In December 1997, Arsène Wenger’s Arsenal team were beaten 3-1 at home by Blackburn Rovers, and the players were booed off
the pitch by the home fans, an expression of the frustration built up by watching extremely mediocre and unsuccessful football for half a decade. That afternoon, Arsenal looked years away from being able to challenge Manchester United, the then perennial champions.
After the match, striker Ian Wright, hurt by the criticism, yelled obscenities out of the window at the departing crowd and was spoken to by the police. Highbury was an unhappy place.
Wenger had been in charge of the club for 14 months. No Arsenal fan had heard of him before his arrival – he had been working in Japan, of all places – and none would have cared much if he’d been fired after the game. He had brought in a couple of promising players, but three of the four defenders that afternoon had played in the famous title-deciding game at Anfield eight years before, and the fourth had actually made his debut for Arsenal even earlier.
Those who booed had been watching football long enough to know that this was a team going nowhere, in serious need of investment and ideas, and almost certainly yet another new manager.
Yet astonishingly, the Blackburn game was the end of all deep Highbury unhappiness for several years. It disappeared almost literally overnight. That hopeless team stayed more or less unchanged, and didn’t lose another Premier League game until they had already won the title in May.
They didn’t lose an FA Cup game that season, either. There was another championship and FA Cup double in 2002, then another FA Cup, and then the famous Invincible season of 2003-04. (“I remember every single player in that exceptional team,” Wenger says somewhat bathetically. Well, yes. Me too.) And the manager who might have been fired after the Blackburn game by more trigger-happy clubs stayed for another two decades.
Whether you were seven years old or 70, you’d never seen anything like it at Highbury; even in the years when Arsenal didn’t win anything, they were narrowly failing with the best players in the world – Thierry Henry, Robert Pires, Patrick Vieira, Dennis Bergkamp, Ashley Cole, Freddie Ljungberg. Owning an Arsenal season ticket back then was like living in New York in 1959 and being able to wander down to the Village Vanguard to see Bill Evans and Miles Davis every week: if football was important to you, then you were in the right place at the right time. I cannot think of another adult male who so directly improved the quality of my life as Wenger did. It all went downhill when Arsenal moved to their new stadium, the financing of which proved ruinous to the team; when the club could afford to buy better players again, Wenger’s touch seemed to have deserted him.
How was the club transformed so quickly? Why were the defenders who apparently should have been replaced in 1997 still winning titles five years later? How did Wenger and his team manage to prise young talents such as Cesc Fàbregas, Henry and Vieira away from clubs like Barcelona, Juventus and AC Milan? What were the relationships with Sir Alex Ferguson and José Mourinho really like? (They looked pretty spiky from the outside.)
Why did he seem to come to the conclusion that goalkeepers didn’t matter much? Why did Jamie Vardy turn up to sign a contract and then go back to Leicester? Why did Wenger never win a Champions League, given the players at his disposal?
There are a million questions that Arsenal fans would want Wenger to answer. The answers, unfortunately, are either missing altogether from My Life in Red and White, or expressed in a way that is long familiar to us: the English players stopped drinking and eating Mars bars; he used to have his ups and downs with Ferguson but they get on fine now.
Meanwhile Mourinho, who cast a long shadow over some of Wenger’s most difficult years, appears once in the book, in a table provided at the end showing his head-to-head record against rival managers. (Wenger beat Steve McClaren 83.3% of the time; he beat Mourinho 10% of the time.)
I was at the training ground to interview Wenger the afternoon before the last game of the Invincibles season, and while I was waiting for him in his office, a Frenchman I didn’t recognise came in and slammed his hand down hard on the manager’s desk. “Stupid English regulations,” he said. I expressed sympathy. “We are trying to sign a player, an incredible player. Yaya Touré. He has much more power than his brother. But they won’t let us.” It was a story that provided me with great currency among fellow fans, especially a few years later, when Touré was tearing up the midfields and defences of every other Premier League team. It is the absence of revealing stories here that will most disappoint Wenger’s many admirers. When asked at a press conference, shortly before he left Arsenal, whether he was writing a book, he replied: “Not at the moment. Because I don’t like to talk and not tell the truth. As long as you are in work, you cannot really tell what is going on.” One should point out that he is still in work, at Fifa, perhaps the most political of all sporting bodies.
What we have instead is a lot of quiet, thoughtful musings on the qualities necessary for management, coaching and playing, with lots of abstract nouns: “The action [today’s manager] needs to take should be based on a three-pronged approach: giving people responsibilities, personalising and openness, through clear and constant communication, based on today’s science.” Roy Keane probably wouldn’t have written that sentence.
The opening chapters of what is a surprisingly short book, about Wenger’s childhood and playing days, are elegiac and rather moving: he grew up in Alsace, in a village with three blacksmiths, where the local farmers used horses rather than tractors. He played for the village team, and then for Strasbourg, the club he supported, before slowly moving up through the divisions of French football as a coach. (As he points out, every team he has ever been involved with play in red and white, hence the title of the book.) At Monaco, his last job in Europe before Arsenal, he discovered George Weah, once the greatest player in the world, now president of Liberia, and won the French league in his first season. His career has been spectacular, rich, colourful. But when he is talking about the end at Arsenal there is a glimpse of regret and bitterness.
I was at the training ground to interview Wenger the afternoon before the last game of the Invincibles season, and while I was waiting for him in his office, a Frenchman I didn’t recognise came in and slammed his hand down hard on the manager’s desk. “Stupid English regulations,” he said. I expressed sympathy. “We are trying to sign a player, an incredible player. Yaya Touré. He has much more power than his brother. But they won’t let us.” It was a story that provided me with great currency among fellow fans, especially a few years later, when Touré was tearing up the midfields and defences of every other Premier League team. It is the absence of revealing stories here that will most disappoint Wenger’s many admirers.
When asked at a press conference, shortly before he left Arsenal, whether he was writing a book, he replied: “Not at the moment. Because I don’t like to talk and not tell the truth. As long as you are in work, you cannot really tell what is going on.” One should point out that he is still in work, at Fifa, perhaps the most political of all sporting bodies. What we have instead is a lot of quiet, thoughtful musings on the qualities necessary for management, coaching and playing, with lots of abstract nouns: “The action [today’s manager] needs to take should be based on a three-pronged approach: giving people responsibilities, personalising and openness, through clear and constant communication, based on today’s science.” Roy Keane probably wouldn’t have written that sentence.
The opening chapters of what is a surprisingly short book, about Wenger’s childhood and playing days, are elegiac and rather moving: he grew up in Alsace, in a village with three blacksmiths, where the local farmers used horses rather than tractors. He played for the village team, and then for Strasbourg, the club he supported, before slowly moving up through the divisions of French football as a coach. (As he points out, every team he has ever been involved with play in red and white, hence the title of the book.)
At Monaco, his last job in Europe before Arsenal, he discovered George Weah, once the greatest player in the world, now president of Liberia, and won the French league in his first season. His career has been spectacular, rich, colourful. But when he is talking about the end at Arsenal there is a glimpse of regret and bitterness.
He tells us that after the Invincibles season he turned down job offers from PSG, Juventus, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, England and France; “I am happy to have been able to say no to more glory, more money, and to have been guided only by the idea of loyally serving the club during that period.” And then, later: “If money had been my priority instead of passion or loyalty, I could have earned two or three times more by leaving Arsenal.”
The money arrived, in the end – he was earning £8m a year in his last couple of seasons at Arsenal, although you have to look outside the book for that information. He clearly doesn’t think that loyalty was returned: “It seemed to me that the people making the decisions for the club knew it less well than I did.” But that, really, is all this clever, charismatic man will say about his forced departure. Perhaps there will be another, more revealing book, when he has stopped work altogether.
• My Life in Red and White: My Autobiography by Arsène Wenger, translated by Daniel Hahn and Andrea Reece, is published by W&N (£25).
