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Arsene Wenger strives to defy critics by seeing the positives in Arsenal's Champions League absence
Arsène Wenger’s capacity to see the best in a bad situation is undimmed and even now, in his first season since 1997 without a starting berth in the Champions League, he was expressing Arsenal’s good fortune that they could “focus completely on the Premier League”.
The Community Shield game against Chelsea on Sunday is an early chance to see what Arsenal look like liberated from the yoke of Europe’s leading club competition, which is as Wenger would prefer to see it, although it does not tell the full story. The question of how Wenger addresses the season, in particular the club’s new Thursday commitment in the Europa League, is critical especially with Jose Mourinho having used it last season as an alternative route to the Champions League when his team failed to break the top four.
The dynamic of Arsenal’s week will be fundamentally altered for the first time in 20 years by those Thursday games, especially the return trips from away games that drag into Friday, and handling that as well as challenging for the title, or just the top four, will not be easy. Wenger tried a comparison between Arsenal’s new reality and that of Sunday’s opposition Chelsea last season but the latter won the league without the burden of any European football at all.
Having found themselves eight places and 21 points below Arsenal at the end of the 2015-2016 season, Chelsea ended the 2016-2017 campaign under Antonio Conte four places and 18 points better off than Sunday’s opponents. Arsenal’s FA Cup final victory that denied Conte’s team the domestic double might have mitigated against that reverse but it does beg the question of how Wenger is going to make up the ground with the gruelling added extra of Thursday night football.
When the two sides met in Beijing last month, Arsenal found themselves well-beaten and their performance against Sevilla in the second of two Emirates Cup games last Sunday did not inspire great confidence for a flying start. It is early days yet but already Wenger is having to deal with the questions over Alexis Sánchez’s future as well as those on his own new contract after yet another turbulent season in front of a divided support.
He did not take well a question about having to justify his own position as manager, an obligation he clearly does not feel. “I am sorry I am still here. I can understand that you want to kill me but at the moment, I have survived,” he said
“Look, [last season] we won the FA Cup and made 75 points, and we are of course not happy with it but some teams did worse. When we qualified for the Champions League, people told me: 'But you didn't win a trophy.' Now we won a trophy, and didn't qualify for the Champions League, and it's said to me: 'Why are you not in the Champions League?' That's normal to live with but I want to focus on my job and do as well as I can and win absolutely every competition.”
It sounds like Wenger is lukewarm at best about the Europa League, a competition that the club won in 1970 in its very early guise as the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup,. As usual, his objections seem to spring from his opposition to the structure of the competition, which accepts certain eliminated teams from the Champions League into the New Year knockout stages, rather than the benefits it offers to a pragmatic manager.
Asked whether he would take it seriously as a competition, it would be right to say that Wenger hedged his bets. “I will always play a team that has a good chance to win the next game. In the Europa League if we can afford sometimes to rest some players we will do it. But we have to adapt to the level of the competition and see first what kind of group we play in.”
The notion that it might be considered a route into the Champions League was summarily dismissed. “You cannot go into the season and think that. I always was not in favour of that, because I think at some stage it can influence on the championship. If a team is in a position in April where they have more chance to win the Europa League they can let some games go in the championship, and not completely focus on that, on the regularity of the competition.”
“I was always against it [Champions League teams’ entry]. Because apart from Man United, who did win the Europa League, all the years before it was always a team who was kicked out of the Champions League. That’s why I was always against, when we voted in Geneva, I was always against it.”
It did not sound like a man who has his eye on a first European trophy at Arsenal, the one achievement he has not managed in more than 20 years, although, as Mourinho can attest, that may change if his team are slipping from contention in the league come spring.