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Herbert Chapman
| Category: | Manager |
| Year Inducted: | 2003 |
Profile by Robert Galvin, the author of Football's Greatest Heroes, the official book of the National Football Museum Hall of Fame:
In making Arsenal the most famous and successful football club in the world, Herbert Chapman defined the role of modern team manager. His legacy, like his memorial bust, can still be seen at the Emirates Stadium, as it was previously at Highbury.
London had yet to celebrate a championship success when Chapman arrived at Highbury in 1925. Mediocre, debt-ridden, and lacking mass support, Arsenal hardly looked likely saviours for the capital.
A decade later, Arsenal were the dominant power in England, let alone London. At the time of his death from pneumonia, at the age of 55, in 1934, a second successive title was within sight, to add to an earlier FA Cup win. The team he built won three more trophies in the 1930s.
He had put Arsenal on the map, literally: in 1932, in a public relations coup, he persuaded the local rail company to re-name the London Underground station close to Highbury after the club.
Chapman was the first manager to win the championship with two different clubs, a feat unequalled for four decades, following successive titles at Huddersfield Town in the mid-1920s. Determined to lure him south from his native Yorkshire, Arsenal made Chapman the highest paid manager in football.
From the outset he insisted that selection and all other team matters must be left to professionals. ‘Football today is too big a job to be a director's hobby,' he wrote. ‘Herbert was definitely the governor,' George Male, the team captain said.
Tactically, Chapman refined the role of the centre-half, restricting his responsibilities to plugging the middle of the defence after a change in the offside law in 1925 tilted the balance in favour of the forwards. An inside-forward was also withdrawn, as a link between attack and defence.
To make it work, Chapman scoured the country for the best talent – and he was willing to spend record sums in the transfer market. In 1928 Arsenal paid Bolton Wanderers £11,500 for David Jack, the England inside-forward. The following year Chapman returned north to sign Alex James from Preston for a fee of £8,750.
Operating in the withdrawn inside-forward position, James looked to release the wingers, Cliff Bastin and Joe Hulme, who were instructed by Chapman to cut inside and shoot more often. Between 1929 and 1935, Bastin and Hulme scored 191 League goals, an unprecedented return from the wings.
Team meetings were initiated during which players were encouraged to offer an opinion, another break with custom. There was even a table-top pitch and plastic models to demonstrate tactics – which were followed at all levels at Highbury.
In 1933, Chapman offered a glimpse of the future when he took charge of the England team on a one-off basis for their first international against Italy in Rome. The job would not be made full-time for another decade.
Years later, Bastin spoke of Chapman's ‘aura of greatness', his power of inspiration and foresight. ‘He should have been prime minister,' Bastin wrote in 1950. ‘He might have been but for the lack of opportunities entailed by his position in the social scale.'