Arsene Wenger has offered his honest opinion on Arsenal’s move from Highbury to the Emirates sports stadium, admitting a big piece of the club’s identity was lost within the transition.
The Gunners decided to upgrade to a 60,000 capability venue in 2006 after spending 93 years at Highbury, that housed 38,419 supporters in total.
During the ten years before the switch, Arsenal won eleven trophies beneath Wenger’s berth – as well as 3 Premier League titles – whereas competitive with arch-rivals
Manchester United for domestic dominance.
Arsenal are unable to sustain those levels of success at the Emirates, however, wherever they have still yet to win one league crown after falling behind the likes of Manchester city , Liverpool and Chelsea in English football’s chain of command.
Wenger, whose reign within the managerial hot seat lasted twenty two years in total, believes his recent club left their soul at Highbury, and are unable to copy constant atmosphere at the Emirates.
“I moved from Highbury, that was like Anfield, however there was a soul within the stadium,” the frenchman told beIN Sports.
“We engineered a new stadium however we never found our soul – we left our soul at Highbury. we may never recreate it for security reasons.
“The distance from the pitch to the stand had to be bigger as we needed ambulances to come back in. The inclination of the stands had to be smaller all those things along that we didn’t find to recreate the atmosphere.”
Arsenal completed a whole Premier League season undefeated back in 2003-04, and went on to line a record of forty nine games without defeat with Wenger at the helm.
Liverpool are currently on course to beat that mark and emulate Arsenal’s invincibles in the process, having enjoyed the most effective begin to a top-flight campaign within the history of the 5 major European leagues.
Wenger says the Reds are on the right track after cutting out a “fear of losing”, with variety of “intelligent” players leading their charge across the pitch.
“You look at the number of goals they score and also the number of goals they concede,” Wenger added .
“They are superb. They play intelligent soccer, their players build intelligent decisions on the pitch.
“My experience once you play the entire season undefeated is that they accumulated the belief that if they just continue to play they’re going to win the game.
“That is incredibly difficult to get in the team because you need a special run to do that and to get the fear of losing out of the team.
“It’s one thing that’s vital and that they have that at the moment.”
Liverpool moved sixteen points clear at the top of the Premier League standings with a game in hand after beating Manchester United 2-0 at Anfield on Sunday .
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