He is renewing himself. He is investing in youth as the only answer that makes sense against Chelsea’s buying phenomenon. He is, in effect, committing Arsenal to christening the new stadium in the summer with a house full of human potential.
Wenger may not spell it out, but he is redistributing what wealth his club can afford after the £375m commitment to the Emirates Stadium.
He is calling time on Dennis Bergkamp and is tacitly challenging Thierry Henry to stay and be the daddy to an emerging new team in their new home.
In part, Wenger is tearing up the side that has been his life’s work since he entered Highbury a decade ago. In part, he is going back to what he does best: identifying and nurturing embryonic talent. What was Henry before he came under Wenger’s wing? What was Patrick Vieira or for that matter Ashley Cole? Youth development is a risky strategy, but with Chelsea’s financial power to outbid Arsenal, Manchester United, Real Madrid or anybody else for a proven player, the circumstances warrant it.
“There is always a high level of risk with human nature,” Wenger admitted when others questioned his attempts to develop such youngsters as Jermaine Pennant and Francis Jeffers. “But in this case, I very much like the player.”
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He was referring to the deal that he has yet to conclude, Walcott the prodigy from Southampton. Wenger used the media attention surrounding the supposed £12m offer to make his point.
“Chelsea have the potential to do it,” he said of the power to take any financial gamble. “But there is one obstacle: you can only play with one player in each position.”
In other words, message to the Walcotts: think of Glen Johnson, Wayne Bridge, and Shaun Wright-Phillips. Young English stars who went for the big money and are now in the supporting cast to the Stamford Bridge collection of world talents.
The age-old conundrum is how to handle youth’s growth spurts, spiritually as well as physically. Wenger’s record, with Henry and Vieira, and more recently with Cesc Fabregas, is that he is indeed the professor at managing the maturation of gifted talents. He sees in them more than they know in themselves, If, as appears likely, he gets Walcott, the Arsenal team maker will possess a nucleus as young and as exciting as the youth cup winners David Beckham, Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, Gary and Phil Neville and Nicky Butt around whom Sir Alex Ferguson built his finest Manchester United side.
Fabregas was better last season at 17 than he is now, largely because he was carefree and he had the presence of Vieira alongside him. It did not take an Einstein to know that Vieira would be missed, nor is it a surprise that Wenger has opted for Vassiriki Abou Diaby, who captained the French team that eclipsed England at last summer’s European Under-19 Championships in Belfast.
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Diaby wore the No 4 shirt, a la Vieira. He is a Parisian of Ivorian descent, he is rangy and long striding, and has come through the school of Auxerre, which is France’s most reliable youth recruitment club.
He has to grow into responsibility and, frankly, Auxerre gave him little in the first team. Wenger sees the potential of power and force, and the need Fabregas and Mathieu Flamini have for muscle power at their side. In attack, with or without Henry, Jose Antonio Reyes and Robin van Persie, he still needs aerial strength, and that was the emphasis Wenger made when he signed Emmanuel Adebayor, the Togo centre-forward who, again, has come through French schooling in Metz and Monaco and is still only 21.
Diaby and Adebayor have to adapt to a league more physical than any in their experience, and they represent between them about £10m of Wenger’s gamble on human adaptability.
But you sense that Walcott, as sweet a 16-year-old talent as there is in the English game, would be something special in Wenger’s hands.
Many have tried to compare Walcott to Wayne Rooney whereas, apart from precocity, there is nothing to compare. Rooney was a man in boy’s guise in his mid-teens — built like a bullock, hard as nails, a rough and tough Liverpudlian fuelled by belligerence.
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Walcott’s temperament appears as composed as his movement is swift. If he has a contemporary likeness it might be Leo Messi, the Argentine who moved to Barcelona at
13 and swept into the first team at just 17. It was, of course, the age at which Pele became a World Cup winner, and Maradona, Ronaldo and Cruyff became irresistible youths on the senior stage. It was the age we felt Joe Cole was something special, though only now is he proving it.
But, in movement and instinct, and in family background, the closest resemblance to what Walcott is now was Trevor Francis 35 years ago. Francis was a silky smooth, turbo-charged Plymouth schoolboy coveted by the best, but he chose Birmingham because it offered him the opportunity to score his goals at 16.
He exploded the doubts that a youngster should not be thrown into the man’s league by scoring 15 goals in his first 15 games in the Second Division, which is the equivalent to where Southampton are now. “People asked if I would have preferred a quieter, more normal start than I had,” said Francis. “But I loved having people tip me for England even at that age.
“It was ridiculous, but it put me on the map straight away, and I wasn’t green enough to believe it.”
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He had what Walcott would have at Arsenal, but not necessarily at Chelsea: a place in the first team as soon as performance merits it, a manager who looks beyond the instant, and parents who try to see the future for the good of their still very young teenager.
When Brian Clough and Peter Taylor broke the £1m barrier to buy Francis for Nottingham Forest’s European Cup ambitions in the 1970s, they described him as “quicker than most, with better control than most, better composure than most” and a better long- term investment than most.
Their £1m, nevertheless, made Forest at least temporarily the Chelsea of their day. And the money was recouped. So while youth is ever a gamble, it is easy to see why Wenger is ready to persuade Arsenal to spend that £10m on a player whose potential is far from being confirmed.
With Diaby, Adebayor, Fabregas, Van Persie, Reyes, Senderos, and even Alexander Hleb all emerging rather than confirmed Premiership players, it is a major reconstruction fashioned on the experience of Wenger.
When he arrived in September 1996, Wenger said he wanted to be careful not to break the cycle set for him by George Graham. The defence he left intact until it fell apart at the seams, the midfield and attack he recast on a level never seen before at Arsenal.
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His eye for youth was ever roving. Nicolas Anelka, stolen from the French at 17, Fabregas smuggled out of Spain at 16, were the successes. And from one youth tournament, the Uefa Under-16 championship played in Israel in May 2000, four teenagers from four different cultures found their way to Highbury.
Jermaine Pennant from Notts County and Moritz Volz from Schalke were tried, and moved on — not up to Arsenal’s discipline or quality. Reyes, a Seveille protégé, and Van Persie from Feyenoord are still in the French professor’s fresh Arsenal dream team.
But four players from one boys’ tournament, and now the evidence that Arsenal are establishing, among other places, a soccer school in Israel, emphasises that with Chelsea able to buy international players to hold in reserve, developing youth is the affordable option.
It was TS Eliot who, even before Wenger, observed: “The young feel tired at the end of an action, the old at the beginning.”