re: Mourinho: Wenger a specialist in failure

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I don't think Wenger has anyone to blame but himself and the board for that, though.

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Whoa, let's step back here. Wenger was hamstrung by the board in a serious, serious way.

The board wanted to build a new stadium. But they didn't want to leverage their equity. Someone can correct me here if I'm wrong but the board decided to saddle the club with long term debt, instead of using their equity and a much smaller loan to finance the stadium. Ultimately they wanted to protect the price of their shares by saddling the club with a long term (potential) liability, which almost immediately increased the price of their shares because of the increased revenue streams (as evidenced by the amount each got from Kronke and Usmanov) but protect them from that liability. This was in their own interest, and not the club's, as was the scale and reality of the self-financing model. While this was happening, they squeezed every last penny from the fans of the club, all the while cashing out, maybe millions of pounds in the process.

Their business plan in terms of the actual playing team was to keep Wenger at all costs, since getting CL football was absolutely required for the club to run without adding to the already massive stadium debt. It's actually an insane way of building a football club, and one that doesn't get criticized enough.

Wenger was a part of this to a degree, but he was always interested in the football club on the pitch. I'm not sure he understood why the board wanted to fund the stadium they way they did. When it became clear the the board was selling shares at massive profits, Wenger was stuck five years into a project he relished, choosing between Kroenke and Usmanov as the sugar daddy owner he never wanted.

People blame Wenger a lot, but I don't think people understand the level of deception that went on in the Arsenal boardroom with regards to the stadium. The idiotic front-loaded deals, the complete lack of vision, the self-financing model that involves pricing out all but the most white-collar of fans, all were part and parcel of the boardroom's decision to protect their equity rather than actually invest it in the club, or sell their shares at their Highbury value and get out if they weren't interested in actually staying at the club long term.

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Maybe he has overachieved a couple of seasons, but no "top" manager who has had CL revenue for 16 straight seasons should win nothing over 8-year periods of time.

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Maybe? Look at those squads from 2005 to 2009 and tell me you would bet on any these squads are top four worthy. After Cesc and Nasri left the squad was again bare, and it's only now rebuilt.

I'm not saying Wenger should be absolved of blame. He believed in a lot of projects who didn't pan out, and who played horribly along the way. He was the one who was hesitant in the market, where he lost out on one good player after another because he couldn't part with one or two million more. He was tactically stubborn with young team after young team, he insisted on his philosophy even if he didn't produce results. He did a lot wrong. But we went from a modest club that could reinvest whatever operating profits we had directly into the team, into a international club that can actually support large transfer fees and wages. Was that worth the 8 year trophy drought? Probably.

The fact that we are now self-sustaining (however misguided and risk-averse that project was) while still being a CL team is absolutely insane. The scale of the project is almost beyond comprehension now. Who knows where we would have been if we missed CL at any point.

So Wenger definitely hasn't been a failure, despite his inability to win a trophy. He's been massively successful in spite of major obstacles. The easiest thing to do would have been to leave when Real came calling in 06, save his reputation from the hit it's taken the past 8 years, and gone and built a winner there with unlimited funds. He didn't for better or worse, and the shame is that a manager who was once the equal of Sir Alex has fallen far behind in terms of reputation, when in his first 8 years in England he had 7 trophies, which overshadows the amazing coaching job he actually has done.

TL;DR-It's mostly the board's fault.