How does a football club get an identity? Sometimes it takes someone with a vision, and Arsenal were blessed to have two of them in a row during the 1920s and 1930s.
Whether rightly or wrongly, we venerate football managers.
They're the axis upon which a football club rests. The manager is a vessel for our love, as well as our disproportionate hatred. They're a shield for malfunctioning players and owners. They're the main PR person, the master tactician and motivator. The manager is the conduit through which the personality of a football club flows. The most celebrated of them are often treated as demigods. Consider, for example, the veneration afforded to Bobby Robson, Brian Clough or Alex Ferguson.
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But football clubs weren't born with managers in place. The role had to be created. The first football manager is commonly assented to be George Ramsey, who was appointed as the manager of Aston Villa subsequent to the placement of a newspaper advertisement in the summer of 1884.
Ramsey's job was very different to the role of a football manager today. He was addressed, as per the convention of the time, as the club secretary but, despite the fact that the club's committee picked the team, This particular secretary's duties also included looking after the players and controlling both recruitment and transfers. Ramsey would stay in this position until 1926.
Herbert Chapman arrived at Highbury in the summer of 1925. In a high-profile move, with a lengthy career that already went back two decades and which had already been touched by enormous success and a degree of controversy already behind him, he didn't come from nowhere, but he did build the identity of a football club, and his importance both to that club and to the game in a general sense cannot be understated.
Starting out in amateur leagues in Lancashire, Herbert Chapman cut an uninspiring figure as a player. He played briefly in the Football League for Grimsby Town, Sheffield United and Notts County as an inside right, but remained an amateur for much of his playing career in order to make the most of his civil engineering qualifications. Somewhat ironically, considering where his career would take him, he also played two years for Tottenham Hotspur before moving to Northampton Town of the Southern League as player-manager in 1907.
Northampton had finished bottom of the Southern League table for each of the previous two seasons. But by the time that Chapman retired as a player in January 1909, he'd already made his mark as a manager. He'd noted as a player that no team's ever seemed to make any serious attempts to, as he put it himself, organise victory, and that even the players seldom talked to each other about how they might win matches.
He drew up a framework around which the players could work. He dropped a couple of his forwards back and instructed his players on how to play their way out of trouble should they find themselves in any. After successfully lobbying Northampton's directors to let him spend a little money on players, they won the Southern League in 1909.
Within three years of this, however, Chapman's ambition was starting to feel somewhat thwarted. Election was the only entry route to the Football League and Northampton Town couldn't get the votes. Chapman lobbied for the League to be expanded, with two regional division sitting below the two divisions of the Football League.
This would follow in 1921 with the creation of the Third Divisions North and South. But his request came to nothing in 1912. That year, though, he was offered and accepted the manager's job at Leeds City. Leeds had just finished in the re-election places at the bottom of Division Two when Chapman was appointed, so his very first job was to lobby for the club to keep its place in the Football League in the first place. Chapman's first season in charge ended with Leeds City in eighth place in the table.
The following season, they finished two points from promotion. All clubs, however, were affected by the outbreak of the First World War, even though the game played on throughout its first nine months. Crowds fell, the team was disrupted, and Leeds City fell to 15th place in the Second Division. In 1916, Chapman took a job in a munitions factory as a gesture of support towards the war effort.
After the slaughter had finally ended, football didn't start again for another 10 months. By that time, however, Herbert Chapman was out of football altogether and Leeds City were at the point of being expelled from the Football League. Chapman, meanwhile, had quit Leeds in December 1918 to go and work in an oil and coke works in Selby.
During the last two years of the war, while he was away, Leeds City had put George Cripps, Chapman's assistant, in charge of the team and in charge of the books, alongside a new chairman, Joseph Connor. In Chapman's absence, the club's financial position declined significantly, and in 1917 only the intervention of the Football League prevented the board from folding the club altogether. Meanwhile, Leeds City were making illegal payments to encourage guest players to play for them in the loosely arranged tournaments that were covering for the Football League while that tournament remained suspended.
It was a player from the pre-war years that blew the whistle on Leeds City. Charles Copeland had been demanding the doubling of his pre-war wages and attempted to blackmail the board by threatening to inform of the club's illegal payments. The board called Copeland's bluff, giving him a free transfer.
Copeland, however, had left Leeds City with documentary evidence of his allegations, and duly did take the club to the authorities. A joint inquiry between the FA and the Football League began, and Leeds' directors were ordered to hand over all relevant paperwork.
They replied that they were unable to, since the documents were not in their possession and were locked in a solicitor's strongroom. From reporting at the time, it seems that documents would probably have been produced, but a decision was made not to do so, presumably because rather than exonerating those under suspicion, they would actually more likely implicate even more people.
Leeds City were not found guilty of financial irregularities, they were found guilty of blocking the FA's investigation and for a body like that to do this might even have been a bigger crime. The punishment was savage. Leeds City were expelled from the Football League in October 1919 and were liquidated shortly afterwards. Their assets were sold to the newly formed Leeds United.
Four directors, including Connor, as well as George Cripps and Herbert Chapman, were banned from football for life. At first, this didn't seem to concern Chapman, who'd walked away from Leeds several years earlier. But when he lost his job at the end of 1920, he needed new employment and decided to appeal the ban.
Huddersfield Town, who wanted him as their assistant manager, backed Chapman in the appeal, arguing that, as he had been working in the factory in Barnbow during the war, he had not been in charge of Leeds City during the period when illegal payments were being made.
The ban was lifted, and Chapman was formally installed as the assistant to Huddersfield's manager Ambrose Langley on the 1st February 1921. A month later, he was the manager of the club himself. Chapman's first season at Huddersfield ended with the club winning the FA Cup, with a 1-0 win against Preston North End at Stamford Bridge.
By this time, Chapman had been granted complete control over the footballing side of the club, and everything would be done according to his rules. The club's reserve teams and youth teams would play the same formation as the first team, whilst a wide-ranging scouting network would look for the best players for his tactical system.
Money from the FA Cup run could pay for better players. The following year, Huddersfield Town jumped from 14th place to 2nd in the table. The year after that, 1923-24, they became the champions of England for the first time. The year after that, they repeated the trick.
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In the summer of 1925, Arsenal's Henry Norris placed an advertisement for a new manager in the newspapers, having sacked Leslie Knighton at the end of Huddersfield's second championship-winning season. Chapman, Lured by a salary of twice the amount that he was earning at Huddersfield and an opportunity to go to a bigger club in London, took the job.
It was, in some respects, a surprising move for him to make. Huddersfield Town were, after all, twice league champions, while Arsenal at this stage had never won a major trophy or league title, and had spent the previous couple of seasons fighting relegation. And on top of all of this, the chairman was the famously unpleasant Henry Norris, the Ken Bates of his day.
Tactically, Chapman decided to exploit a change to the offside rule. In the summer of 1925, the number of defenders that needed to be between an attacker and the goal reduced from three to two.
Chapman immediately secured the signature of Charlie Buchan from Sunderland and made him the team captain. Buchan's intention was to drop the centre-half, formerly quite a mobile position, to be more of a stopper, with wing-backs dropping in to make a three-man defence. Midfield would be made up of two pairs, inside forwards and half-backs, taking attacking and defensive positions respectively. Two wingers would feed the centre forward who would be supported by the inside forwards.
It was essentially a 3-2-2-3 formation, but it became known as the WM and it gave Arsenal a strong defence with a rudimentary offside trap and the ability to counter-attack at pace. It was criticised in some quarters as overly defensive, but Arsenal's goal tallies over the following decade and a half would be ample proof to the contrary.
Chapman's first season saw his team jump to the runners-up spot in the First Division behind Huddersfield, whose title win marked the first time that a team had won three consecutive League championships. The team that Herbert Chapman had built.
In the summer of 1927, though, Came a change that altered the course of Arsenal's history forever. The Daily Mail reported that Henry Norris had made under-the-counter payments to Buchan as an incentive for him to join Arsenal in 1925, when Chapman first arrived at the club. It was found that Buchan owned a sports shop and wanted compensation for lost revenue from being in London. Payments for this were kept off the books.
Chapman claimed no knowledge of it. The Football Association began an investigation which discovered that he'd used the club's expense accounts for personal use. It was found that the proceeds from the sale of a team bus, £125, had found their way into his wife's bank account and subsequently had been used to pay for a chauffeur.
Norris's defence, that this was a drop in the ocean in comparison with the amount of money that he'd put into the club, did not wash with the Football Association. It wasn't the only financial irregularity found at the club either. In addition to the whole chauffeur issue, the FA also found that one player signed in 1923, Clem Voisey, had been paid a signing-on fee, against Football Association rules. Payment of £143 had been made towards the legal costs of one player, Jock Rutherford. The FA considered this to be against their rules.
Norris had faked the signature of Herbert Chapman on a cheque paid to his wife, and one invoice showed furniture being ordered that hadn't been authorised by other directors, while another showed travel expenses had been paid. Again, this was against Football Association rules. Norris sued the newspaper and the FA for libel, but in 1929 he lost his case and the FA banned him from football for life.
With the autocratic Norris out of the way and the altogether more relaxed Samuel Hill Wood having taken over the chairmanship of the club, Chapman's influence within Arsenal grew greater and greater. He set a five-year plan for success, while the club itself continued the job of turning Highbury into a bold and imposing stadium. Arsenal had leased the site from a church when moving there from Woolwich in 1913, but they bought the site outright in 1925 and from the start of the 1930s it was transformed into a home fit for one of English football's most successful clubs.
The team was reinforced with increasingly high-quality players such as David Jack, who arrived for the world's first five-figure transfer fee of £10,890 from Bolton Wanderers. Such was Arsenal's financial largesse at the time that they became known as the ‘Bank of England Club’.
Just in time, Chapman came good on his promise to deliver success within a five-year period, beating his former club Huddersfield Town in the 1930 FA Cup final. It was a strong indication of a broader turning of the tide. Having won the FA Cup, Chapman's Arsenal team fully blossomed. The following year, they won the First Division Championship by seven points, scoring 127 goals in the process, a tally that remains the club record for one season.
Chapman had now won both the League and the FA Cup, with both Huddersfield Town and Arsenal. But the double, winning the FA Cup and the League title in the same season, eluded him. Becoming the first manager to win the double in the 20th century would come to preoccupy Chapman for the rest of his life.
The following season, Arsenal would miss out on both trophies. In 1932, they were pipped to the First Division post by Everton. Arsenal would also go on to reach the FA Cup Final that year, but their return to Wembley would end in disappointment and controversy. They took the lead against Newcastle United early on, but seven minutes from half-time, Jimmy Richardson pulled the ball back after it already seemed to have crossed the goal line for Jack Allen to bring Newcastle level.
Allen scored again 18 minutes from time to win the cup for Newcastle, but all the attention after the match focused on Anderson's pull-back for the first Newcastle goal, which was seen in cinemas on newsreels as well as photographs in newspapers. The match became known as the over-the-line cup final. It might have been football's first multimedia frenzy.
The following season, Arsenal roared back to the top of the First Division table, finishing above Aston Villa to end the season four points clear, having scored 118 goals. Again though, there would be no double. In fact, Arsenal stumbled to one of their most infamous defeats during this season, beaten 2-0 by Walsall of the Third Division North in the third round of the FA Cup. This result clearly stung Chapman. Two of those who played in that match, Tommy Black and Charlie Walsh, were sold to Plymouth Argyle and Brentford respectively within a couple of weeks.
During that summer, Chapman also stepped briefly into the manager's job for the England national team for a brief tour of Europe. He had to concede his usual expectation of picking the team, of course. The FA's International Selection Committee would take care of that. He did, however, arrange the tactics for a 1-1 draw against Italy and Rome, and a 4-0 win against Switzerland a week later.
The 1933-34 season started with Chapman looking to rebuild his team again. The Walsall defeat had shown how stretched Arsenal's resources had become and the team built in the mid-to-late 1920s was starting to show its age a little, despite the previous year's league title.
By the end of 1933, Chapman's schedule was as hectic as ever. On New Year's Day, he made a scouting trip to Gigg Lane to see Bury play Notts County. The following day, he travelled to Hillsborough to see Arsenal's next opponent, Sheffield Wednesday. Returning to London with a cold, he still took the time to see Arsenal's third team play non-league Guildford City in a training match, against his doctor's advice.
But Chapman's health then took a sudden turn for the worse. Pneumonia set in, and at his home in Hendon, North London, early in the morning of the 6th January 1934, Herbert Chapman died. He was 55 years old. After the shock of Chapman's death had sunk in, Arsenal needed a moment to repose.
Chapman died halfway through a championship defending season, and although there was widespread shock at his passing and considerable sympathy for Arsenal, no other clubs were going to let up in their pursuit of the defending champions.
He died early in the morning of a match against Sheffield Wednesday, which they drew 1-1 in front of a crowd of 45,000. The following Wednesday, Chapman was buried at St Mary's Churchyard in Hendon. David Jack, Joe Hume, Eddie Hapgood, Jack Lambert, Cliff Baston and Alex James were his pallbearers.
Over the remainder of January 1934, with coach Joe Shaw overseeing the team until the end of the season, Arsenal won two FA Cup matches but their League form stuttered with defeats at Manchester City and at home against Spurs and Everton.
Following these results, though, they only lost two more of their remaining 15 League matches of the season and won the title for a second year in a row. It was fitting tribute to their former manager, although they couldn't manage the double that he'd been yearning for. Aston Villa knocked them out of the FA Cup in the quarter-finals at Highbury.
Come the end of the 1933-34 season, the job went to George Allison. In several respects, Alisson was something of a retrograde step for the club. He was essentially a secretary-manager, happy to leave the coaching to the coaching staff, while he managed transfers and media relations.
And media was certainly something that Alisson knew about. He'd failed to make the grade as a player himself, but moved to London from his native county Durham in 1907 with the intention of breaking into journalism. As well as a career that took him writing forThe Sporting Life and freelance for several newspapers, Alisson also became involved with Woolwich Arsenal, acting as their programme editor and later as club secretary.
When the BBC launched its radio service in the early 1920s, he became their first sports commentator, even commentating on the 1927 FA Cup final between Arsenal and Cardiff City, despite being employed by one of the finalists.
In his first year in charge of the club, Alisson equalled the hat-trick of football League championships that Huddersfield Town had completed in the 1920s. In addition to this, the club also won the FA Cup in 1936 and a further League title in 1938.
But whilst the success continued on the pitch, Alisson was not the same as Chapman. He didn't have, and never claimed to have, a deep theoretical knowledge of the game, but he listened closely to what his coaches and senior players had to say and acted upon their advice.
And throughout the 1930s, the Bank of England club continued to periodically flash its wealth. In 1938, Arsenal bought Bryn Jones from Wolverhampton Wanderers for £14,000, a world record transfer fee which led to debate in the House of Commons in which both Arsenal and Alisson himself were criticised.
In 1939, though, came arguably the club's greatest media coup of all, when Alisson had a speaking role in the thriller film The Arsenal Stadium Mystery, a somewhat hokey whodunit set around a charity match between Arsenal and a fictional amateur team called Trojans. An otherwise humdrum film was enlivened by match footage; some badly acted, some taken from a First Division match between Arsenal and Brentford played at the end of the 1938-39 season.
And whileAlisson can hardly be said to have had a starring role in the film, he does at least get to crack one gag. Sitting alongside a commentator who remarks that it's 1-0 to Arsenal at half-time, Alisson's response, “And that's just how we like it”, came to form a part of the club's identity for years to come. It might even be argued that the true star of the movie is the Arsenal Stadium itself, sitting and gleaming in the background of almost every single shot.
Football broke again for war in September 1939, and this time the Football League suspended operations immediately after just three games of the new season had been played. It wouldn't return until 1946. Arsenal were moderately successful in the wartime competitions, though they had to use White Hart Lane from 1940 on after a bomb landed on the North Bank at Highbury during the Blitz.
By the time peace finally reared its head again, Arsenal weren't in a terribly good shape, financial or otherwise. The war acclaimed the lives of nine Arsenal first-team players, more than any other top-flight club, and the intervening time had cut short the careers of several others, including stars such as Cliff Bastin and Ted Drake.
Additionally, the debts from the construction of Highbury and the costs of repairing war damage meant that the club's financial position was nowhere near as secure as it had been before the war. This wasn't the Bank of England club anymore.
Moreover, George Allison's heart didn't really seem to be in the job anymore. He lasted one season after the return of the Football League, at the end of which Arsenal finished 13th. Allison retired at the end of the 1946-47 season, and Tom Whittaker, the long-time coach, was promoted in his place. Whittaker was able to revive the team almost automatically, winning the First Division title again in 1948, the FA Cup in 1950 and the First Division title again in 1953.
Whittaker died suddenly from a heart attack in 1956 at the age of 58, and this time Arsenal couldn't seamlessly transition into a new generation of management. The club went into a decline after this, with the bottoming out point perhaps coming at the very end of the 1965-66 season, when an end-of-season match against Leeds United attracted Highbury's lowest ever league attendance, just 4,554 people.
When the club finally achieved the League and Cup double that had eluded Chapman under Bertie Mee in 1971, it came quite out of the blue. They'd finished the previous season in 12th place in the table. The 1970-71 season, however, turned out to be a flash in the pan for Arsenal, and it would be 18 years before the League championship would return to Highbury again.
Under the managership of Arsene Wenger, Arsenal would soar to new heights on the pitch throughout the 1990s and the first part of this century. Even at more than two decade's remove, we're still too close to the invincible season of 2004 to be able to fully appreciate what an extraordinary achievement that was. It was also, however, the last time that the club were the champions of England.
Highbury is now flats, the Emirates Stadium is home now, but a clock still hangs from one end of its roof. Arsene Wenger may have come to personify Arsenal from the late 1990s on, but Wenger could never have created Arsenal Football Club as we all recognise it today.
It's easy to be glib about innovation, as though it only exists in an abstract sense. But Chapman created Arsenal Football Club. Dropping the definite article from the club's name. Persuading London Underground to change the name of nearby Gillespie Road tube station to ‘Arsenal’. Adding white sleeves to the players' shirts. The ‘Gunners’ nickname. The clock at the Clock End.
Chapman didn't so much build Arsenal as give it a heartbeat. He also gave considerable thought to innovations in the game in a broader sense. He experimented with white match balls, an experiment that didn't work out because they were kept white by dunking them in buckets of whitewash whenever they went out of play. He had floodlights hung from the roof of the stands at Highbury, even though the FA had banned them, so that his players could continue to train on the pitch at night. He suggested shirt numbers.
George Allison built upon the foundations laid by Chapman. He pushed the club into the media spotlight and kept them winning on the pitch before war came along to end a remarkable period of success. Allison gave the club a sense of scale, overseeing matches watched by crowds of over 70,000 people in a stadium that was the most modern in the country.
There are a small number of managers who successfully alter the DNA of the football club at which they work in some way or another. Shankly, Steen, Struth, Busby, Revie. That's an elite level of management. Herbert Chapman and George Allison live forever in this circle; creators of the soul of Arsenal Football Club.
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