I’m sorry that this review comes so long after the publication of Arsene Wenger’s autobiography, not least because it has given time for some apparently genuine anticipation to build up. With matches coming twice a week, each calling for a preview and review, it has had to wait for an international break. It only occurred to me a day or two before the book came out, that I might conceivably have been able to get hold of an advance copy against a promise of a website review. Fortunately, by that time it would clearly have been pointless even to have made the attempt, so I was spared the embarrassment of a refusal. With luck, when Mikel comes to retire and publish his autobiography, this bar will be so well established that the publishers will approach us. We have, of course, already published extracts from the autobiography of Mikel’s successor.
Arsene’s autobiography starts with an account of the young Arsene Wenger growing up in Duttlenheim, a small village near Strasbourg. We learn a little of his early life, of his family and his early education in people skills as he watched the behaviour of men of the village in his parents’ bistro – “I listened to their conversations, I noticed which man talked loudest, which one lied, who was the conceited one and who the retiring one…”
The next chapter deals with Wenger’s playing career. Having been spotted by Max Hild, the opposing coach, Wenger joined Mutzig and then followed Hild first to Vauban and then to Strasbourg. Hild also noticed the latent coach in Wenger and offered him the position of Training Academy coach while he continued to play in the first team. Wenger’s playing career came to a sudden end when, aged around 30, the club president told him he was getting too old. This was as great a surprise to the rest of the team as it was to Wenger himself who watched in the next match as his erstwhile teammates outdid themselves, leading him to resolve to concentrate his full efforts to coaching.
Chapter 3 covers Wenger’s first couple of coaching jobs – a year at Cannes, then in Ligue 2, and three years at Nancy in Ligue 1. His job in Cannes was the first time that Wenger had left Alsace – there’s a nice story that he made his first signing en route to the South, when after arranging to meet the player in a motorway services, they played four-on-four and one-on-one games of football by way of audition. Life in Cannes was very different to north-eastern France and Wenger gained an insight into the feelings of a newly-transferred player struggling to come to terms with new team-mates not knowing anyone, in a new town. We also learn a little of Wenger’s beliefs regarding player development – learn technique between the ages of 7 and 12; develop physically from 12-16; mentally from 17-19 and gain intelligence and motivation between the ages of 19 and 22. He tells us that football “depends on three criteria: ball control, decision making and the quality of execution”. An illustration of Wenger’s understanding of finance (some might call it parsimony) comes in the shape of another story of him making the 1000 mile round-trip alone to a trade fair in Munich where he negotiated a good deal on 100 footballs for the club.
After Nancy, Wenger moved back to the south coast, this time to Monaco. Perhaps a description from chapter 4 of his relationship with the Monaco players tells us a little about what Wenger misses most from the old days: “It was possible for us to talk. They were not yet surrounded by lawyers, agents, advisors who are really family members, all those middlemen who would gradually get between a player and his coach”. There’s a nice story about George Weah, who was recommended to Wenger while he was playing in Cameroon. Wenger brought him to Monaco, where he was initially thought “hopeless” and “clumsy”. After a great deal of work and encouragement Weah went on to win the Balon d’Or in 1995. By now managing in Japan, Wenger happened to be in Milan for the ceremony and when he found out about this, Weah insisted he come along, vouching for him to the security staff when he arrived and tried to gain entry without a ticket. At the presentation, Weah had dragged his former manager on stage and given him his prize. Wenger says that he still speculates on what the security men must have thought as he left the building at the end of the night carrying the trophy.
Chapter 5 tells of Wenger’s time in Nagoya, where he came across players with a completely different cultural background. He tells us of their extraordinary commitment and how their trust in a manager’s infallibility would lead them to follow his instructions without question and to rely upon him to make all their decisions (even those in the middle of matches) for them. Wenger tried to re-educate the team to believe that his job was to train them to be able to take decisions for themselves – something he achieved fairly successfully to judge by the team’s rise from being the laughing stock of the J League (17 consecutive defeats) the season before he joined to finishing second in his second and last season. It was in Nagoya that Weneger and Boro Primorac (whom he had met at Cannes) formed their coaching partnership. They also shared living accommodation and the book includes a curious story (of which Wenger is apparently very fond) of a social evening the Primorac and Wenger families had enjoyed together, when Boro and Alphonse (Arsene’s father) spent most of the time deep in conversation. Afterwards, Wenger asked his father what they’d been talking about and received the reply, in effect, “No idea, I could hardly understand a word he was saying”. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in this chapter about Japanese culture – I liked the story about how Wenger saved his interpreter’s job – but this review is getting far too long.
Chapter 6 marks the main event – Arsene Wenger’s arrival at Arsenal. There is a description of how the young Arsene had watched FA Cup Finals on a black-and-white TV growing up and had conceived an ambition to step onto the perfectly prepared Wembley pitch; of how he had flown to England one summer in his playing days to learn the language and had wandered around Cambridge knocking on doors in search of rooms to rent. By sheer luck, he ended up with a landlady who taught at a language school and got him enrolled on her course. After a description of Arsenal’s history and culture – well known to drinkers at this establishment – there’s a paragraph each on many of the players Wenger found at the club – Adams, Seaman, Berkamp, Wright and Keown – and descriptions of his first few acquisitions – Vieira, Petit and Garde. He follows up with a list of notable players that he brought in over the years – Ljungberg, Gilberto, Arshavin, Ramsey, Gallas, Sagna, Vermaelen, Walcott, Mertesacker, Fabianski, Clichy, Gibbs, Coquelin, Szczesny, Cygan, Senderos and Kanu. After an account of his first few, eventful and successful, seasons – the double in 97-98, the disappointment of 98-99 and that goal by Ryan Giggs, Wenger tells the story of the replayed FA Cup tie against Sheffield United in 1999 and the purchases of Henry, Wiltord and Pires. The chapter ends with the 2001-2 season, when Arsenal won the title without losing away, and the start of the quest to go one better by going through a season without losing at home either.
The achievement of that ambition is covered in chapter 7, which starts with brief appraisals of Campbell, Toure, Lauren, Cole and Lehmann. (The paragraph on Cole includes the sentence “It is one of the great regrets of my life that I lost him to Chelsea, thanks to a misunderstanding in the negotiations with his agent”.) There are no descriptions of any of the 49 matches which include the Invincible season – no comments on the circumstances surrounding Arsenal’s equalising penalty in the home match against Portsmouth, nothing about Thiery Henry’s individual excellence at home against Liverpool (just two of my own memories of 2003-4) – but there is much about the spirit of the team, how they “were solely focussed on the objective of playing very well during every match, swiftly correcting any individual faults, maintaining the level of our ambition”. There is a brief description of the away match against Manchester United that brought the run to an end before the chapter turns to an account of the press reaction to Arsenal’s team for the home match against Crystal Palace in February 2005 in which there were no English-born players, and a discussion of the role of foreign-born players in improving (or otherwise) the quality of English players in the years since then. The chapter ends with Arsenal’s FA Cup win in 2005, courtesy of Patrick Vieira’s last kick of a ball for the club.
Chapter 8 covers Arsenal’s move from Highbury to the new stadium finishing with a brief description of the 2006 Champions League final. Wenger describes how he always lost in “unbelievable circumstances” in the Champions League and says that the 2006 final hurts the most and he has never been able to watch it again.
Chapter 9 deals with a period when the organisation of the club and the game itself was changing and becoming more complex. Arsenal’s staff grew from 70-80 when Wenger arrived in 1996 to over 700 by the time he left in 2018. Television revenues increased from around £20 million to £180 million in the same period. Much of the chapter is devoted to a description of these changes and their effects of day-to-day life at the club. Hanging over everything were the loans that had been taken out in order to build the stadium. Among the conditions of these loans was an agreement that Arsenal would spend no more than half of their income on player salaries. With a hard limit in place on the wage bill, it became harder to compete when other clubs came knocking on the door trying to recruit our best players and so, with regret, Wenger had to part company with a number of well-known names, who left with more or less dignity, leaving corresponding good or bad memories behind them. While he was hugely disappointed to see young players leave – Wenger says it was as if “we were being cut down before the harvest” – he understood their desire to win trophies and how Arsenal’s lack of players with more ”maturity, experience and clear-headedness” was making it appear unlikely that they would be able to do so without moving on. (Perhaps Alan Hansen had a point after all?)
The final chapter is about Wenger’s life since leaving Arsenal and deals mainly with his new job as Head of Global Football Development at FIFA. He tells us that he sees FIFA’s roles as: organising competitions; being custodian the Laws of the game; and education, and that he sees his role principally as educational. He speaks briefly about his ambition to set up a research centre to develop teaching methods and ways to measure performance and his desire to focus on the development of young players.
As a card-carrying fan of Arsene Wenger, I was surprised to discover after reading the book, that I had found it somewhat disappointing. I rather enjoyed the first few chapters as I knew little about his early years, but the chapters about his time at Arsenal contained little that was new to me. There’s a lot of interesting stuff about man-management and team building, but to be honest, nothing particularly new or startling. I hadn’t realised how much of a family man Arsene Wenger is – there’s a couple of pages of quite moving tribute to his daughter Lea in the middle of chapter 6.
I guess my disappointment should be directed as much toward myself as toward the book. Although it was silly to think that Wenger would be indiscreet, I had hoped to get some insight into some of the more controversial transfers of the post-Invincible era (think Gilberto, van Persie, Fabregas) but the only hint I spotted was the remark about Cole in chapter 7 that I mention above.
I would have been interested to know how things might have been organised differently in Wenger’s latter years to avoid some of the problems that became evident – maybe the lengthy description in chapter 9 of the way the game has changed might be an oblique admission that he had too much influence in the club, but there are many other statements of the importance Wenger attaches to a manager being involved in everything about a club.
I was reduced to trawling the book to find something that might have been emphasised more than I expected, or an omission that surprised me in search of enlightenment. I’m not the only one, I’ve read reports that the current Tottenham manager is devastated that he doesn’t get a mention. Never mind Jose, one day perhaps.
Perhaps the explanation of the unrest that marked the end of Wenger’s time at Arsenal is simply that as in politics, all football managers’ careers eventually end in failure. In a career as long as his, perhaps the sheer number of players you have disappointed, fans you have upset by selling their idols, journalists to whom you haven’t given decent quotes and opponents that you’ve beaten once too often just becomes too long.
