In what has been rather surprising news today, Thierry Henry has supposedly been axed from his position as a coach at Arsenal!
The news report has come a bit out of the blue, with no previous suggestions that there was anything wrong with Henry’s participation at the club. However his current association with Arsenal has been terminated, with the Wenger no longer happy with Henry’s activities with coaching the youth ranks.
Henry was supposedly offered the role of being the head coach of the Arsenal Under 18’s team, as Henry works towards his full coaching licence. Henry has shown to be a promising and much favoured coach at Arsenal, largely due to the admiration and experience that young players see in him, as well as the fact that he has a wealth of practical footballing skill and knowledge.
However apparently Wenger has given Thierry a choice of either Arsenal or SkySports, as the position is full time and he cannot work for both.
Wenger wants Henry to focus on his coaching and Arsenal full time, instead of being tied up with commitments to SkySports on the weekend. Henry is currently a regular SkySports pundit and so his regular commitment to the organisation means that he would currently be unable to take up a ‘full time’ position at Arsenal. Wenger is also supposedly concerned about how Henry may be working with the ranks at Arsenal in the week, but then potentially criticising the first team on the weekends, when working with SkySports.
It’s a strange situation at Arsenal and one that I’m struggling to find an decisive opinion on. It’s very surprising for Wenger to come out and criticise arguably his best and the club’s best ever player, however I can see Wenger’s reasoning and concern about Henry’s other commitments. The biggest concern from this however, is that he is unlikely to chose Arsenal over Sky. If he can keep his £4m a year contract at Sky, as well as coach elsewhere, then Henry may see that as the more favourable option.
Therefore it seems increasingly likely he will be moving away from the Emirates to continue coaching, as have the likes of Dennis Bergkamp and Mikel Arteta. But maybe his dream is to become a manager at Arsenal one day?
Is Wenger right to force him to choose?
By AH
no he is not right in this… this is ridiculous ! now our best ever player will go and coach other rival young players !
this is utter s**t ! and why are not signing a striker !
oh god plz have mercy on arsenal fans lives..
Stop the Hate Game against Wenger and grab some sense, please. What is wrong in ensuring we have a FULL TIME coach? What is wrong if Tony Adams is willing and ready to serve us in that capacity full time?. Henry is my hero but I choose him second to ARSENAL. So wake up my brother!
@Carbon-12
Good thing you say that you’ll choose Henry second to Arsenal.
My question to you is that will you choose Wenger second to Arsenal?
There is more to this story than meets the eye. Nothing is peachy and easy at Arsenal.
Ask players that left Arsenal to our rivals…Nasri, RvP, Sagna, Toure, even Adebayor…there’s more to their leaving the club than we know.
The issue here is between Arsenal’s interet and Henry’s. So Arsenal first and then Henry. Henry sees it the other way though. No qualms. Even if I’m to choose between Arsene and Arsenal, I will go for Arsenal. Good to see Arsene also prioritize Arsenal.
Nasri, RvP, Sagna, Toure, Adebayor – except RvP, no one was worth a try to keep in the team. Henri is paid by Arsenal when he is a coach, and he goes as a Pundit and criticizes the club, the board, Wenger. That is something you dont see as professionalism. He could have decided to do one of the 2, and he chose TV. All good players are not necessarily good coaches, so lets hire someone who can devote full time
Where and when did Henry criticise the club and board members? On the other hand, he roots for them on TV. The only criticism from Henry was that Arsenal won’t win the BPL with Giroud leading the line. You might not like the statement, but it’s true.
There’s more to this Henry news than we know.
Thierry did not mention giroud.
Thiery henry April 2015.
Speaking as a Sky Sports pundit, he said: “I think they need to buy four players – they need that spine. They need a goalkeeper, they still need a centre back, they still need a holding midfielder and, I’m afraid, they need a top, top quality striker to win this league again.
“You had the best example with Chelsea here today. They were struggling last season to win the league. They went on to buy [Thibaut] Cortouis, [Nemanja] Matic, Cesc [Fabregas] and [Diego] Costa.
Basically thierry was saying that the whole spine of the team needed strengthening, ok he stressed a striker but that could have been that our goal scorers with pace are not good enough, ie welbeck or sanchez.
Wenger didnt fire him, he chose the easy money of skysports over giving back something to the club and manager who made him into somebody.. I said go a little further and tear down the statue too.
Wenger is right.
You can’t have one of your coaches, sitting on TV ripping the arse out of the team he’s a coach at, how well would that go down on the training field?
It just goes to show, that when push comes to shove, he values his already massive bank balance above working for the club he claims to love.
If I caught any of my employees bad mouthing my company, or it’s employees, they’d be out the door, with a size 10 foot mark on their arse.
Oh, and he’s a crap pundit anyway, which I’ve said since he started working for Sky.
Your foot is small
It it’s not meant to be its never going to be.If he’s meant to be our manager one day he will and if he’s not meant to be he won’t.That’s life for you.I am just praying that some Arsenal players really step up.I also hope for players who have not improve and players who dont want to improve to not be payed attention to by the manager in the team.I also hope Iwobi plays in the centre forward role as I believe he’s built like a centre forward and plays like a centre forward.
Meanwhile when it’s a tournament Le prof becomes a pundit. Bloody hypocrite,King Henry will come back one day.
Wenger doesn’t do punditry during the football season dummie. If Henry wants to be a coach he should be available FULL TIME not part time.
Wenger does punditry for international games not games in which arsenal are playing
I don’t like Wenger but this time he’s 100 percent right
Yes mate. For the first time in a long time that I cannot remember, am agreeing with Wenger.
i) If you are a coach, have in-house discussion about your players and not in the public always.
ii) Such comments can worsen the state of mind of the players to the advantage of other teams.
iii) Henry is a legend but not a certain S. Gerrard who could not be lured away when his team was not contending again.
iv) Pundit work on league teams don’t go along with coaching with a team of the league.
Arsenal fans are so disgusted that even when Arsene is right Wenger is still wrong.
I am with AW on this one. Henry knew two weeks ago when he extended his contract with Sky that this meant that he couldn’t be a full time youth coach at Arsenal and be a full time correspondent for Sky Sports. He apparently liked the money from Sky more than the rewarding aspects of coaching Arsenal youth. Thats his choice. Arsenal need a full time youth coach not a part time coach.
No hard feeling Titi. Head coach is a non part time job even for youth players, period.
Oh and also, here is the real reason he chose Sky
“Henry is believed to earn in the region of £4million-a-year at Sky “
It’s a pity Wenger wouldn’t take a job with Sky!!!
People want to blame everything on wenger, but this is normal practice.
I don’t even see where the issue is. Thierry was offered a full time job and a part-time one but turned both down because he wants to also work for another company.
Most decent companies prefer you to work for one company, so as to rule out any conflict of interest. Thierry has also proved to be outspoken about the goings on in the club and expressed his opinions. If a player does that he is considered to be a mole in the camp.
Any manager wants his team to be fully focused, that includes, players,assistants, coaches and anyone else. TH has no right to be any different. Let’s not forget this is a man who left us to kiss the badge at Barcelona and now prefers the sky logo. Before you know it he will be cheating a country out of a place in a major tournament, oh wait a minute.
Good luck to Tony Mr Arsenal Adams hope you make a real successful of it.
Wenger is right but the optics suck. You would think that a club the size of Arsenal would have been able to frame this more positively e.g a joint statement from Wenger and Henry. It just adds to the general malaise many fans are feeling in the lead up to the start of the season. But one big signing could change it all….
This is the Wenger I want to see. Ruthless where it’s due. Same scale should also be used for players who are just sitting and piling our wage bill!!
@rahul
RealTalk…
Yes man. Simply sick of the guys who are treating our club as some milking cow!!
Wenger has a point. But will be sad to see Henry managing Chelsea in future.
Never thought Henry was manager material anyway…
Maybe not but what clear is that Wenger is no longer managerial material either.
I get the feeling that Henry was disagreeing with Wenger on a number of issues behind closed doors and as we all know Le Prof is NEVER EVER wrong.
He may not have fired Henry but to allow a coach who was such an iconic striker to possibly go and coach elsewhere is a really bad mistake in my book and it really does smack of Wengers “Im never wrong policy” which as we have all seen over a number of years is very very wrong
It’s a shame this wasn’t sorted out a couple of months ago, then we could have offered Arteta the role, who I think will be a better coach than Henry.
i think there is a conflict of interest and once there is he can not do both. Personally i do not think Henry is going to make a good coach and should stick to punditry, he discuss football basically like a fan and not some one developing coaching ethics or principles.
Its true he is a great footballer but would be better suited marketing football all over the world, i have heard henry made statements and by the next day the statement has changed, he is what we call a HYPOCRITE.
Anyway i wish him all the best in what ever field he continues in
Yes he is but there is a way of handling it. Like it or not he’s the boss and he’s trying to protect the club in the eye of the media. Conflict of interest massively. Ot just read we are planning 42m plus giroud for higuain surely not! Giroud takes some flack and we want an upgrade but hang on we all admit giroud is a good sqaud player.
Trying to protect the club?? or trying to justify his already proven ludicrous decision making pprocess??
how long does it have to be before we realise that Wenger is NO longer the man to lead the club and has not been for some time?
will it take another season of Giroud leading the line and failing miserably yet again for people to understand that Wenger now runs the club as his own private fiefdom ??
how many more times does the world and his brother need to shout to the hilltops that we need a new and effective striker to win anything before someone realises that Wenger will Never win the PL again with players like Walcott and Giroud ?
One is lazy and bone idle and takes his wages and put in zero effort and the other despite his real work rate is just not good enough. How long before its clear to one and all that Wenger is no longer the man for this job?
Henry was given the ultimatum because he critasized the party line and thats when Wenger does something, otherwise he’s happy to collect his wage and save the club money and just sit on his hands
shall we give it another season? or two or six? before we all realise that if the clubs not moving forward it will eventually die?
How long I wonder ?
Had enough of wenger . this guy is a dictator and emotional robber . How dare he dismiss a club Icon/celebrity like that???????
He didn’t dismiss him t all, he gave him a choice, full time Arsenal coach or he could carry on being a pundit. He chose to be a pundit.
same as dismissing him then!!!
where I wonder will Henry be coaching strikers in the comming years and who will benifit?
Not us and we are in need of someone to bring on talented strikers from our youth system more than anyone else cos we certainly aint going to be buying any anytime soon are we?
Absolute nonsense, it was Henrys’ choice to follow the money, the offer was there on the table for him to accept or decline, he declined it.
So…with this kind of “getting players as cheep as possible” or “hard to get top players” problems…all we need now is to Old Man Wenger makes Tierry go away from AFC!!!???
Wenger should take some advices from TH instead..OLd FuL!
My understanding of the situation is as follows.
Henry worked with youth players as part of his Uefa A Licence course.
The best analogy for the ‘A’ license is that it is your degree, a bit like getting an MBA in coaching. It makes you very employable. It is a two-year commitment, tailored to professionals in the game. You can only get it by working with a national FA. (Copied from daily telegraph)
So thierry has the qualification to enable him to become a professional coach. He was offered the job of assisting Kwame Ampadu in coaching the U18 at arsenal but Wenger considers that this is a full time position and cannot be combined with being a pundit on Sky TV. Thierry was willing to do the coaching for free if he kept his sky tv role.
So the question is, can they be combined. What happens when thierry is required by sky when the u18 are playing. The u18 play a lot of games on a saturday and they are all over the country so a lot of travelling with the team is involved. It seems to me that there is a conflict here and Tony Adams has been appointed to the role.
We are all probably disappointed, arsenals current problem is putting the ball in the net and having thierry at the club would, we hope, help with this.
As for thierry becoming a future manager of Arsenal, I would want him to be very sucessful elsewhere first. I do not want to remember him as a failed arsenal manager.
Of course there are the conspiracy theories about wenger not wanting competition etc. But ask this question, how many times have you known a football manager at any professional level be missing from watching his team because he is working at another job. As I said above, a lot of u18 matches are on a saturday and that is when there are PL matches which thierry is paid to comment on.
I seem to remember Wenger doing his second job or something the day we signed Danny Welbeck even going as far as saying he wouldn’t be here if Arsene was at work that day
We ought to get over ourselves ourselves and be less emotional about this. Football as we know is a ruthless and money driven business. Most other jobs in the real world require us to declare a second job reason being companies want full effort for themselves. Also Thierry was a legend for us but arsene personally owes him nothing.
Yes he’s right, and why would Henry want to work under Arsene anyway? he won’t learn anything he hasn’t seen in training at the Arsenal countless times, better to bide his time, do what he wants and wait for The greatest ever Arsenal player ‘Sir Denis Bergkamp’ to take over, he’ll learn better from a modern coaching style
@ArsenalDave
Spot on
Hopefully Wenger won’t sign the 2 years extension which “strangely seemingly” slipped into the news…!!! That guy would stay until he hits his 80 or being wheel to the touchline…!