Arsènal

Arsenal fans might not give much thought to the dissolution of Yugoslavia that led to the war in the Balkans which claimed so many lives. But the conflict led to a sporting embargo and the football team being unceremoniously booted out of Euro 92 at the eleventh hour and replaced by Denmark. If Yugoslavia had participated, the sequence of events that led to Arsène Wenger’s arrival and Arsenal’s graduation to the status of one of the most popular and richest clubs in the world might never have happened. For without having seen him fire the Danes to an unexpected triumph in the tournament, it is highly unlikely George Graham would have purchased John Jensen, who inadvertently proved to be his nemesis. The Danish midfielder symbolised how the master had lost his touch in two ways. It was not only his lack of style as a central midfield player compared to his predecessors such as Thomas, Davis and Rocastle, the priority being winning the ball rather than how to use it once in possession. More pointedly, the negotiations surrounding his transfer ultimately led to Graham’s dismissal in disgrace.

George Graham’s downfall could not happen today. No longer do managers control the transfer and contract negotiations: after Graham’s departure, David Dein (and subsequently Ken Friar) would undertake this duty on behalf of the club. When Dein first arrived at Arsenal, he may well have harboured ambitions in this area, but his involvement on the football side was curtailed by Graham, determined to be master of all he surveyed. Sadly, the situation created opportunities for abuse: the ‘brown envelope’ or ‘bung’ culture, whereby the practice of managers receiving under-the-table payments as a cut of a transfer fee provided by a player and/or a selling club’s agent was all too prevalent. However, only Brian Clough and his Nottingham Forest aides were put in the dock alongside Graham as sacrificial scapegoats. (Moreover, any verdict against Clough was academic as he was already retired.)

Graham, who received a payment of £285,000 when Jensen was signed for £1.57 million from Brondby in July 1992 (and a further payment of £140,000 when he later bought Pål Lydersen) was brought to book not by the naive football authorities but by the Inland Revenue, concerned by the untaxed earnings of the Arsenal manager. They were alerted after the story first broke late in 1994 when Simon Greenberg, then a Mail on Sunday journalist and more recently Chelsea’s Director of Communications, was tipped off about the discrepancy between the figure that Brondby received for Jensen and the amount paid by Arsenal. The deal was set up by Norwegian agent Rune Hauge. Graham later recalled, “The meeting [with Hauge] was all very normal but the money came as a shock. I thought ‘Jesus, what a Christmas present. Fantastic.’ The ridiculous thing is that it wouldn’t have changed my life. I was on a good salary, but greed got the better of me. I’m as weak as the next man when it comes to temptation.”

After the story came out, Graham was doomed, although he did hang on to his job for a few weeks. The fact that he had won three cups over the past two seasons doubtless prolonged his stay of execution. However, with the poor quality of the football on offer and the Highbury public enduring a fourth consecutive league campaign without having a shot at the title, the terminal rot had set in.

It is debatable whether Graham was acting in the best interests of the club when these transfers were made. Certainly Pål Lydersen never looked good enough to be a Premier League player, making a limited number of first-team appearances, none notable for anything other than his mediocrity. Still, some argued that he didn’t stand out that much from many of his colleagues. Names such as David Hillier, Steve Morrow, Eddie McGoldrick, Ian Selley and Jimmy Carter are recalled by the fans as indicative of a slump in Arsenal’s fortunes, although some of them did play a part in the cup successes of the time.

Alan Smith remembers the team going off the boil as Graham seemed to lose his touch, with talk in the dressing room rife. “We just thought ‘this isn’t happening’. We were used to top-class players at the club and this was turgid stuff.” The tactics were pretty basic, described by Smith as “Wrighty, a big character, shouting for the ball and the players would hit him. It was not a creative midfield. Wrighty would get a goal and we would defend our lead. It made us a one-dimensional team.” Smith recalls his time partnering Wright as “the worst of my career, although it was not his fault. But if he didn’t score, invariably we didn’t, which detracted from our threat. We didn’t play with any width so I wasn’t getting too many crosses.” It was ironic that during this time, having for the most part sidelined Anders Limpar, Graham was offered Russian international winger Andrei Kanchelskis, but felt he was not what Arsenal required and allowed Manchester United to sign him. It was further evidence of a manager who had lost his way as Graham’s reject gave Alex Ferguson a potent threat, in tandem with Ryan Giggs, from each flank. Smith would have loved such service, remembering, “My confidence dropped and I was at a really low ebb and that went on and on for about three years. It was totally unenjoyable and I felt like I needed to move. George would not let me go as he hadn’t got a replacement.”

Smith now admits that the players got wind of the bung that led to Graham’s downfall before the story became public knowledge: “We thought, he’s buying players like Pål Lydersen because he’s getting knockbacks for it. We’d heard a whisper a few months before. One of the lads had said they’d heard it on good authority, the rumours persisted and we began to believe them. His sacking was a shock when it came, but by that stage we half sensed something was going to happen. As we weren’t championship contenders, it made it easier for the board.”

After the Premier League found Graham guilty of taking a bung from Rune Hauge (whose licence to practice as an agent was later withdrawn by FIFA) with the euphemism “Mr Graham did not act in the best interests of the club”, Arsenal finally dispensed with his services in February 1995 and shortly after he was banned from working in football by the FA for two years. Of course, he subsequently returned to manage Leeds and, of all clubs, Tottenham. It still seems remarkable that Alan Sugar could have hired a man who, three years before his appointment as Tottenham manager, had written in his autobiography, “I will always have Arsenal’s red blood running through my veins.” Still, Sugar lived to regret it and after a parting of the ways in 2001, he commented, “In my time at Tottenham I made a lot of mistakes, the biggest was possibly employing him.”

A stronger Arsenal board would have dismissed the manager as soon as he admitted the transgression and returned the money, which ultimately had come out of the club’s coffers as part of the transfer fees theoretically paid to the selling clubs, when in fact they went into the agent’s pocket. The directors left themselves open to a charge that they might have been prepared to forgive and forget by the fact that they allowed the manager to spend £6 million on three players (John Hartson, Chris Kiwomya and Glenn Helder) just days before his dismissal, none of whom subsequently remained at the club long enough to see out their contracts. After years of relative financial conservatism, the profligacy was akin to the last days of the Roman Empire, blowing the finances as the club’s reputation went up in smoke. Glenn Helder actually played his debut match hours after Graham’s sacking, having been signed only seven days before. Did the board really want to sack Graham, or did they do so because of the external pressure?

Meanwhile, across the Channel, after rejecting Bayern Munich, preferring to see out the last year of his contract with Monaco, a certain young coach was summarily fired after an inauspicious start to the 1994/95 French season. With Arsenal in turmoil during the last weeks of the George Graham era, at David Dein’s insistence Peter Hill-Wood took Arsène Wenger to lunch at his favourite restaurant – Ziani’s – a stone’s throw from his Chelsea home. But with Dr Jozef Venglos the only foreign coach in the Premier League hardly presenting a good advertisement for imported expertise – he lasted less than a year before suffering the fate of the majority of Doug Ellis’s hirelings – the general atmosphere in football boardrooms was not exactly liberal and Arsenal decided to make an appointment closer to home.

“I think at that moment we were nervous of hiring a foreign manager,” recalls Hill-Wood. So Graham’s right-hand man Stewart Houston took the reins on a caretaker basis for the remainder of the campaign. The team flirted with relegation – it must have taken the players time to adjust to the fact that ‘the Coneman’ (their derisory nickname for Houston stemming from his job of putting out the cones before training sessions) was now their boss – before putting a couple of key wins together over the Easter period to ease the pressure. This allowed them to concentrate on their ultimately unsuccessful defence of the Cup Winners’ Cup, when they lost the final to Real Zaragoza in extra time. Houston was retained on the staff when the apparently safe pair of hands of Bruce Rioch were hired in preference to Wenger. And there was a whiff of revolution in the air that summer as two genuine superstars were acquired from Italy.

Unlike his predecessor, Bruce Rioch was only too willing to delegate to Dein and give him carte blanche when it came to handling transfer negotiations. Even though he had been kept at arm’s length by Graham, Dein had capably demonstrated what he could do when the opportunity arose. One of his greatest coups had been the signing of Ian Wright in 1991. Dein later recalled the circumstances surrounding the move. “George Graham had identified Crystal Palace strikers Ian Wright and/or Mark Bright as being potential signings. At that time, I was speaking regularly with club chairmen, including Ron Noades from Palace. It was natural to speak about players. I was on the phone to Ron and asked him to tell me about Ian Wright and Mark Bright. Would he sell either of them? He said he was a ‘reluctant seller’, and that it would take a lot of money to prise one or the other away. I asked him what he called a lot of money, so he said, ‘Like £2 million for Mark Bright’, and that he wouldn’t take ‘less then £2.5 million for Ian Wright’. I asked him if that meant he would sell Ian Wright for £2.5 million. He said, ‘I suppose, if it was offered it, I’d have to take it.’ So I said to him, ‘Ron, I’m offering you £2.5 million for Ian Wright’. The phone went quiet. He said, ‘Are you serious?’ I said, ‘Yes, I’m offering £2.5 million. You said you’d sell him for that, you are a man of your word, I’m offering you two and a half million.’ And to his credit, he stuck by his word. He said, ‘You’ve got yourself a deal’. And Ian Wright was at Highbury that afternoon for a medical. George Graham was having – of all things – a golf day with the press. I rang through to him on the course, and said, ‘I’ve got good news for you: we’ve just signed Ian Wright.’ And so George announced it to the press when he finished his golf.”

“Ian Wright was almost unique,” Dein later reflected. “When he came in, and Ken Friar was doing the paperwork, he said, ‘Where do I sign?’ We said, ‘But what about your terms?’ He said, ‘Where do I sign?’ He was not interested at all in salary or bonuses, just ‘Where do I sign?’ And that spoke volumes to me.” By then, Dein certainly had enough experience to label the incident as atypical. But as the vice-chairman took on greater responsibility for transfers and wage negotiations, things would be different from the days when Graham would lay down the law on deals with his ‘take it or leave it’ approach.

The mid-1990s were a free-wheeling time with opportunistic agents and sports lawyers anxious to strike a deal at a time when exclusive representation and honouring contracts were figments of many a chairman’s imagination. At home in the boardrooms of the leading Italian clubs, in the summer of 1995 Dein became aware that Internazionale were prepared to offload Dutch striker Dennis Bergkamp. Although sports lawyer and Arsenal season-ticket holder Mel Goldberg is convinced to this day he has a claim to an introduction fee, Dein felt free to deal directly with the Italians rather than go through another party because of his club’s policy of only dealing with agents as players’ representatives.

With club secretary Ken Friar, he flew to Milan and returned with the signature of, for the first time in Arsenal’s history, a true international superstar. (Sale time in Italy obviously appealed to him as a short while later, after spending four seasons in Serie A, David Platt was signed from Sampdoria.) For once price was no obstacle: £7.5 million for Bergkamp and £4.75 million for Platt, obliterating the previous record outlay of £2.5 million for Ian Wright.

Bergkamp arrived in June 1995 aged 26, thus becoming one of the first stars to come to England with his best years still ahead of him. “I can think of no other top European club that has kept this prize [signing a world class player] from its supporters for so long,” reflected author and Arsenal fan Nick Hornby, “which is why it had become ever more difficult to describe Arsenal as a top European club.” No longer. “I think Arsenal took on a new aura when Dennis Bergkamp arrived,” said Arsène Wenger’s goalkeeping coach and former Arsenal double winner Bob Wilson. “I love the guy. I love what he has brought to the club. His stature in terms of having him at Arsenal and seeing that he likes England, likes Arsenal, has brought other players to the club.”

Surely this is what Tottenham do? However, at the same time that Arsenal were signing Bergkamp, Spurs were busy turning themselves into the Arsenal of yesteryear, exemplified by chairman Alan Sugar’s comparative parsimony and manager Gerry Francis’s stunted imagination. “I can’t ever see us spending £7 million on a player, I really can’t,” said Sugar, suggesting that Arsenal would live to regret their profligacy. Bergkamp (along with Jürgen Klinsmann whose signed shirt the Tottenham chairman wouldn’t use to wash his car) exemplified in Sugar’s mind the notion of ‘Carlos Kickaball’, a foreign mercenary who failed to deliver and would head for the exit when the going got tough. The fact that Bergkamp had a predilection for Tottenham probably passed Sugar by.

When he was a youngster, as a special treat Mr and Mrs Berkamp would take Dennis to White Hart Lane where he only had eyes for his favourite player, Glenn Hoddle. So when he was searching for an escape route out of Milan his first thought was to ask his agent, Rob Jansen, to contact Tottenham to see if there was any interest. Of course back came the answer, none whatsoever, enabling David Dein to smartly step in. Even at the eleventh hour – allegedly in the taxi taking him to Highbury to sign, Bergkamp asked Jansen to check again with Tottenham and only when he was re assured that his only London home could be in N5 did he finally commit himself to Arsenal. However, there was still one further issue to be resolved.

Dein immediately investigated the British Airways Fear of Flying course (a two-day tutorial which culminates with the passenger sitting alongside the pilot in the cockpit as the plane takes a spin over London). As Dein was telling his new employee that there were numerous options and the course would not interfere with training, he could see the colour draining from Bergkamp’s face.

Arsenal’s new star had been traumatised by two flying incidents, the first in 1989 when 14 Dutch Surinamese players lost their lives in a plane crash and the second as recently as the year before, when the Dutch national team were caught up in a bomb scare during the World Cup in the USA, after which he vowed never to set foot in a plane again. Although at the time Dein must have been perturbed, he might have had more serious misgivings had he envisaged the perennial European campaigns under Wenger in the years to come and consequently the many key encounters Bergkamp would miss as a result of his phobia. Today, Dein is sanguine. “We still got the bargain of all time,” he says.

Whilst Rioch undoubtedly wanted Bergkamp – “He was the only foreign superstar the manager had heard of,” quipped Dein – Rioch’s insularity and indecisiveness might have scuppered other potential acquisitions. In a case of once bitten, twice bitten, Mel Goldberg was convinced that Bordeaux left back Bixente Lizarazu was just an unknown exotic foreign name to the Arsenal vice-chairman before he introduced him, implying that Dein in this instance was just as unworldly as his manager. Perhaps Arsenal’s interest cooled when Roberto Carlos came on the market. In the event they dithered and ended up with neither. Both went to bigger clubs: Lizarazu to Bayern Munich and Carlos to Real Madrid. It was probably inevitable anyway but Dein must have felt he and his manager were not on the same wavelength.

Now though there was no time to dwell on missed opportunities. Bruce Rioch changed the team’s tactics to get the ball on the floor more and build up from the back, utilising a 3–5–2 formation with Lee Dixon and Nigel Winterburn as wing backs. What was the point pumping the ball long to Ian Wright when the talents of Bergkamp and Platt had been assembled? It was a transitional season – a football cliché, but in this instance an accurate reflection of Rioch’s time – laying the groundwork for future progress. Arsenal qualified for the UEFA Cup, but the fifth place finish did not satisfy the board, who expected more given the outlay to bring the two big star names to the club. Moreover, the manager had alienated certain senior players and for some reason had not signed the contract that was on the table and would have committed him for the long term.

Paul Merson recalls that Rioch appeared to be a fish out of water, he simply didn’t fit in. “He couldn’t handle big time players. He couldn’t handle Wrighty. He used to come in and say ‘I can’t believe you all don’t come in the same car. At Bolton [Rioch’s previous managerial post] four or five of them used to come in the same car and talk about set pieces.’ London’s not like Bolton. He couldn’t grasp the concept that Ian Wright lived an hour and 20 minutes away from the training ground and someone else lived an hour away in the other direction.”

But, more critically, there were issues with his man-management style. George Graham might have seemed military to Merson, but he’d developed the players from unknowns into household names. Now they were stars, they didn’t take well to a new man using the same approach that they had had to endure when they were growing up. Merson recalls a particular training session as a watershed. “One day, he said to Wrighty ‘John McGinlay [his star striker at Bolton] would have scored that.’ I remember now seeing Wrighty walking to the showers saying the F word to him and that was it. Wrighty was bigger than the club itself then. It was either Rioch went or Wrighty went. And Rioch went.”

They were lucky to get a second chance. Peter Hill-Wood admitted, “We hadn’t the nerve to do it [before hiring Rioch in preference to Wenger] and I might not have been wrong. I don’t think it hurt him going to Japan.” (After Arsenal’s disinterest, Wenger went to manage Grampus Eight for whom he won the Japanese cup.) Indeed, there was some support for Hill-Wood’s position. Wenger’s former star player at Monaco, Jürgen Klinsmann, felt that “There was a different Arsène Wenger after Japan. He came back and for the first time truly believed ‘I’m ready for a big club now.’”

Yet, as with Dennis Bergkamp, Arsène Wenger could so easily have ended up on the other side of North London. During French mid-season breaks in the late 1980s, Wenger, then the Monaco coach, would head across the Channel to absorb his annual fix of English football. “There was a different quality of passion and the way supporters lived the match was distinct from anywhere else [I had experienced] in Europe. I thought,” he said, “that if one day I was given the chance to work in England, I would do it.” That chance could and should have come at Tottenham.

Wenger had established a relationship with FIFA-accredited agent Dennis Roach, who had enabled him to acquire his clients Mark Hateley and Glenn Hoddle. The Monaco coach was indebted to Roach who, unbeknown to Hoddle, had changed his French destination at the last minute from Paris St Germain, enabling Wenger to snatch the man he later described as “indispensable” from under the nose of his friend and then PSG coach Gerard Houllier. Further, Roach was a good friend of Irving Scholar and was thus in a perfect position to act as a go-between. As a start, he instituted friendly matches between Monaco and Tottenham which became a regular feature of the January calendar and he organised Wenger’s winter travel itinerary, with the first stop invariably White Hart Lane.

Having lived in Monaco for many years, it is the cruellest of ironies for a Tottenham fan that the biggest one of all, Irving Scholar, the most cosmopolitan and outward-looking English chairman of his time, should have passed up the golden opportunity on his doorstep. Scholar and Wenger were enthusiasts on the same wavelength regarding how their obsession should be played. Unfortunately for Wenger Scholar preferred Terry Venables as Pleat’s replacement, a decision that came back to haunt him when the club went into debt and Scholar was forced to sell his shares to the Alan Sugar/Terry Venables partnership.

Although he wasn’t on Tottenham’s wishlist, it didn’t stop Wenger’s winter escapades which of course went far beyond White Hart Lane. As luck would have it, on one of his trips, lost in the bowels of Highbury, Wenger stumbled into the Ladies’ Lounge (even as recently as 20 years ago, no directors’ WAGs were allowed in the Arsenal boardroom). Rescued by Mrs Dein, who took him to meet her husband, the two men struck up an immediate rapport. On his own in London that night, the Deins took Wenger along to a friend’s dinner party where the unexpected guest endeared himself to everyone by the panache he brought to an after-dinner game of charades. At the time, his English was only passable, but he immediately impressed David Dein with his intelligence and the Arsenal vice-chairman made a mental note of the fact that here was a different species of football man. “One for the future,” Dein recalls thinking.

Having a yacht moored at Antibes on the Côte d’Azur, just along the road from Monaco, Dein became an increasingly frequent spectator at the Stade Louis II, where the post-match tradition of dinner with the Monaco coach was inaugurated and his admiration subsequently increased by leaps and bounds. Dein was convinced that if ever the Arsenal leopard was going to change its spots, he had the answer in waiting.

Although the club did not announce that Arsène Wenger would be coming until some weeks into the 1996/97 season, it became the worst kept secret in football. Rioch was dismissed days before the first league match of the new season and Stewart Houston was once again asked to take charge until Wenger’s arrival. Houston then received an offer from Queens Park Rangers and jumped ship before the new number one arrived, ironically recruiting Bruce Rioch to assist him at Loftus Road in a reversal of their roles at Highbury (though apparently Houston couldn’t rid himself of the habit of, from time to time, referring to Rioch as “Boss”).

Pat Rice took charge for the remaining matches until Wenger had completed his obligations to Grampus 8 in Japan. His first sight of his team in the flesh was their late September elimination from the UEFA Cup by Borussia Mönchengladbach in Germany. His first match in charge was a 2–0 victory away to Blackburn two and a half weeks on. By that time, Arsenal fans had already seen the debut of a young midfielder signed on Wenger’s recommendation before his arrival had been officially confirmed. (“I had to be quick because he was on the verge of signing for Ajax,” he recalls. “I intercepted him when he was in Holland.”) Probably only footballing francophiles were aware of the 20-year-old before he joined, but Patrick Vieira’s evident talents indicated that the new boss certainly had an eye for a player.