The same fans will fill up bars and sell out stadiums, players will line up in their colours, managers will tread nervously on the touchline… There will be one thing, though, that will be very different.
We might see Aaron Ramsey finally fulfil his potential, we might even see Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang ape Thierry Henry, maybe even Mesut Ozil will, no longer just for the sake of a song but for the sake of reality, be “Better than Zidane”…
There will be one thing, though, that will be very different.
Unai Emery, Arsenal’s new manager – will take some getting used to that… Arsenal’s newmanager – will be succeeding One Arsene Wenger on the touchline this season for a club whose only constant has been the man he will be replacing.
That one thing, though, may just be all too different.
We have faced struggle in trying to come to terms with the modus operandi of the board at Arsenal Football Club. The last sensible thing they did was back in 1996.
Since then they’ve oscillated from the utterly incomprehensible to the devastatingly ineffective – nothing in between.
Arsene Wenger was left solely in charge of the administrative affairs of the club, whereas the board was more than keen to oversee a financial mismanagement of biblical proportions.
There, too, the manager broke precedence to help carry the burden, quite literally leveraging his own good name to help broker loans from banks who sought assurances from the club that Wenger would stick around at Highbury for the foreseeable future.
Even Madrid came calling but a man stays true to his word. And Wenger is some man. The top players left, new ones never came, and it was once again Wenger who was left holding the hefty cheque – for years of incompetence shown by the board.
Those who shout the loudest are often heard the most, and there’s hardly any entity in existence that yells harder and longer than Arsenal FanTV. Stan Kroenke was awoken from his cryogenic sleep and, as he often tends to, proceeded to make a decision with the wherewithal of someone who ought to have much rather been buried alive.
Arsene Wenger was shown the door at the very Stadium he helped build.
Wonder what’s in store for those of us who demanded heads roll, without giving the depleted resources under the manager so much as a passing glance. One passing glance would have told you the problem lay with quality in the side. Or the lack of it.
Two, and you’d have figured that Wenger was being sent into battle armed with a couple of paper clips and a hand towel.
And what did he do with it? 16 consecutive years in Europe’s most elite competition and three FA Cups.
That is genius. Instead of taking our hats off to him, we harried the chap, ridiculed him for his results and scoffed at his beliefs.
And what’d he do? Serve.
Then, all it took was one statement asking him to step aside.
And what’d he do? Stepped aside.
Look everywhere around you and you’ll see disgruntled managers vilifying their own club for the lack of transfer activity, filling up column inches in newspapers with suggestions for owners instead of picking up the telephone and calling them.
The public display of abhorrence for their own employers, past and present, is all too common in modern football.
But Arsene Wenger was cast aside from the very club he gave an identity to. And what’d he do? Thank us.