Arsene Wenger's appliance of science pays off

"Technical superiority can be measured,” Arsène Wenger claims in a fascinating interview. He does not mean by the number of goals that may separate Arsenal from AC Milan in the Champions League this evening.

The Frenchman is talking about computer data that may, for example, tell him exactly when to drop Alexander Hleb or why Gilberto Silva deserves to start ahead of Abou Diaby in the San Siro. His disclosures amount to a revealing insight into how science underpins the beautiful art of the Wenger regime.

We can thank Total Youth Football magazine for this glimpse inside Wenger's laboratory. They failed only to persuade the professorial Frenchman to pose in a white coat. We all know that ProZone and Opta bombard Premier League managers with numbers, but Wenger admits being like a drug addict in his yearning for statistics.

His analysis is far more detailed than which player has run the most miles or who has completed 75 per cent of passes, although those numbers form part of the picture. What counts to Wenger is knowing where they passed (was it forward or sideways), how long it took them and - down to a decimal point - at what speed.
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“If I know that the passing ability of a player is averaging 3.2 seconds to receive the ball and pass it, and suddenly he goes up to 4.5, I can say to him, ‘Listen, you keep the ball too much, we need you to pass it quicker.' If he says ‘no', I can say look at the last three games - 2.9 seconds, 3.1, 3.2, 4.5. He'll say, ‘People around me don't move so much!' But you have the statistics there to back you up, too.

“It works well with your tactical observations, too. You see that a guy never loses the ball, so you look at the number of times he passes the ball forward. You can get to the point where you can say, ‘I prefer the one who loses the ball a bit more but tries to play it forward.' It is a concrete observation.” And there was Martin O'Neill at the weekend telling Wenger, who has an economics degree, that he was not good at statistics.

“In the past, it was just about feelings, opinions,” Wenger explains. “So I thought, ‘That's not good enough,' and I wanted to know a little bit more. I am always in the situation where I have to judge people, and the more concrete objective numbers you have the better you can achieve that.

“For me, it's an integral part of the game. And I must say when I come in the next morning after a match I am like a guy who is after his doses! He needs to inject! I have a feeling of a performance and then I want to check if that feeling is right or not. So I get all the numbers I can.”

None of this number-crunching contradicts the notion of Wenger the aesthete. His brilliance is to turn statistical measurements into some of the most joyous, breathtaking football this country has ever seen.

It is a brave and singular vision of how the game should be played, even more remarkable given that Wenger spends Arsenal's money as if it is his own. But it cannot gloss over a jarring number - the big fat zero next to Wenger's Champions League triumphs despite one semi-final with AS Monaco and one defeat with Arsenal, in the 2006 final in Paris.

Against Kaká and company at the San Siro this evening, there will be an expectation that they will fall short yet again. There would be no shame in that.

But perhaps defeat will raise the question of whether Wenger, in his search for fractional improvements, is neglecting power in his obsession with speed.

Welcome to the season of the Bad Owner

We all think we could turn our hands to the big jobs in football. We could all be a more precise referee than Mark Clattenburg, a more astute manager than Steve McClaren, a more honest agent than Paul Stretford and just as rich.

Some of the time we may even be right, and never more so than if you have played at being the owner of a Barclays Premier League club this season. Has there ever been a run of more bone-headed boardroom decisions?

“Get the manager right and the rest usually follows,” a former Premier League club chief executive once advised. “It is your one big call.” And yet we have still seen the appointments of Sammy Lee, Chris Hutchings, Avram Grant and Kevin Keegan.

To the above list we could also add the woes of the Gadsby regime at Derby County and the erratic lurchings at Fulham, where Chris Coleman's dismissal last year began a steady decline towards the Coca-Cola Championship.

A common explanation of these dunderheaded mistakes is that bright executives check their brains in when they enter the emotional maelstrom of the football directors' box. Having walked into the Bigg Market as a leader of business and come out a lairy Geordie, Mike Ashley seems hell-bent on proving this theory. Certainly there can never have been a more ludicrously populist decision in the history of the English game than reappointing Keegan as the Newcastle United manager.

But sometimes it is the chairmen looking to please themselves as much as the fans that lands them in trouble. Lee was not a crowd-pleasing decision so much as Phil Gartside, the Bolton Wanderers chairman, looking for a yes-man after turbulent times under Sam Allardyce. Grant was a personal hunch by Roman Abramovich.

Hutchings, meanwhile, was a rushed decision by Dave Whelan, the Wigan Athletic chairman, because, as he explained on the day of the unveiling, he wanted matters sorted before season tickets went on sale. And to think Whelan was shrewd enough to amass a personal fortune of £200million.

Each executive had his own misguided reasons, but one thing unites them all. Thousands of us could have told them, and many did, that they were making a terrible mistake. Anyone with a brain knew that Lee and Hutchings would not last until Christmas, that Grant would not turn Chelsea into Barcelona and that Keegan would be disastrous (although not even the most sceptical of us thought he would have so little impact).



Perhaps we say this every year, but 2007-08 will surely go down as the season of the Bad Owner. And we have not even got around to discussing Tom Hicks.