"I see players in the tunnel today, hugging one another before a game. I don't think any of the United lads would have disagreed with me; they hated Arsenal. And the Arsenal lads hated United."
Roy Keane
"Our rivalry at that time was more with United than it was with Tottenham."
Patrick Vieira
This Saturday evening, Arsenal play Manchester United at the Emirates Stadium. It may be fascinating. It may be spicy. It may even, when the league table finally clanks to a halt in May, prove decisive. But there is one thing we can be certain of: it will not have the buzz or hostility that it had in the past.
For much of the last generation, United and Arsenal have been without doubt the two biggest teams in English football. Between them, they have won 16 of the 22 Premier League titles and 10 of the last 22 FA Cups. And their rivalry was one of the most heated: driven not just by sporting competition, but by mutual antagonism. They really did hate each other.
Now, although it is still one of the blue-chip fixtures in English football - just ask any foreign television broadcaster - something of that needle is missing. The malevolence that used to infuse this game - from the week leading up to the match, to the tunnel before the match, to the tunnel after the match - has largely evaporated. Why this has happened is a question with many answers. But the truth is that neither club's fans really relishes this fixture as much as they used to.
"The order of rivalry would now be: Liverpool, Manchester City, Chelsea, Arsenal," says United fan Lee Gabbie, a regular match-going fan. "Arsenal would have made it up to second on the list in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the rivalry was at its zenith."
"At their peak," says Alan Samson, an Arsenal fan from London who has been going to watch them for more than 50 years, "it was a fantastic heavyweight bout. Not a middleweight bout."
Another boxing analogy: if Arsenal v Manchester United used to be like Bernard Hopkins v Roy Jones I, then it is now more akin to Hopkins v Jones II.
Of course, rivalries going cold is nothing new in English football. Brentford and QPR had a pretty feisty relationship until they went their separate ways in the 1960s. Ditto Chelsea and Leeds, one of the legendary beefs of English football that has been pretty much shelved for a decade. But this is one of those rare occasions when a rivalry has cooled not due to relegation or promotion, but because both teams pretty much stopped caring as much. And at about the same time, too.
Numbers only tell you so much, but combine it with anecdotal and visual evidence and you have a pretty solid argument. The following graph shows the number of yellow and red cards in this fixture since Soccerbase started recording them on its website. And it indicates that if you think flying tackles, simmering tension, off-field intrigue and cards galore are desirable components of a football match - you're correct, by the way - then this is a fixture with a very clear golden era: the period between 2002 and 2005, when United and Arsenal were the two dominant teams in English football.
But this is a rivalry that has been fearsome for a lot longer than people remember. In 1987, Alex Ferguson's first meeting with Arsenal, David Rocastle was sent off for a foul on Norman Whiteside, after which a row erupted between the Arsenal players and the United coaching staff. In 1988, Brian McClair missed a late penalty for United that would have levelled the match at 2-2. As he trotted back to the centre circle, Nigel Winterburn launched himself at McClair, cruelly taunted him over his miss. As you'll have noticed, taunting players over penalty misses is something of a recurring theme in this rivalry.
McClair saved that one in the memory bank. A couple of years later, in 1990, Winterburn scythed in on Dennis Irwin just after the hour. McClair, first on the scene, reacted by kicking Winterburn several times while he was on the ground. A 21-man brawl ensued - David Seaman, true to form, stayed resolutely in his penalty area - and Paul Ince shoved Anders Limpar into the advertising hoardings.
"Within a few minutes, the red mist had disappeared and I was looking round in disbelief," McClair later remembered. "I couldn't believe what I'd just done." Arsenal were docked two points and United one, but it was a portent of things to come: a fixture with a unique ability to addle a footballer's mind.
There were skirmishes throughout the early and mid 1990s. Mark Hughes and Eric Cantona were sent off in successive games at Highbury. In November 1996, Ian Wright accused Peter Schmeichel of racially abusing him, although the case was eventually dropped. "It doesn't help when people manufacture so-called racial incidents out of an everyday clash between two strong-minded players in the heat of a match," Ferguson later wrote, words that had evidently slipped his mind by the time the Patrice Evra and Luis Suarez incident came around.
But the real turning point - and what in retrospect looks like the start of the golden age - came in March 1998, when Marc Overmars scored the only goal in a 1-0 win at Old Trafford. "If we had lost that match, it was over," Overmars later remembered. "We went on to win every match after that to win the title."
Moreover, it was the moment when United realised that Arsenal meant business.
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"Vieira, whooah. Vieira, whooah. He passed Giggsy the ball. And Arsenal won f--- all."
Manchester United fan chant
Arsenal were brilliant in the 1998-99 season and won nothing. Manchester United won everything, and for the next few years the stage was set: Liverpool and Newcastle were on the way down, Chelsea and Leeds were on the way up, but these were the two outstanding sides in English football.
They brought the best and worst out of each other. In February 2003, Arsenal beat United 2-0 in an FA Cup tie. It was a match that would ultimately be remembered for what happened afterwards: Ferguson kicked a boot in the dressing room and sent it flying into David Beckham's eye. In April that year, Sol Campbell was sent off for putting an elbow into Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's face. The touchline footage of furious Arsenal players surrounding the linesman is spine-chilling.
In the Community Shield, an ill-tempered game ended with Francis Jeffers being sent off for kicking out at Phil Neville and Campbell banned for three games for kicking Eric Djemba-Djemba in the buttocks.
The Community Shield!
Then, in September 2003, came what would eventually be known as the Battle of Old Trafford. A physical, ill-tempered game exploded late on, with Patrick Vieira being booked twice in three minutes and getting a red card. Arsenal players harangued van Nistelrooy, accusing him of getting Vieira sent off. Then, in injury time, with the score still goalless, penalty to United. Van Nistelrooy stepped up to take it, and hit the bar. As Martin Keown approached to inform him politely that no goal had been scored, all hell broke loose. The following footage is worth watching if only to see Cristiano Ronaldo's rather funny attempt to pick a fight with Edu.
October 2004. Champions Arsenal arrive at Old Trafford boasting of extending their record unbeaten run to 50 games. "Big mistake," Wayne Rooney recalls. "They've fired us up. Fifty games unbeaten? No way. Not at our place." At the end of United's 2-0 win, the two teams brawl in the tunnel afterwards. Wenger confronts Van Nistelrooy, Ferguson in turn confronts Wenger, and then Cesc Fabregas, with the elegant precision that has defined his game ever since, lands a pizza smack on Ferguson's face.
February 2005, Highbury. The game hasn't even started yet, but Vieira and Gary Neville are exchanging words in the tunnel. Keane, returning to the dressing room to get his captain's armband, overhears the conversation and something inside him clicks. "Listen, we are not at Old Trafford here, this is Highbury," Vieira warns him. "If you touch Robert [Pires], I will come after you."
"If you love Senegal so much," Keane retorts, "why don't you f---ing play for them?"
"I started it," Vieira wrote in his autobiography. "I was cool, I was really calm, I was smiling at him – and then he lost it."
We can argue and bicker about whether this was football in its purest form, but for sheer entertainment, Arsenal v Manchester United during those few years was about as good as any footballing rivalry can get.
"The rivalry between ourselves and Arsenal brought energy and passion," Keane would later write. "It was brilliant. I hated them. There was an element of jealousy there, too, because I knew they were a bloody good team. But ultimately, they made me a better player."
The question is: what happened?
Perhaps the identity of the protagonists offers a clue. By the end of 2005, both Vieira and Keane had left their clubs. Van Nistelrooy joined Real Madrid in 2006. Keown had gone in 2004. The natural villains of the piece disappeared from the scene more or less at once. Their absence didn't guarantee a quiet afternoon, but there was a natural electricity between them. "Personally, I can't stand the sight of Van Nistelrooy," Vieira wrote. "Everything about him annoys me. The man is a cheat and a coward. Everyone thinks he's a nice guy but in fact he's a son of a bitch."
"Arsenal had big personalities which wound people up," says United fan Lee. "[Thierry] Henry was also someone who would wind up opposition fans, he was a great player but was also a diver. Lee Dixon used to support City as a kid so even players like him were a target for abuse. But the main reason for the edge being taken off is that Wenger has mellowed and Arsenal no longer have figures that you can really get worked up about. Jack Wilshere may be the only one now that you could really dislike, but you can’t compare him to the likes of Keown and Vieira."
"We've not seen the like since - that bitter rivalry," Keane writes. "There isn't as much physical contact in the game now. Clubs are buying a different kind of player - technically gifted, but not fighters."
And yet it is hard to escape the conclusion that the enmity off the field is at least in part a reflection of events on it. The graph above shows the combined league position of Arsenal and Manchester United over the last two decades. Not since 1995, when Arsenal finished 12th, has their combined might been so feeble. The rise of Chelsea and Manchester City as the two dominant teams in English football has relegated Arsenal v United to a fixture of the second rank - tasty, but not necessarily a title decider. A match to decide who might finish third.
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"They say he’s an intelligent man, right? Speaks five languages? I’ve got a 15-year-old boy from the Ivory Coast who speaks five languages.”
Alex Ferguson
"Ferguson does what he wants and you [the press] are all down at his feet. He doesn't interest me and doesn't matter to me at all. I will never answer to any provocation from him any more."
Arsene Wenger
"It's hardly a bitter rivalry at all," says Arsenal fan Alan, whose first visit to Highbury was to watch Denis Law in 1963. "It has been ratcheted up because of a certain tension between Ferguson and Wenger."
Ferguson targeted Wenger from the very start. Wenger had not been Arsenal manager long when he started complaining about the fixture list. "He’s a novice," Ferguson retorted. "He should keep his opinions to Japanese football."
That set the tone. Over the subsequent 17 years the relationship between the pair went through a number of stages, although they were never quite able to call themselves friends. The scars ran too deep for that. They both craved victory and abhorred defeat too much. After Pizza-gate in 2004, Arsenal assistant manager Pat Rice would no longer visit Ferguson's office after a game. Wenger never had. You suspected that Wenger's feelings towards Ferguson verged closer to hatred.
But as the years went on, as Arsenal receded as competent title challengers, Ferguson's attitude to Wenger began to soften. He sent an open letter to United fans demanding they stopped their sick chants about Wenger. The pair shared a laugh and a chat at the League Managers Association Awards in 2008. By the time of their Champions League semi-final in 2009, Wenger and Rice felt able to invite Ferguson into the office for a drink afterwards. During the 8-2 drubbing in 2011, Ferguson recalls wanting his side to stop scoring, to salvage some dignity for his old foe.
"That's when we really hated it, when he was being nice to us," Alan says.
And there is a sense that with Ferguson off the scene and Wenger in what must surely be his last few years, the sizzling rivalry between the two has ebbed just a little. Wenger even agreed to sell Robin van Persie to Ferguson in 2012, a move that would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier. "Fans could no longer channel their hatred through their respective managers' dislike of the other," Lee explains.
Alan agrees. "My inclination is the tension may disappear now Ferguson has gone," he says.
As they aged, these wizened old men of football, Ferguson and Wenger realised that they had more in common then perhaps they had first assumed. And at the same time, perhaps United and Arsenal have reached a similar conclusion about each other.
Globalisation has changed the face of football, not just on the pitch but in the stands too. The average visitor to Old Trafford and the Emirates is as likely to be a tourist from Norway or a pilgrim from Indonesia as they are to be from Archway or Ancoats. "The metropolitan nature of Premier League football means you probably don't get those tribal rivalries," Alan says. "And that's a good thing, by the way."
Moreover, the rise of the carbon football monoliths at the Etihad and Stamford Bridge have created a common enemy. Arsenal and Manchester United's shared enthusiasm for Financial Fair Play is driven by a common desire to shift Chelsea and Manchester City from their perch. In a way, having been pioneers of the English game for so long, both clubs now stand as bastions of the footballing establishment: old money versus new. And until they both recapture their former glories, that is perhaps how this rivalry will characterise itself: two teams whose best days may be in the past or may be in the future, but are certainly not in the present.
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