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Football Musings

Football Musings

Arsenal, more than most clubs in the English game, have guiding principles by which they abide; for example, every member of the starting eleven on any given match day is obliged to wear the sleeve length chosen by the club captain. As outlandish as it sounds, it is a tradition that is religiously observed, with Mathieu Flamini’s flagrant flouting of the rule in 2013 earning him an earful from Arsène Wenger. Of more significance is the club’s insistence on handing players in their 30s only a one-year contract extension, regardless of their status or importance to the club. Outgoing captain Mikel Arteta, in 2014, questioned the wisdom of the policy saying “"I don’t value players by age,” and promised to speak with his manager about it. “We need to analyse and talk about it,” he concluded. Arsenal are dyed-in-the-wool regarding the traditions they hold dear.

On Sunday, though, Arsenal completed the signing of Leicester and England striker Jamie Vardy for a fee believed to be around £20m reportedly on a 4-year contract, in what will surely be a contender for this window’s most surprising transfer deal. Vardy is 29, turns 30 next January, and is unlikely to improve further; in numerous ways he represents the atypical Wenger signing, a marked shift from everything the Arsenal chief seemed to stand for in his transfer dealings. Wenger has always had a preference for young and relatively cheap recruits hungry to prove a point. The transfer is rather convoluted, and it is worth trying to make sense of it from all angles involved.

For Arsenal the thinking is slightly obvious: in Vardy they are getting themselves a genuine Premier League A-lister whose 24 goals accounted for 35% of all of Leicester’s goals in their successful pursuit of the title last term. Vardy requires no bedding-in period or a time to acclimatize to his new surroundings; the Premier League is his turf, his raw pace and predatory instincts have torched many hapless defences over the past 18 months. Vardy’s goalscoring is rightfully praised to the high heavens, but his other underrated quality is that ability to cover ground as quickly as possible, hounding defenders and generally being a nuisance to the opposition as he malevolently scurries around like an energized ferret. The England striker started all 36 league games for which he was available last season, completing 3140 minutes out of a possible 3240. Vardy is supremely fit, and has not missed a single Premier League game through injury since Leicester’s promotion in 2014. For all intents and purposes Vardy might as well be the product of an elaborate scientific scheme to determine how far a player can go in his career armed solely with pace, remarkable strength and a seeming propensity to explode in a fit of uncontrolled rage at the slightest provocation.

At £20m Vardy is a snip, considering the prices being quoted for strikers in the transfer market at the moment. If paying £20m for a 29-year old who could essentially be a one-season wonder is a considerable bargain, it is a result of the dearth of elite strikers in the European game that Wenger has discussed at length over the past year. Speaking in September 2015, Wenger was at pains to point out the absence of a high-grade finisher in Europe.

“It was one of the debates we had at the European managers meeting during the break,” said Wenger. “The strikers are South American today. Europe doesn’t produce strikers any more.”

Arsenal’s other reported target Álvaro Morata scored 12 goals in 47 games across all competitions last term and could have potentially cost the club north of £40m; a confirmation of Wenger’s assertion that top-quality strikers are in short supply.

Vardy, for his part, clearly sees Arsenal as a step-up despite Wenger’s men finishing ten points behind his old club last season. If reports are to be believed, the striker is due for a bumper pay rise but it is the footballing aspect that would have been too much of a draw for him to turn down. Leicester’s miraculous season, glorious as it was, is no guarantee of a sustained push for the biggest prizes at the top end of the table, with history – in England and elsewhere - suggesting the Midlands side are far more likely to become a mid-table fixture in the Premier League than a card-carrying member of the league’s elite clubs. There is inherently no shame for a club of Leicester’s size to welcome stability as a permanent member of the league, but at 29 and seemingly at the peak of his powers, Vardy obviously knows there will be no better time to test himself at an elite club that has qualified for the Champions League for twenty consecutive seasons. Talk of Arsenal being serial bottlers is entirely valid but the club are infinitely a much bigger club than the Premier League champions. A move to Arsenal also improves his standing within the England squad, and loathe as some people may be to admit, there is something to be said about players plying their trade at the bigger clubs getting an easier ride into the national team. Roy Hodgson defended his decision to select a perma-crocked Jack Wilshere by stating, “there aren’t many Jack Wilsheres”, which is fundamentally correct but it does make one wonder if a Sunderland or West Ham player would have been afforded such leeway.

A word, too, for Leicester who look destined for a summer of seeing themselves stripped of their prized assets as the wolves circle and players have their heads turned by the lure of improved contracts and grander stages to strut their stuff. This is a quick reminder for the have-nots of the modern game that regardless of their achievements, the bigger clubs will ruthlessly pick off their best players like toothy crocodiles in a prolific henhouse. Southampton, Atlético Madrid and Borussia Dortmund have all, in recent seasons, seen fantastic seasons rewarded with players moving on to greener pastures. If you can’t beat them, why not just buy them?

The gigantic elephant in the room and perhaps the most important facet of this transfer is to ask how Vardy fits into Arsenal’s tactical plans. Here is a player who has trademarked moves in behind the opposition defence and attacking space afforded him linking up with a team who are often faced, especially at home, with two banks of four defending deep and daring them to break them down. For context, Leicester averaged 42.3% possession last season, the third lowest in the division, with Arsenal averaging 58.2%, the joint highest in the league. This provides a tactical conundrum for Wenger, a obvious need to recalibrate their approach to maximize the searing pace possessed by his new marquee signing.

In the past couple of seasons, Arsenal have significantly tweaked their approach for the biggest games; ceding large swathes of possession and instead unusually playing on the counter-attack. Wenger’s experimentation with Theo Walcott as a centre forward also indicates a concerted effort on the manager’s part to accommodate a speedy striker in the team. Mesut Özil, Arsenal’s lively creative spark and creator-in-chief, relishes a striker capable of darting into space, with Walcott’s goal in the home clash against Stoke a prime example of the link-up play the German can initiate with his pinpoint passing. With Francis Coquelin winning the ball in Arsenal’s half, it broke to Özil who instinctively picked up Walcott’s run on the shoulder of the last defender to set him up for Arsenal’s opener; from one end to the other in less than 15 seconds. As Walcott himself noted, Özil is at his creative best when he has pacy forwards at his beck and call. There is indeed an argument to be made that had the Englishman been a more effective finisher, Wenger might have decided not to recruit Vardy. Vardy therefore provides an effective Plan B (or A) when the burly Olivier Giroud’s skillset require that Arsenal play with someone capable of playing on the counter-attack.

The move for Vardy on Wenger’s part echoes Sir Alex Ferguson’s decision to sign Robin van Persie in 2012: a last ditch vanity signing to paper over long term cracks for one final tilt at the Premier League title before walking off into the sunset. This also indicates Arsenal’s continued ability to splash the cash after years of stadium-imposed financial austerity, with early moves for Vardy and Granit Xhaka suggesting lessons have been learned from the club’s disastrous summer last year when they failed to recruit a single outfield player. Jamie Vardy may not be the shiny new striker Arsenal fans are crying for, but with elite strikers on offer at slim pickings, he may just be the right player available at the right price, even if it is at odds with their transfer policy.

*This article appeared on Yahoo Sport UK under the headline: Premier League: Wenger’s pursuit of ‘old boy’ Vardy signals policy change at the Emirates.