Bus-Conductor
SC Supporter
- Oct 19, 2004
- 39,837
- 50,713
Dedicated to my old trophy adversary @Mullers
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/...ven-trophies-can-save-arsene-wenger-92xlnf0hc
Why trophies don’t matter any more
james gheerbrant
On the other side of the Atlantic, the Philadelphia 76ers, the NBA basketball team, have a rather curious unofficial motto: “Trust the process”. Originally a pledge of support for the team’s specific strategy of “tanking” on purpose to get better picks in the following season’s draft, the slogan has become a more general, cultish declaration of faith in the team’s gradual rebuild from one of the worst teams in the NBA. It has outlasted the man who originated it, the team’s former general manager Sam Hinkie, and become utterly synonymous with the franchise. It has bled into popular culture and trended a hundred times over on Twitter. Fans have even been known to chant it at home games.
To the ears of the English football fan, attuned to the sport’s comic-book folklore of glorious heroes and glittering triumphs, it sounds weird, even iconoclastic: like the sort of soulless corporate motto more suited to the boardroom than the stadium. We grow up believing that the game is about glory. Medals over methodology. “Football is about winning trophies,” Jamie Carragher wrote in his Daily Telegraph column last month, describing that statement as an “immovable fact”. That the ultimate aim of football should be to win things is a truth so unquestioned that it might as well be carved into a stone tablet.
But ahead of Sunday’s Carabao Cup final between Arsenal and Manchester City, when the first trophy of the season will be awarded, it feels like an apposite time to consider the actual worth of silverware. And I think that increasingly, the game of football is much less about the glory of winning trophies than we might imagine, and more about trusting the process.
Last June, the august football magazine FourFourTwo had a go at ranking the best managers in world football. Mauricio Pochettino was 11th, one of no fewer than six managers in the top 20 — along with Peter Bosz, Maurizio Sarri, Julian Nagelsmann, Gian Piero Gasperini and Marcelino — who have never won a major honour, plus another, Lucien Favre, who hasn’t won a trophy since the 2007 Swiss Super League. Arsène Wenger and Rafael Benítez, serial trophy winners, did not make the top 30. No 1 was Antonio Conte, an outstanding league manager who has won zero cup competitions in his career (if we exclude Italy’s Community Shield equivalent).
I mention this not to take issue with their list. Actually I think the ranking was eminently reasonable and would probably be in line with the opinion of most football observers. If some of those names, inevitably, have seen their stock fall eight months on, most are still considered among the best managers out there, and Pochettino and Sarri in particular might even be in a consensus world top ten, despite not adding to their barren mantelpieces. What is interesting is what the order says about the priorities and preoccupations of modern football.
I’ve been thinking about trophies recently, and whether we actually care about them as much as we think we do. Of course, there is a vast bedrock of football orthodoxy that suggests we should care about winning trophies — indeed, that it’s all we ought to care about. Bill Shankly’s much-mythologised quote that Liverpool “exists to win trophies” — for which you could probably find an analogous utterance at every big club. The notion that trophies are football’s “hard currency”. The reflexive pub-debate cry of, “Show us your medals”.
But what do we really talk about when we talk about managerial excellence nowadays? Are we mentally counting out numbers of trophies, assigning an arithmetic value to a manager’s greatness? Or are our minds instead drawn to the less shiny intangibles: a manager’s ability to tactically drill a team for the big games; their track record of developing players; their ability to cultivate an atmosphere of stability and gradual long-term improvement?
When Tottenham Hotspur produced a superb tactical performance in a dominant 2-2 draw in their Champions League last-16 match against Juventus last week, there was pretty much universal assent for the idea that Pochettino has already abundantly demonstrated his excellence without needing the additional garnish of a trophy to “prove himself”. Actually, I think the idea that he does is akin to the “Messi has to win the World Cup” contention: an argument more often imagined than it is actually advanced. In order to be considered good, even great, it is no longer a pre-requisite for managers to win things. In fact, sometimes, we don’t care even when they do.
Take a look across town at Wenger. On Sunday he will lead his team out in their fourth cup final in five seasons — and they have won the previous three. It is, unquestionably, an excellent recent track record of contending for, and usually collecting, at least one of the game’s major prizes, year in year out; a run of big days out, silverware, history, all the things that are supposed to be important to clubs and their fans. And yet it has made hardly any difference to his standing at Arsenal.
Wenger’s run of winning things has failed totally to slow the roll of his reputational decline and has had a negligible long-term impact on the general spiral of negativity at Arsenal. Partly that reflects the diminished stature of the FA Cup, of course. But it is also because, for all the isolated glory of those Wembley wins, most Arsenal fans do not trust the process under Wenger. They no longer believe in his ability to develop the team, to deliver sustainable improvement. The cup competitions, football’s “hard currency”, have undergone such a process of depreciation that even cashing in three of them in four seasons has barely made a dent in Wenger’s overdraft.
Ironically, it might have been Wenger himself who started the ball rolling, with his quote in 2012, much derided at the time, that “the first trophy is to finish in the top four”. By equating a broadly successful league campaign with a cup triumph, Wenger began to pick away at the mythology of trophies, to undercut their traditional primacy. If finishing in the top four was as good as a trophy, then perhaps other things were too: building a thrilling young team of improving players, for example; or consistently challenging the best opposition with attractive football. Now the reordering of priorities that he argued for condemns him and minimises his triumphs.
Wenger’s old foe, José Mourinho, increasingly finds himself on the same side of the fence. Under Mourinho, United won two of the four trophies they competed for the last season — the League Cup and Europa League — yet Mourinho still finds himself overtaken in many reasonable estimations by the likes of Pochettino and Jürgen Klopp. Not many argue for those two trophies as proof of Mourinho’s enduring greatness — instead it is the frequency of sterile performances like the one against Seville on Wednesday, the lack of visible signs of growth and progress in his team, that matter more. After the Europa League win, Mourinho suggested that “poets don’t win titles”; but increasingly it seems that poetry is more important to us than prosaically acquired prizes.
Recent seasons have provided ample evidence that the club football hivemind no longer rates the acquisition of trophies as a top priority. If it did, Benítez would be in a far bigger job than Newcastle United. Louis van Gaal would not have been fired immediately after leading Manchester United to the FA Cup. An FA Cup and Champions League double would have brought Roberto Di Matteo a lot more time at Chelsea, and granted him far more glamorous jobs subsequently. Do you really think Liverpool or Tottenham would exchange their coaches for Zinédine Zidane, the Champions League-winning manager of the last two seasons? Trust in the process, not trophies on the résumé, is what counts.
And the football-watching public is the same. Tottenham fans don’t care that Pochettino hasn’t won a trophy, just as a victory for Arsenal on Sunday would not transform perceptions of Wenger, nor shake faith in what Manchester City are building under Pep Guardiola.
The one exception, perhaps, is the players. Listen to any Harry Kane interview from the past six months and he will reference a need to “start winning trophies”.
Maybe it has something to do with the zeitgeist. Social phenomenologists posit that we are living in the Experience Age: an era characterised by the social media-driven tendency to live in the moment. Everything is impermanent. As the artist Fatima Al Qadiri has said, “There’s no such thing as the most recent update. It immediately becomes obsolete.” Trophies, the instant they are won, pass into history, a sepia-tinted realm of scant interest to the millennial. It is how our teams make us feel, how we experience them in the here and now that is important; not the number of cups we can point to.
It’s interesting to revisit the full context in which Danny Blanchflower uttered his famous, “The game is about glory” maxim. The full quote is this: “The great fallacy is that the game is first and last about winning. It is nothing of the kind. The game is about glory, it is about doing things in style and with a flourish.”
That now feels truer than ever. What does a momentary cup win matter if a team is not moving in the right direction long term? It does not matter a jot that Pochettino will not be leading his team out at Wembley on Sunday — because under him, Tottenham fans feel they can trust the process.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/...ven-trophies-can-save-arsene-wenger-92xlnf0hc
Why trophies don’t matter any more
james gheerbrant
On the other side of the Atlantic, the Philadelphia 76ers, the NBA basketball team, have a rather curious unofficial motto: “Trust the process”. Originally a pledge of support for the team’s specific strategy of “tanking” on purpose to get better picks in the following season’s draft, the slogan has become a more general, cultish declaration of faith in the team’s gradual rebuild from one of the worst teams in the NBA. It has outlasted the man who originated it, the team’s former general manager Sam Hinkie, and become utterly synonymous with the franchise. It has bled into popular culture and trended a hundred times over on Twitter. Fans have even been known to chant it at home games.
To the ears of the English football fan, attuned to the sport’s comic-book folklore of glorious heroes and glittering triumphs, it sounds weird, even iconoclastic: like the sort of soulless corporate motto more suited to the boardroom than the stadium. We grow up believing that the game is about glory. Medals over methodology. “Football is about winning trophies,” Jamie Carragher wrote in his Daily Telegraph column last month, describing that statement as an “immovable fact”. That the ultimate aim of football should be to win things is a truth so unquestioned that it might as well be carved into a stone tablet.
But ahead of Sunday’s Carabao Cup final between Arsenal and Manchester City, when the first trophy of the season will be awarded, it feels like an apposite time to consider the actual worth of silverware. And I think that increasingly, the game of football is much less about the glory of winning trophies than we might imagine, and more about trusting the process.
Last June, the august football magazine FourFourTwo had a go at ranking the best managers in world football. Mauricio Pochettino was 11th, one of no fewer than six managers in the top 20 — along with Peter Bosz, Maurizio Sarri, Julian Nagelsmann, Gian Piero Gasperini and Marcelino — who have never won a major honour, plus another, Lucien Favre, who hasn’t won a trophy since the 2007 Swiss Super League. Arsène Wenger and Rafael Benítez, serial trophy winners, did not make the top 30. No 1 was Antonio Conte, an outstanding league manager who has won zero cup competitions in his career (if we exclude Italy’s Community Shield equivalent).
I mention this not to take issue with their list. Actually I think the ranking was eminently reasonable and would probably be in line with the opinion of most football observers. If some of those names, inevitably, have seen their stock fall eight months on, most are still considered among the best managers out there, and Pochettino and Sarri in particular might even be in a consensus world top ten, despite not adding to their barren mantelpieces. What is interesting is what the order says about the priorities and preoccupations of modern football.
I’ve been thinking about trophies recently, and whether we actually care about them as much as we think we do. Of course, there is a vast bedrock of football orthodoxy that suggests we should care about winning trophies — indeed, that it’s all we ought to care about. Bill Shankly’s much-mythologised quote that Liverpool “exists to win trophies” — for which you could probably find an analogous utterance at every big club. The notion that trophies are football’s “hard currency”. The reflexive pub-debate cry of, “Show us your medals”.
But what do we really talk about when we talk about managerial excellence nowadays? Are we mentally counting out numbers of trophies, assigning an arithmetic value to a manager’s greatness? Or are our minds instead drawn to the less shiny intangibles: a manager’s ability to tactically drill a team for the big games; their track record of developing players; their ability to cultivate an atmosphere of stability and gradual long-term improvement?
When Tottenham Hotspur produced a superb tactical performance in a dominant 2-2 draw in their Champions League last-16 match against Juventus last week, there was pretty much universal assent for the idea that Pochettino has already abundantly demonstrated his excellence without needing the additional garnish of a trophy to “prove himself”. Actually, I think the idea that he does is akin to the “Messi has to win the World Cup” contention: an argument more often imagined than it is actually advanced. In order to be considered good, even great, it is no longer a pre-requisite for managers to win things. In fact, sometimes, we don’t care even when they do.
Take a look across town at Wenger. On Sunday he will lead his team out in their fourth cup final in five seasons — and they have won the previous three. It is, unquestionably, an excellent recent track record of contending for, and usually collecting, at least one of the game’s major prizes, year in year out; a run of big days out, silverware, history, all the things that are supposed to be important to clubs and their fans. And yet it has made hardly any difference to his standing at Arsenal.
Wenger’s run of winning things has failed totally to slow the roll of his reputational decline and has had a negligible long-term impact on the general spiral of negativity at Arsenal. Partly that reflects the diminished stature of the FA Cup, of course. But it is also because, for all the isolated glory of those Wembley wins, most Arsenal fans do not trust the process under Wenger. They no longer believe in his ability to develop the team, to deliver sustainable improvement. The cup competitions, football’s “hard currency”, have undergone such a process of depreciation that even cashing in three of them in four seasons has barely made a dent in Wenger’s overdraft.
Ironically, it might have been Wenger himself who started the ball rolling, with his quote in 2012, much derided at the time, that “the first trophy is to finish in the top four”. By equating a broadly successful league campaign with a cup triumph, Wenger began to pick away at the mythology of trophies, to undercut their traditional primacy. If finishing in the top four was as good as a trophy, then perhaps other things were too: building a thrilling young team of improving players, for example; or consistently challenging the best opposition with attractive football. Now the reordering of priorities that he argued for condemns him and minimises his triumphs.
Wenger’s old foe, José Mourinho, increasingly finds himself on the same side of the fence. Under Mourinho, United won two of the four trophies they competed for the last season — the League Cup and Europa League — yet Mourinho still finds himself overtaken in many reasonable estimations by the likes of Pochettino and Jürgen Klopp. Not many argue for those two trophies as proof of Mourinho’s enduring greatness — instead it is the frequency of sterile performances like the one against Seville on Wednesday, the lack of visible signs of growth and progress in his team, that matter more. After the Europa League win, Mourinho suggested that “poets don’t win titles”; but increasingly it seems that poetry is more important to us than prosaically acquired prizes.
Recent seasons have provided ample evidence that the club football hivemind no longer rates the acquisition of trophies as a top priority. If it did, Benítez would be in a far bigger job than Newcastle United. Louis van Gaal would not have been fired immediately after leading Manchester United to the FA Cup. An FA Cup and Champions League double would have brought Roberto Di Matteo a lot more time at Chelsea, and granted him far more glamorous jobs subsequently. Do you really think Liverpool or Tottenham would exchange their coaches for Zinédine Zidane, the Champions League-winning manager of the last two seasons? Trust in the process, not trophies on the résumé, is what counts.
And the football-watching public is the same. Tottenham fans don’t care that Pochettino hasn’t won a trophy, just as a victory for Arsenal on Sunday would not transform perceptions of Wenger, nor shake faith in what Manchester City are building under Pep Guardiola.
The one exception, perhaps, is the players. Listen to any Harry Kane interview from the past six months and he will reference a need to “start winning trophies”.
Maybe it has something to do with the zeitgeist. Social phenomenologists posit that we are living in the Experience Age: an era characterised by the social media-driven tendency to live in the moment. Everything is impermanent. As the artist Fatima Al Qadiri has said, “There’s no such thing as the most recent update. It immediately becomes obsolete.” Trophies, the instant they are won, pass into history, a sepia-tinted realm of scant interest to the millennial. It is how our teams make us feel, how we experience them in the here and now that is important; not the number of cups we can point to.
It’s interesting to revisit the full context in which Danny Blanchflower uttered his famous, “The game is about glory” maxim. The full quote is this: “The great fallacy is that the game is first and last about winning. It is nothing of the kind. The game is about glory, it is about doing things in style and with a flourish.”
That now feels truer than ever. What does a momentary cup win matter if a team is not moving in the right direction long term? It does not matter a jot that Pochettino will not be leading his team out at Wembley on Sunday — because under him, Tottenham fans feel they can trust the process.
