How Sheffield United legend Dave Bassett paved the way for Arsene Wenger's heralded Arsenal transformation

Arsene Wenger's 1996 arrival at Arsenal is widely heralded as a watershed moment for English football, with the Frenchman renowned for an emphasis on fitness, diets and sports science that changed the landscape at Highbury and beyond. Lesser known is the fact that, years before Wenger arrived on these shores, Dave Bassett had already laid much of the groundwork.

The Sheffield United manager has a reputation for traditional values and even more traditional football, a direct approach that favoured substance over style. But anyone who worked with Bassett during his iconic time in charge at Bramall Lane remembers a man ahead of his time, introducing things like sports science and video analysis well before they became the norm as preparation tools.

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Bassett introduced strict diets for his players and brought in a coach called Ed Baranowski to improve his side's strength and fitness with extra sessions often at Sheffield's Don Valley Stadium. Even with the famed BBC documentary that followed the club throughout their eventual promotion campaign in 1989-90, imaginatively titled United!, Bassett was something of a trendsetter, allowing cameras to follow the club decades before clubs such as Arsenal agreed shiny propaganda pieces with Amazon Prime, Netflix and Co.

"Harry was a trailblazer," agreed Chris Wilder, one of Bassett's former disciples who followed him into the United dugout, said ahead of Monday's clash with Arsenal. "In terms of sports science, from a psychology point of view and video analysis. Even stuff like [the documentary]. For him to agree to that would have maybe surprised quite a few of us at the time, but it's something that is there and on record. We were one of the early ones to go deep into that type of insight into a professional footballer and a professional football team, on and off the pitch."

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But to the wider football world Bassett, now 79 and regarded as one of the finest managers in the club's history alongside Wilder after leading the Blades to back-to-back promotions in the 1980s and 1990s before masterminding the greatest great escape in top-flight history, is seen as something of a dinosaur - an example, Wilder believes, of football's ability to incorrectly pigeonhole people a certain way.

"I think football's lazy at times," the Blades boss added. "Very lazy in terms of its opinion and doesn't do its homework. People do get typecast and there's so many of them, going back. Looking to the game on Monday, Arsene Wenger was quite rightly celebrated in terms of changing a lot of the things in English football and the Premier League at the time.

"But there was still a lot of good work going on and a lot of progression in the game, by English coaches and managers pre-Arsene. The likes of Dave Bassett and the other guys, Graham Taylor and Howard Wilkinson, doing a lot of good and revolutionary things. If people delve into those guys and their careers, I think they'd be quite surprised how at the forefront they were of modern football."