Arsènal (6 page)

“I think at that moment we were nervous of hiring a foreign manager,” recalls Hill-Wood. So Graham's right-hand man Stewart Houston took the reins on a caretaker basis for the remainder of the campaign. The team flirted with relegation – it must have taken the players time to adjust to the fact that ‘the Coneman' (their derisory nickname for Houston stemming from his job of putting out the cones before training sessions) was now their boss – before putting a couple of key wins together over the Easter period to ease the pressure. This allowed them to concentrate on their ultimately unsuccessful defence of the Cup Winners' Cup, when they lost the final to Real Zaragoza in extra time. Houston was retained on the staff when the apparently safe pair of hands of Bruce Rioch were hired in preference to Wenger. And there was a whiff of revolution in the air that summer as two genuine superstars were acquired from Italy.

Unlike his predecessor, Bruce Rioch was only too willing to delegate to Dein and give him
carte blanche
when it came to handling transfer negotiations. Even though he had been kept at arm's length by Graham, Dein had capably demonstrated what he could do when the opportunity arose. One of his greatest coups had been the signing of Ian Wright in 1991. Dein later recalled the circumstances surrounding the move. “George Graham had identified Crystal Palace strikers Ian Wright and/or Mark Bright as being potential signings. At that time, I was speaking regularly with club chairmen, including Ron Noades from Palace. It was natural to speak about players. I was on the phone to Ron and asked him to tell me about Ian Wright and Mark Bright. Would he sell either of them? He said he was a ‘reluctant seller', and that it would take a lot of money to prise one or the other away. I asked him what he called a lot of money, so he said, ‘Like £2 million for Mark Bright', and that he wouldn't take ‘less then £2.5 million for Ian Wright'. I asked him if that meant he would sell Ian Wright for £2.5 million. He said, ‘I suppose, if it was offered it, I'd have to take it.' So I said to him, ‘Ron, I'm offering you £2.5 million for Ian Wright'. The phone went quiet. He said, ‘Are you serious?' I said, ‘Yes, I'm offering £2.5 million. You said you'd sell him for that, you are a man of your word, I'm offering you two and a half million.' And to his credit, he stuck by his word. He said, ‘You've got yourself a deal'. And Ian Wright was at Highbury that afternoon for a medical. George Graham was having – of all things – a golf day with the press. I rang through to him on the course, and said, ‘I've got good news for you: we've just signed Ian Wright.' And so George announced it to the press when he finished his golf.”

“Ian Wright was almost unique,” Dein later reflected. “When he came in, and Ken Friar was doing the paperwork, he said, ‘Where do I sign?' We said, ‘But what about your terms?' He said, ‘Where do I sign?' He was not interested at all in salary or bonuses, just ‘Where do I sign?' And that spoke volumes to me.” By then, Dein certainly had enough experience to label the incident as atypical. But as the vice-chairman took on greater responsibility for transfers and wage negotiations, things would be different from the days when Graham would lay down the law on deals with his ‘take it or leave it' approach.

The mid-1990s were a free-wheeling time with opportunistic agents and sports lawyers anxious to strike a deal at a time when exclusive representation and honouring contracts were figments of many a chairman's imagination. At home in the boardrooms of the leading Italian clubs, in the summer of 1995 Dein became aware that Internazionale were prepared to offload Dutch striker Dennis Bergkamp. Although sports lawyer and Arsenal season-ticket holder Mel Goldberg is convinced to this day he has a claim to an introduction fee, Dein felt free to deal directly with the Italians rather than go through another party because of his club's policy of only dealing with agents as players' representatives.

With club secretary Ken Friar, he flew to Milan and returned with the signature of, for the first time in Arsenal's history, a true international superstar. (Sale time in Italy obviously appealed to him as a short while later, after spending four seasons in Serie A, David Platt was signed from Sampdoria.) For once price was no obstacle: £7.5 million for Bergkamp and £4.75 million for Platt, obliterating the previous record outlay of £2.5 million for Ian Wright.

Bergkamp arrived in June 1995 aged 26, thus becoming one of the first stars to come to England with his best years still ahead of him. “I can think of no other top European club that has kept this prize [signing a world class player] from its supporters for so long,” reflected author and Arsenal fan Nick Hornby, “which is why it had become ever more difficult to describe Arsenal as a top European club.” No longer. “I think Arsenal took on a new aura when Dennis Bergkamp arrived,” said Arsène Wenger's goalkeeping coach and former Arsenal double winner Bob Wilson. “I love the guy. I love what he has brought to the club. His stature in terms of having him at Arsenal and seeing that he likes England, likes Arsenal, has brought other players to the club.”

This was Arsenal drawing a line under everything that had gone before. The boring, boring tag, the spendthrift policies and sterile football of the later Graham years, and most of all the bung scandal were all consigned to times past as the board finally gave their fans what they had been clamouring for so long: extravagant spending on world-class attackers.

Surely this is what Tottenham do? However, at the same time that Arsenal were signing Bergkamp, Spurs were busy turning themselves into the Arsenal of yesteryear, exemplified by chairman Alan Sugar's comparative parsimony and manager Gerry Francis's stunted imagination. “I can't ever see us spending £7 million on a player, I really can't,” said Sugar, suggesting that Arsenal would live to regret their profligacy. Bergkamp (along with Jürgen Klinsmann whose signed shirt the Tottenham chairman wouldn't use to wash his car) exemplified in Sugar's mind the notion of ‘Carlos Kickaball', a foreign mercenary who failed to deliver and would head for the exit when the going got tough. The fact that Bergkamp had a predilection for Tottenham probably passed Sugar by.

When he was a youngster, as a special treat Mr and Mrs Berkamp would take Dennis to White Hart Lane where he only had eyes for his favourite player, Glenn Hoddle. So when he was searching for an escape route out of Milan his first thought was to ask his agent, Rob Jansen, to contact Tottenham to see if there was any interest. Of course back came the answer, none whatsoever, enabling David Dein to smartly step in. Even at the eleventh hour – allegedly in the taxi taking him to Highbury to sign, Bergkamp asked Jansen to check again with Tottenham and only when he was re assured that his only London home could be in N5 did he finally commit himself to Arsenal. However, there was still one further issue to be resolved.

After the deal was done, Dein was told by Jansen that “It's nothing major but Dennis isn't too keen on flying.”

“What do you mean?” said Dein. “We are aiming for Europe.”

“I'm sure you'll get round it,” said Jansen, making light of the situation.

Dein immediately investigated the British Airways Fear of Flying course (a two-day tutorial which culminates with the passenger sitting alongside the pilot in the cockpit as the plane takes a spin over London). As Dein was telling his new employee that there were numerous options and the course would not interfere with training, he could see the colour draining from Bergkamp's face.

“I don't like to fly, Mr Dein,” said Bergkamp

“Don't worry,” said Dein. ‘This course will help you.”

“No, Mr Dein. You don't understand. I don't fly.”

Arsenal's new star had been traumatised by two flying incidents, the first in 1989 when 14 Dutch Surinamese players lost their lives in a plane crash and the second as recently as the year before, when the Dutch national team were caught up in a bomb scare during the World Cup in the USA, after which he vowed never to set foot in a plane again. Although at the time Dein must have been perturbed, he might have had more serious misgivings had he envisaged the perennial European campaigns under Wenger in the years to come and consequently the many key encounters Bergkamp would miss as a result of his phobia. Today, Dein is sanguine. “We still got the bargain of all time,” he says.

Whilst Rioch undoubtedly wanted Bergkamp – “He was the only foreign superstar the manager had heard of,” quipped Dein – Rioch's insularity and indecisiveness might have scuppered other potential acquisitions. In a case of once bitten, twice bitten, Mel Goldberg was convinced that Bordeaux left back Bixente Lizarazu was just an unknown exotic foreign name to the Arsenal vice-chairman before he introduced him, implying that Dein in this instance was just as unworldly as his manager. Perhaps Arsenal's interest cooled when Roberto Carlos came on the market. In the event they dithered and ended up with neither. Both went to bigger clubs: Lizarazu to Bayern Munich and Carlos to Real Madrid. It was probably inevitable anyway but Dein must have felt he and his manager were not on the same wavelength.

Now though there was no time to dwell on missed opportunities. Bruce Rioch changed the team's tactics to get the ball on the floor more and build up from the back, utilising a 3–5–2 formation with Lee Dixon and Nigel Winterburn as wing backs. What was the point pumping the ball long to Ian Wright when the talents of Bergkamp and Platt had been assembled? It was a transitional season – a football cliché, but in this instance an accurate reflection of Rioch's time – laying the groundwork for future progress. Arsenal qualified for the UEFA Cup, but the fifth place finish did not satisfy the board, who expected more given the outlay to bring the two big star names to the club. Moreover, the manager had alienated certain senior players and for some reason had not signed the contract that was on the table and would have committed him for the long term.

Paul Merson recalls that Rioch appeared to be a fish out of water, he simply didn't fit in. “He couldn't handle big time players. He couldn't handle Wrighty. He used to come in and say ‘I can't believe you all don't come in the same car. At Bolton [Rioch's previous managerial post] four or five of them used to come in the same car and talk about set pieces.' London's not like Bolton. He couldn't grasp the concept that Ian Wright lived an hour and 20 minutes away from the training ground and someone else lived an hour away in the other direction.”

But, more critically, there were issues with his man-management style. George Graham might have seemed military to Merson, but he'd developed the players from unknowns into household names. Now they were stars, they didn't take well to a new man using the same approach that they had had to endure when they were growing up. Merson recalls a particular training session as a watershed. “One day, he said to Wrighty ‘John McGinlay [his star striker at Bolton] would have scored that.' I remember now seeing Wrighty walking to the showers saying the F word to him and that was it. Wrighty was bigger than the club itself then. It was either Rioch went or Wrighty went. And Rioch went.”

Dein had already targeted the man he really wanted, and after Arsène Wenger had been initially overlooked following Graham's dismissal, at Dein's behest the board believed the time was now opportune for a foreign adventure.

They were lucky to get a second chance. Peter Hill-Wood admitted, “We hadn't the nerve to do it [before hiring Rioch in preference to Wenger] and I might not have been wrong. I don't think it hurt him going to Japan.” (After Arsenal's disinterest, Wenger went to manage Grampus Eight for whom he won the Japanese cup.) Indeed, there was some support for Hill-Wood's position. Wenger's former star player at Monaco, Jürgen Klinsmann, felt that “There was a different Arsène Wenger after Japan. He came back and for the first time truly believed ‘I'm ready for a big club now.'”

“It was a big decision,” recalls chairman Peter Hill-Wood, to reverse the one taken two years previously. However, it was quick and painless once the Arsenal trio of Dein, Hill-Wood and largest shareholder, Danny Fiszman, made the trip to Japan in the summer of 1996. An hour's discussion in Wenger's hotel room and it was handshakes all round.

Yet, as with Dennis Bergkamp, Arsène Wenger could so easily have ended up on the other side of North London. During French mid-season breaks in the late 1980s, Wenger, then the Monaco coach, would head across the Channel to absorb his annual fix of English football. “There was a different quality of passion and the way supporters lived the match was distinct from anywhere else [I had experienced] in Europe. I thought,” he said, “that if one day I was given the chance to work in England, I would do it.” That chance could and should have come at Tottenham.

Wenger had established a relationship with FIFA-accredited agent Dennis Roach, who had enabled him to acquire his clients Mark Hateley and Glenn Hoddle. The Monaco coach was indebted to Roach who, unbeknown to Hoddle, had changed his French destination at the last minute from Paris St Germain, enabling Wenger to snatch the man he later described as “indispensable” from under the nose of his friend and then PSG coach Gerard Houllier. Further, Roach was a good friend of Irving Scholar and was thus in a perfect position to act as a go-between. As a start, he instituted friendly matches between Monaco and Tottenham which became a regular feature of the January calendar and he organised Wenger's winter travel itinerary, with the first stop invariably White Hart Lane.

At the time, George Graham was getting his feet under the table at Arsenal, while at Tottenham David Pleat's team of talents were self-combusting – Clive Allen and Chris Waddle following Hoddle to France – as the manager committed occupational suicide by giving the tabloids the opportunity to make headlines out of his private life.