Making Way for the Next Generation -- of Players, Leaders, and Even Owners

We see people age quickly in sports.  Coaches get sentimental, so do teammates, do does the media, and so do fans.  It is sad to see aging stars fail to keep up, fail to make the runs they need to, fail to do the things that made them stars in the first place.

What also is hard is that when players have seniority, they set all sorts of examples for the younger players as to conduct.  Some of those examples are bad.  For example, a leader gets into the clubhouse early, leaves late, and talks with the younger players about how to sleep, how to eat, how to take care of their bodies so that they can have long and productive careers.  An aging star who is not a leader expects his own set of rules, and while he might play hard, he does nothing to elevate the team.  In fact, some of these leaders, who insist upon deference because they have been there and done that, do the opposite.  And then there are those veterans whose experience gets them deference whether they seek that deference or not. Put differently, those veterans can set the tone and the mood for the team.  That can mean that a laid back veteran's approach to the game blocks the energy that a younger group of stars ready to take over might want to display.

My crucible for this particular theory is Arsenal FC, which discovered something very interesting yesterday when it removed David Luiz from the lineup.  There is no doubt that Luiz commands respect -- he was an instrumental figure on the Brazilian national team (which while not successful according to Brazilian standards in recent World Cups is still a very difficult team to make and start for) and Chelsea (which did win titles while he was there).  But the 32 year-old Luiz is far from the player he was five years ago.  Chelsea fans were happy when he left for Arsenal; their view was that he was well past his prime and because his skills had eroded, he would take chances that created goal-scoring opportunities for opponents, and too many of them at that.  Some of those gambles cost Chelsea games.

Yet so desperate did Arsenal believe itself to be that it purchased Luiz from Chelsea and anointed him a starting center back.  His personality is such that it can be dominating -- you can see that on the field.  The problem is that Arsenal had gambled with aging and/or underskilled center backs -- Laurent Koscielny (aging and frequently injured), Shkodran Mustafi (underskilled for the EPL), and Sokratis (perhaps not performing as the skills he demonstrated at Dortmund predicted he would for Arsenal.  Then there were younger defenders -- Mavropanous (injured and developing), Rob Holding (missed last season according to injury) and Callum Chambers (perhaps just not good enough).  So, they added Luiz.

The problem is that he has not performed nearly well enough to suggest that the club is better off with him.  Yet, he started almost every match for the Gunners, except for yesterday.  And free of his opinions and actions, the Gunners played a more low-key duo at center half and then opened the club up for younger players -- Kieran Tierney (went off because of an injury), Ainsley Maitland-Niles (best match in months), Lucas Torreira (who finally showed what we all had expected of him when he joined the club from Sampdoria two years ago) and, of course, Gabriel Martinelli, a generational attacker in the words of that great developer of talent, Juergen Klopp.  What result was an Arsenal that threw its cares to the wind, was not paralyzed at the back, relaxed in the second half and put on a show against, admittedly, a struggling West Ham team.  That said, any football manager will tell you that three points for a win is three points, and you take them regardless of how well your opponent is playing at the time.

I don't want to put all of Arsenal's problems on Luiz.  I think that 65% of the issue is with management.  The good news is that they parted company with Ivan Gazidis; the bad news was that they lost outstanding talent scout Sven Mislintat in a power struggle with Raul Sanellhi, a former Nike executive who did a stint at Barcelona, but who seems more like an influencer/operator than a real football guy.  The other bad news is that they still have Stan Kroenke as their owner, and his track record says that he owns without passion or commitment to using personal funds to take a team to an elite level.  That has not cut it in North London, and it is time for the Kroenkes to make that commitment or sell the team to someone who really cares about winning.  To crystallize the problem -- Daniel Levy, Tottenham's chair, has out-"ownered" Stan Kroenke markedly in the past five years and has made gutsy decisions that have made Spurs an elite team, in contrast to Kroenke's actions, which have made Arsenal a complicated puzzle wrapped inside a riddle.

On the pitch, the good news is that the team started to do yesterday what everyone thought it would do when all players got healthy -- turn it loose on offense and make themselves difficult to defend and to challenge.  That said, the team still has needs at center back and center defensive midfielder, needs that former manager Unai Emery wanted to fill but met with rebuffs from management, and my guess is was Sanellhi speaking for Kroenke.  On the pitch, the club is turning to its very talented younger players to help forge a path forward and build some belief. 

Off the pitch, though, is where to watch if you are an Arsenal fan or observer.  Will Stan Kroenke be a dilettante, or will he be a passionate football fan?  Arsenal, its former players, and its fans deserve a lot more than they are getting at the moment for this jewel of a club. 

They are capable of and need to find a manager who is not inexpensive but who can develop players and make key acquisitions -- someone like "the next Juergen Klopp."  Some of the names bandied about -- Sousa, Marcelino, are not top-tier managers and have had enough experience to suggest that they never will be.  There will be much eloquence in who the next hire is.  The more you hear Arteta, Pochettino, Nagelsmann, the more you hear smart football people talking.  The more you hear Marcelino and Sousa, the more you hear puppetmasters talking through enablers.  It's that simple.

And they need to become an ownership that has a passion for winning, not just for owning.  If the Kroenkes cannot muster that level of commitment, they should do the honorable thing and sell the club to someone with much more of a deep-seated caring about Arsenal as a way of life, and not just as investment.