Arsenal Finds That Nothing Lasts Forever

Nothing Lasts Forever

Roy Keane was joking. Probably. Arsenal had just lost at home to Wolves, condemning the club to its worst start to a season in almost 40 years. Mikel Arteta’s team had slumped to 14th in the Premier League. It had won only once, domestically, since early October. Still, though, Keane found a silver lining. “They’ll have just about enough to stay up,” he said.

The line was delivered with enough relish to suggest his interest in Arsenal’s possible relegation was not so much sincere concern as an irresistible opportunity to warm the embers of an old rivalry. Keane does not think Arsenal is at risk of losing its place in the Premier League. Of course not. But then the content of the joke was not the part that was supposed to wound. The nature of it was.

Entropy set in at Arsenal a long time ago. Soccer has a heightened sensitivity to sharp, drastic change — the sort that seems to materialize in a day, a week, and then evaporate — but also an ability to remain blissfully numb to the sort that spools out over the span of seasons and years.

The winnowing of Arsenal is a case in point. The latter years of Arsène Wenger’s reign at the club were a case study in slow, steady and, in the moment, almost imperceptible decline: the gradual downgrading of Arsenal first from perennial title challenger to serial F.A. Cup winner, from mainstay in the Champions League to contender for a place and inexorably on, all the way down past hopeful to where it stands now: outsider.

It would be quite wrong, of course, to suggest that nobody noticed. The crowds at the Emirates — before the nine silent months of the pandemic — regularly bubbled with mutiny and protest and dissent. AFTV built an entire media brand on the back of internecine squabbling about the direction of the club. Cubic tons of ink have been spilled detailing each unfurling crisis.

But something about the time lapse disguised the scale of the decline. That each step — from title challenger to top-four regular, top-four regular to top-four contender and so on — seemed shallow made it possible to miss just how far Arsenal had traveled from the peak, and just how steep the journey back to the summit might be.

That is not to say someone should have spotted the direction of travel, that some soothsayer might have been able to surmise that this is where it would end. Such a prediction would have seemed — and to an extent still does, even with Arsenal marooned in its current mediocrity — laughable.

This is not, after all, supposed to happen, not in the age of the superclubs, in an era in which soccer’s hierarchy is set in stone, when the elite enjoy such wealth and power and grace that they have become untouchable.

A vast divide yawns between the elite and the rest, the bridge drawn up to prevent anyone crossing over. Mostly, we worry that strips teams of their right to dream, but it works in both directions: It also means those who have already made it no longer have any reason to worry. Sure, things might go wrong, but for a given value of wrong. In a bad season, you might finish sixth.

And yet Arsenal proves that status is not frozen, not forever. It is not so long ago, after all, since this was the club that served as an emblem for the self-perpetuation of success. Arsenal could always qualify for the Champions League, 20 years in a row, because it always qualified for the Champions League.

But even that did not mean it was immune to the effects of bad decisions. And, over the last decade or so, under the disinterested stewardship of the Kroenke family, there have been plenty of those.

Even Wenger, when we spoke a few weeks ago, wondered if he had stayed — been allowed to stay — too long. When he was replaced, it was by Unai Emery, a perfectly serviceable manager who was wholly unsuited to the job at hand. That unhappy experiment lasted 18 months before Arteta, having learned at the knee of Pep Guardiola, was drafted in.

Off the field, the thinking has been even more muddled. Wenger himself had experimented with remedies. He empowered StatDNA, the analytics firm Arsenal had bought in 2012, but then seemed to move away from its work. When he left, Arsenal seemed to recognize that the job he had done for years was actually several different ones, and (to its credit) recruited specialists to fill each of them.

In came Sven Mislintat, hailed as the visionary behind Borussia Dortmund’s success, who was tasked with turning Arsenal into the home of the best young talent in the world. Then came Raul Sanllehi, with his apparently comprehensive contacts book, with his promise to get Arsenal access to the best agents on the planet and, through them, the best players.

But neither worked well with the other and both, eventually, would leave. Time for another idea: Edu Gaspar, another former player, was made technical director. Arteta was promoted, given wider-ranging responsibilities. Kia Joorabchian, the sort of man you suspect refers to himself as a superagent, seemed to have the inside track on the club’s transfer dealings.

Arsenal's squad lays bare the lack of coherence behind the scenes. Arteta now has eight (or nine, depending on your definition) central defenders at his disposal, but the club’s record signing, Nicolas Pepe, does not fit neatly into the team. His highest-paid player, Mesut Özil, has been reduced to live-tweeting the team’s games.

How to pick a route out of this mess remains a mystery, particularly under Arsenal’s current ownership. For a while, over the summer, it seemed as if Arteta’s bright promise as a coach might be enough. He had crafted a team that was resilient and disciplined and smart, one that offered a kernel of what an updated, modernized Arsenal could be. He won the F.A. Cup and the Community Shield.

A few months later, that momentum has been surrendered. Arsenal heads to Tottenham on Sunday not only behind its league-leading rival in the table, but trailing Chelsea and West Ham, too. It is, for the time being, the fourth-best team in London.

The coronavirus pandemic has wreaked havoc on its finances. Its roster is an uneasy blend of young promise and fading high-earners. It does not want to sell the former and it cannot move the latter; all it can do is let them run their contracts down. Where the money will come from for the necessary, multiyear rebuild is anyone’s guess.

Arsenal will recover, of course. It will return, though it is likely to be a long and arduous journey. In the meantime, it stands as a warning to the rest of the elite that their place at the top table has not been granted in perpetuity: It is yours only so long as you make (enough of) the right decisions.

And it offers inspiration to all those teams who harbor aspirations of, one day, usurping the established order: to Leicester and to Wolves and to Everton and the rest. The divide can be bridged. Permanence is an illusion. People — clubs — make mistakes, no matter their size or their wealth or their self-perception. Keane was joking, probably, when he said Arsenal would not suffer relegation. In a way, though, it already has.

Finally, a Good Thing Out of Brexit

The sunlit uplands are just a few weeks away. Britain will leave the European Union on Jan. 1 and it will finally be free to … have its own currency? No, that’s not it. Control its own borders? Oh, it did that anyway. Turn Kent, the garden of England, into a gigantic parking lot for trucks? Seems a strange thing to want, but if that’s what you like, great.

Brexit’s impact on soccer will, in all likelihood, not be particularly noticeable in the Premier League. English clubs will, in theory, no longer be able to recruit so liberally from Europe, but most of the players of interest to the teams of the country's top division will readily meet the criteria to be granted permission to play in it. (Lower-tier teams, and the majority of clubs in Scotland, may feel more of an effect on their recruitment plans.)

Most important, though, was one throwaway line hidden deep in the weeds of the Premier League’s statement on how international transfers will work in this brave new world. English teams will, starting Jan. 1, no longer be able to sign any international player until the player has turned 18.

This, make no mistake, is a problem for the Premier League’s elite, who have spent the better part of two decades trawling around Europe for any fresh-faced teenager with even a scintilla of talent and using their financial muscle to draw them in. They have been allowed to do so because of a European Union exemption in FIFA’s statutes on the cross-border transfers of minors.

Now they will have to stop. England’s clubs can no longer be hothouses of international talent. And — through gritted teeth — that is a good thing. It may, in fact, be the most obvious benefit anyone has seen from Brexit to date.

There are some cases in which teenage players benefit from being allowed to leave their home countries in order to sign for one of the world’s biggest clubs. Players in countries without the infrastructure to nurture their talent, for example, or where their development might be improved by access to better facilities.

For the most part, though, the E.U. exemption is used to pluck Spanish, Dutch, Belgian and French teenagers from academies that have reared them from a young age, and to do it at a knockdown price.

The clubs that lose the teenagers are not reimbursed suitably for the work they have done; instead, they miss out on the premium fee they might receive if the player completed their education at home. The players are, with only a handful of exceptions, treated as assets, rather than individuals, to be fattened and sold at a profit, rather than given a chance to shine.

It entrenches inequality, rather than addressing it, ensuring more and more of the world’s best talent coalesces at certain clubs. English teams have exploited it more than anyone else in recent years (Manchester United currently has three Czech or Slovak goalkeepers in its ranks, all of them teenagers) but must now stop. It would be a benefit of Brexit for everybody if FIFA took this as a chance to clamp down on the loophole, to close it, for everyone else, too.

Change Is Good. But Not This Change.

In its final moments, then, the Champions League group stage might deliver something approaching excitement after all. On Tuesday, one of Manchester United, Paris St.-Germain and RB Leipzig will be eliminated. On Wednesday, both (or neither) of Atlético Madrid and Real Madrid might follow.

It is a welcome coda to what has been a particularly predictable six weeks, an autumn that has made the proposed restructuring of the competition starting in 2024 — adopting the so-called Swiss Model, in which teams would play 10 group games and be ranked on a “giant” league table of all 32 teams — seem, if not appealing, then at least understandable.

The new plan solves severable problems. Well, no: It solves one problem in several ways. It means teams will play more games, and big teams will play more games against other big teams, which means everyone will make more money from broadcast contracts.

But the plan fails on two counts. One: It is not nearly as intuitive as the current system, which is, and this is just pure science, the best format for a sporting competition yet invented, as the World Cup will prove in 2026. And two: It places too much emphasis on prestige fixtures, and too little on drama. It gives the powerful clubs too many chances to fail.

What will make next week special is not that there will be lots of games between glamorous names, but that some of those glamorous names will be in jeopardy. Whatever change comes to the Champions League — and change can be good, too — that should be the priority: increasing the risks, not ring-fencing the rewards.

Correspondence

It is probably no surprise that the death of Diego Maradona touched so many of you, but still, it has been lovely to read all of the memories of and tributes to him that have filled my inbox in the last week. I particularly liked Ron Amato’s conclusion after “bingeing on highlights reels” for a week: “He got the ball, and stuff happened.”

Folu Ogundimu hit upon a question I’ve been thinking about, too: “How do you compare Pelé’s great artistry and influence on soccer to Maradona’s?” I had this thought while I was writing last week’s newsletter: I’m not sure you would say that Pelé changed the game, particularly, in the way that Cruyff definitively did — there isn’t a Pelé role or a Pelé tactic or a Peléan school of thinking. Pelé’s greatness maybe resides, instead, in the sense of mastery, that he had perfected the game.

Thomas Jakobsh made an insightful observation, too, that “the suggestion his mistakes and frailties were the inevitable flip side, or byproduct, of his on-field genius” does not hold water. (This came up on Set Piece Menu this week, as it happens).

“There is a much more prosaic explanation: The world is filled with grifters, con men, unscrupulous agents, hustlers, mobsters. As Jorge Valdano has elegantly explained, Maradona was a victim, perhaps even the perfect victim,” Thomas wrote. “Adulation stalked him since he was 16, and nothing in those first 16 years equipped him for what was to come. For this failure, there is a lot of blame to be shared.”

And I just wanted to respond to Lucas Bongarra, who felt that last week’s piece communicated that Maradona was “not so spectacular, that he was great then, but couldn’t do any of the unbelievable stuff in today’s game.”

That certainly was not what I thought last week’s column said. While I don’t think Diego Maradona transformed soccer, he most definitely transformed what we thought of as possible within it. As for whether he would thrive in the modern game: yes, obviously, he was inordinately talented. Whether modern soccer could produce a Maradona, I’m not so sure. That may be both to its credit and to its detriment.

That’s all for this week. Feedback, suggestions for stories, tips, ideas, musings: Everything is more than welcome at askrory@nytimes.com, or on Twitter. And in the holiday season, perhaps think about this newsletter as the perfect gift for whoever it is you got in the remote Secret Santa.

Have a great weekend, and keep safe.

Rory

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