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Arsene Wenger: I was interested in signing Gareth Barry
Arsene Wenger has revealed he was interested in signing Gareth Barry in 2009 when the player was still at Aston Villa.
Barry will break the all-time Premier League appearance record if he features for West Bromwich Albion against Wenger’s Arsenal on Monday night.
And ahead of that game, Wenger said that Barry could have ended up an Arsenal player almost a decade ago, but the North London club were blown out of the water by free-spending Manchester City.
It is tempting to wonder how the course of recent English football might have gone if Wenger had managed to tempt Barry to the Emirates.
At the time, Arsenal were desperately in need of a commanding player in the centre of the pitch. Patrick Vieira had left in 2005 and Mathieu Flamini in the summer of 2008, leaving a clutch of talented but raw midfielders – Cesc Fabregas, Denilson, Alex Song – who could have benefited from a more assured presence alongside them.
“We were interested in him, yes, when he moved from Villa to City,” Wenger said. “But at the time City was the big investor, and so that financial potential was superior to ours at the time.”
Barry was at the very top of his game between around 2008 and 2012, becoming an England regular under Fabio Capello and also attracting the interest of Liverpool. A Fabregas-Barry core could have turned Arsenal into genuine title hopefuls. It might even have persuaded some of Arsenal’s star players, many of whom ended up signing for City, to commit their futures to the club.
Instead, Barry ended up joining City for £12 million in the summer of 2009 – also rejecting Liverpool, after Benitez refused to guarantee him a role in the centre of midfield. He spent his prime years there, winning the FA Cup and Premier League before moving to Everton.
Meanwhile, Arsenal’s lack of composure in central areas continued to bite them in big games. It took Wenger another two years – until the signing of Mikel Arteta in 2011 – to find the experienced midfielder he was looking for. By which point, Fabregas had gone and Arsenal’s decline from the pinnacle of English football had become terminal. And despite trying the likes of Francis Coquelin, Abou Diaby, Granit Xhaka, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Flamini (again) over the years, in a strange way, that Vieira-shaped hole in the centre of midfield is one Arsenal are still trying to fill.
After leaving City, Barry spent four seasons at Everton before moving to West Brom, where he is poised to make his 633rd appearance, breaking the record currently held by Ryan Giggs. “I believe that it’s an outstanding achievement,” Wenger said. “He’s a player who is intelligent, determined, strong in the challenge, has good technical quality and I personally always rated him highly.
“I think just he was a bit unlucky, because it was in the period of Lampard and Gerrard, and he maybe did not get the number of caps he deserved for England. But it’s an exceptional achievement, what he’s doing.”