied them when they demanded he dropped Nobby Stiles for his bruising style. And he’d spoken out against the culture which saw the blazered FA farts revelling in the reflected glory of having breakfast and dinner with the players on away trips. So as soon as England failed to qualify for the 1974 World Cup, the same old boys were hardly going to hand Alf any leeway.

Even if Arsenal had been knocked out of the Champions League, it would surely have seemed unthinkable for them to treat such a great manager as Wenger quite so shabbily. As the old Newcastle chairman Freddy Shepherd once said: ‘You don’t sack a man like Sir Bobby Robson’. A few months before he went and sacked Sir Bobby Robson.

Written by Jimmy Greaves for FootballFancast.com.

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