Arsene Wenger Needs to Stop Being Football's Lou Reed

Illustration by Cei Willis

It was Scott Fitzgerald who famously declared there are no second acts in American lives. It's a wildly overused quote, but it says a lot about the formation of people's identities. Fitzgerald was saying that the things you did, the places you visited and the people you associated with in your halcyon days would always come to define you. That essentially, you can never truly escape your past.

But Scott Fitzgerald died of an alcohol-related heart attack at the age of 44, blissfully ignorant that his life's finest work would later become a garish Florence + The Machine musical starring a bloated Leonardo DiCaprio, a 38-year-old ex-Spiderman and the misanthrope who seems likely to one day bear Marcus Mumford children. So frankly, Scott Fitzgerald was talking rubbish.

We now live in an age where it's entirely possible for you to escape your past, rewrite your own story. In the last decade or so we've seen Tony Blair become Slobodan Milosevic, Hugh Grant become John Pilger, Hannah Montana become Katie Got Bandz and Arsene Wenger – that suave, once-invincible strutting peacock of the Premier League – become a latter-day Lou Reed; a bespectacled curmudgeon, brandishing his own idea of artistic justice as a weapon to attack the patience of his fans.

Arsenal may have continued their march from their latest mini-crisis at Fulham yesterday, but in the last week of the transfer window there is still the sense that Wenger is refusing to do what is required of him. Even as Arsenal were easing up through the gears of their one-touch football, like a patient in a hospital head trauma ward reacquainting themselves with old neural pathways, it was difficult to ignore the elephant in the room. Or rather the five elephants in the room: one that can play in goal, one in the centre of defence, one in defensive midfield, one on the left wing and one up front, all of whom are as good at their jobs as Santi Cazorla is at his.

This is what Arsenal need to add to their squad if they're ever to make the step up from fourth place purgatory. And yet year after year you feel as if the man whose job it is to do that simply won't. Even as Arsenal make boasts about the amount of loose change they have in their Emirates vault, Wenger seems like a man imprisoned by his own morals. It's tough enough to win the Premier League as it is and yet the Arsenal boss seems determined to add rules to the game of football that make it even harder for him, like Reed trying to make pop records out of Edgar Allen Poe novellas. These two men were both hailed as visionaries, both revolutionising the fields in which they operate. Their intellectualisations of sport and music were thrilling to observe, but that wasn't enough for them. They warred with their contemporaries and found themselves still respected, but distressingly alienated and out of touch in their advanced years, to the point where Reed thought it would be hip to collaborate with Metallica, or Wenger thought that Denilson was a good player.

There are clear parallels between footballers and musicians. Both are young, usually working-class men whose lives have been warped by their own prodigious talent. They're snatched from their parents' grasp and normality at a young age, denied the rites of passage that comprise adolescence, forced into a strange world in which only their talent matters. Perhaps this is why it's become impossible for me to look at Fernando Torres without also seeing Kurt Cobain, an awesome performer who had it all, yet seemed to become wrapped up in a dialogue with his own demons. Ashley Cole is football's Bobby Brown, Balotelli its DMX, Michael Owen its Chris De Burgh and Ibrahimovic its Danzig.

But managers can't be pop stars. There's nothing romantic about crunching pass completion stats. A bit of caprice is a key element of leadership, helping to keep underlings on their toes, but you can't have a manager who, like Wenger often does, appears to be going through a full-blown existential crisis. No one benefits when the man in charge is tortured – the fans don't want a coach who wanders off to the far side of the field to sulk and read Camus at training. They want a hero, a man who can put his arms round his players and shoulder all the bullshit at the same time. They want a hero, a Mourinho not a Morrissey.

The root of Wenger's problem is that he believes he is an artist. But while football – his football – was and still is artful, it's not actually capital-A Art, it's sport, and in sport we remember the winners. There are no footballing MOMA exhibitions about John Barnes and Jason McAteer's time at Tranmere, there have been no evenings on BBC4 dedicated to rare David O'Leary footage, no murals of Christian Gross erected in Green Park. Idiosyncratic winners are great, but if they want to be remembered at all, then they have to win in the first place. Football managers don't have the option of toiling away self-indulgently in their sheds on new, ever more arcane "masterworks" that will only be appreciated by delusionally loyal fanatics. No football club's fans would wish mediocrity or relegation upon their club in order to keep things "cool" and "edgy" and "underground".

After many years of necessary frugality, Arsenal's bank vaults are fit to bursting. Their expensive new stadium is now no longer new, and is nicely paid for. Despite the vagaries of their form over the past few seasons, Champions League football seems almost guaranteed to them. So why must Wenger continue to force this handicap upon the club he's dedicated his life to serving? Arsenal's fans aren't ushering him into the shadows of obscurity, content with Arsene and their club becoming a niche concern. Instead, they're urging him on; desperate to see him bathed once more in the bright lights of glory.

The difference this season is that, if no new faces arrive, you get the feeling they may finally grow tired of doing so.

Follow Clive on Twitter: @thugclive

Previously – Things That Need to Change in English Football