Fitness ace may be Arsène Wenger’s and Arsenal’s best new signing
Looking to Shad Forsythe, an expert from Germany’s 2014 World Cup win, the manager has high hopes for the season
Fancy seeing you here? That sentiment, no doubt accompanied by the warmest of smiles, will float in the Hertfordshire countryside as three members of Germany’s World Cup squad – Mesut Özil, Per Mertesacker and Lukas Podolski – return from their belated holidays to find an American who shared that
experience of a sporting lifetime in Brazil. Shad Forsythe, a new fitness coach at Arsenal – headhunted to invigorate their training regime – was one of four specialists who were embedded with Joachim Löw’s team every step, every stretch, every session of the way at the World Cup. They were such valued members of the group that the players lined up for a collective we-are-not-worthy bow at the celebration stage in front of millions of fans at
their Berlin homecoming.
The hiring of Forsythe is intriguing in that Arsène Wenger identified the need for improvement in the club’s training regimes and went about solving the problem by recruiting a man who has been working at the vanguard of elite performance.