Arsène Wenger exudes intelligence and a sense of calm. Dignified and unruffled, he is used to living with pressure, but he admits it has taken years of self-discipline to keep his fiery temper in check. Even now he says he fears the dark side of his nature and the consequences of losing his cool.

“Is it anger, is it aggression, or is it a desire to be successful? Would I compromise my princi-ples? On occasions, yes, as first and foremost, I am a winner. But long-term, that’s not my attitude,” he explains. “Where does the anger come from? My father and my mother were both quite excitable, but the postwar world in which they lived was quite a rough world. The football world is also quite rough. You have to assert your personality and you need a high level of motivation. I control it now by thinking about the consequences of what I do. I didn’t always have the ‘off’ switch. I have seen very talented players and managers lose themselves to anger. A lot of things disturb me, but it is not a fear to lose. It is for you to master this fear. I was always concerned about dominating my animal feeling – not really dominating, I mean, knowing myself better.

“You can sometimes be surprised by your bad side. I have a dark side. You want to win so much that sometimes you forget that it is as well that you respect the rules. When you don’t win, you have to acknowledge the respect of your opponents as well. Sometimes I can’t do that. It is a dark side because the perfect side would be to say, ‘Well done. You played better’. You never know, in 50 years I might achieve it.”

There have been times when his impassioned response to on-field events led to criticism and, occasionally, disciplinary procedures. In October 2000 he was fined £100,000 and given a 12-match touchline ban, subsequently greatly reduced on appeal, for a disagreement with officials. “I feel like I have killed somebody,” he said at the time of the harshness of the punishment. In the final throes of Highbury’s last season, when Spurs were the visitors, Wenger argued vehemently with his Tottenham counterpart, Martin Jol. In Monaco he flew into rare but serious rages. At Cannes he once had to stop the team bus to be physically sick after a 3-0 defeat. His sojourn in Japan tempered his anger, but he could still finish matches at Highbury with his tie tugged to half-mast in frustration.

Wenger became famous for disagreements not only with Manchester United’s Sir Alex Ferguson but also with Jose Mourinho of Chelsea. The rows, when they are personal, irk him. “If only football is involved, you forget about it, but when it is personal, no. I didn’t need to talk about it. I ignore people, that’s all.” It seems a shame that there is not a greater bond between them. “Well, yes, but the job makes you want to be lonely. I would rather be successful than popular, but my relationship with Sir Alex has become better. Perhaps we are both mellowing.” Perhaps also, they have a common enemy in the Chelsea manager. “Maybe,” agreed Wenger with a smile.

“You have to be human. I try not to lose my temper because I know I am an excessive man. In fact, I control my temper so well because I’m afraid of the way I can lose it,” he said. “I come from a Latin culture and it’s instant overreaction most of the time. I now realise how much damage you can do to people or to yourself with an instant reaction. You can kill somebody in a second by overreacting. I learnt a lot about control in Japan.”

And also from his Germanic roots? Such is the history of Alsace, constantly switching in ownership along the Franco-German border, that his grandfather fought for the Kaiser during the first world war. His father fought for the Third Reich on the Russian front. “Fighting with very little enthusiasm,” Wenger added. But by the time he was born, October 22, 1949, Alsace was French again.

An intelligent man feels all the more insulted when his best work is foiled by cheating. It means no amount of intellect, ingenuity or work ethic can beat a system unfairly tilted against him. Wenger found himself in that position in Monaco when Olympique Marseille were recurring French champions thanks to systematic bribery and corruption, led by the former politician and club president Bernard Tapie. Exposure of the scandal in the early 1990s sickened Wenger. Although he won the championship with Monaco in 1988, it was depressing to discover his team had been illegally handicapped. It was also disillusioning to discover players were taking bribes, and disgusting to learn that some of those players were his own.

“It was a bad experience,” he said. “You don’t sleep and once you have suspicion about your own players being involved, it is even more difficult. You have to be careful not to become para-noid. What cured me is that I have a natural optimism about human beings. And of course there is the punishment of those who cheat. But it is never enough. It was not enough what happened in Italian football in 2006 when several big clubs, including Juventus, were convicted of cheating and bribing referees. The punishments should have been much harsher than they were.”

Wenger is passionate on the subject, yet, on a smaller scale, he acknowledges the common little fraudulences of his own players on the pitch. The dissembling that became popularly known as “diving”, for example. “I cannot say that Arsenal are not guilty, but we have to fight it.

The price to pay when you are a big club is that minor incidents became major. We did fight against it and it is much better. Our disciplinary record became much better. Too good,” he adds, smiling, because every manager needs a little venom in the overall “va-va-voom”.

“Football has changed in England during my time here. It was much more provocative and physical at the beginning. I always believed that Patrick Vieira and Emmanuel Petit were targeted in the early days because they were strong and foreign. And the French had the reputation of being softies, so the other players wanted to test them. But in these two cases, they got the wrong address. Patrick was a young boy and he was impulsive. So he overreacted at times and received red cards. I was supportive of him because a lot of the bad tackles on him had not been punished, and for such a young boy to say nothing was difficult.

“I always try to support my players to the world outside the club. It doesn’t mean I always agree with them. Outside, you have to keep a united front. To the world outside you can say you have seen a bad performance, but you don’t say, ‘The right-back was a complete failure’. I am responsible. I pick him. I have to stand up for that. You have to hold your nerve.” ARSENE WENGER was always a manager-in-waiting, although neither he nor Arsenal understood how their stories would one day be entwined. While he was a boy in his Alsace village team, the only one who refused a bottle of white wine after the game, Arsenal were recording their lowest-ever crowd at Highbury, fewer than 5,000 people turning up to watch them against Leeds United. Forty years later they would play in the Champions League final together, a manager of international renown and his team of intercontinental superstars.

As George Graham was installed as Arsenal manager in 1986, Wenger was about to lead Cannes to his only experience of relegation. But he had already been approached to become the new manager of Monaco, and he was still with the Cote d’Azur club when he landed in London on New Year’s Day 1990 after a reconnaissance mission to Turkey. He had a few hours to spare and he wanted to take in a game, so tickets were arranged for an Arsenal match. Six years later, a contract was arranged for him to become the new Arsenal manager, fresh from Japan.

It was a controversial appointment. Who was he? What pedigree did he have? Could winning a French championship with Monaco and the Emperor’s Cup in Japan with Nagoya Grampus Eight provide the appropriate springboard into the Premier League cauldron?

He was the first foreign manager appointed from a club abroad since the fleeting and inglorious advent of Jozef Veng-los at Aston Villa. Wenger was introduced to his team, a battle-hardened troop of professionals, including two recovering alcoholics. They saw a tall, thin, bespec-tacled man looking in no way like their concept of a football manager. He saw potential, a challenge. Within two years Arsenal had won the Double and high praise for beautiful football. The transition was so swift, it bordered on the miraculous. “I MODELLED myself on Franz Beckenbauer a little bit [in my playing days] because he was also a libero, a sweeper, super-elegant and classy.” And was Arsène Wenger in that mould? “No, I was not elegant and classy.” He is laughing aloud at himself. “But you can dream. When you have not the physical potential, you need the brain. But times have changed. WhenI played in my village, I never really practised until the age of about 18. I started very late. And because of that I’ve got a physical complex. I still work on my physique every day. I do not seem to understand that my career is finished! I still dream to come back one day.”

Wenger moved from the Duttlenheim village first team to AS Mutzig in the French third division, to FC Mulhouse, where he earned £50 a week as a semi-pro, to AS Vauban and finally on to Racing Club de Strasbourg, where he was eventually preferred as a coach. He loved football from earliest childhood as he listened to the chatter and tactics in his parents’ pub-restau-rant, La Croix D’Or, in Duttlen-heim, which doubled as the headquarters of the village team.

He would pay a franc to watch the FA Cup final on the only television in the village school hall. He had to get there early for a seat. Sister Joseph was the village teacher, but she did not frown on the extracurricular use of the hall. Alsace was football-mad, and Arsène was a sensible young man, even then. “When you want to be at the top of your job, you can only do it with your body. Maybe because I was not as strong as some, I realised quickly that the more your body is ready to perform, the more chance you have to play well. Maybe as well I saw drunken behaviour in the restaurant. When I started to play in the village team, their 11 players drank 10 bottles of wine after the game. But I didn’t drink at all. I was the only one. And they said, ‘You are not a man because you don’t drink alcohol’. There was fantastic pressure on people to drink. They used it as a team-bonding exercise, but the next day they didn’t know what they had done.

“I liked to be with friends, but I was determined. I wanted to play football but never dreamt I would become a professional player, because in a village at that time you were so isolated. A professional football player was on a different planet, but I wanted to do well what I did.”

Wenger’s parents, Alphonse and Louise, were not pleased when their son revealed that he would not be entering the family auto-part business. “When I became the coach of Strasbourg youth team my family were very strongly opposed. Being the coach meant almost giving your whole life to football,” he said. DID ARSENAL fans know or understand what had driven Wenger in his career when he arrived in the autumn of 1996? They did not. He was unrecog-nised, foreign and hard to equate. Glenn Hoddle raved about him, but was this a good thing from a player so inextricably linked to Tottenham Hot-spur? Wenger remained an enigma. “It was an awesome responsibility. It was good that when I first took over, I didn’t realise how big the club is. At first I just tried to do my job as well as I could, thinking, ‘Okay, they will let me know if they are happy or not’. I just tried to be successful and work the way I love to work. My own training methods, my own way to play the game, my own way to bring in players.” Little did he know that the “awesome responsibility” would be his when he visited Highbury on that New Year’s Day in 1990 to watch Arsenal against Crystal Palace. “That was where I met David Dein.” Dein, the Arsenal vice-chairman [until April 2007], recalled: “He was a very thin guy, wearing a raincoat. His English wasn’t that good then, but I spoke French adequately well. We chatted and I told him we were going to the house of some showbusiness friends of ours, and he was welcome to come. Amazingly, he said yes.

“Someone decided we should play charades. Arsène had something like A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He said, ‘I’ll try’. He did brilliantly. The more time I spent with him, the more I became impressed. And anyway, with a name like Arsène for Arsenal, it was written in the stars.”

They kept in touch, Dein becoming all the more impressed with Wenger’s progress at Monaco. “I thought, ‘This man’s a class act’,” said Dein. “Every time we were in the South of France, we’d socialise. Then in 1995, when George Graham had his little mishap [he was banned for a year for taking illegal payments], I said to the board we should seriously consider Arsène. By coincidence he was staying at my house when the George story broke.I said to him, ‘Do you want me to promote you, because, with all due respect, you are an unknown quantity in this coun-try?’ In the end we concluded it was too much of a gamble. We thought Bruce Rioch would be a safe pair of hands. He was the sergeant- major type, straight as a die, but it was the wrong decision.

“In the meantime, Arsène had gone to Japan. I used to send him all our videos, and, being the man he is, he actually watched them. After a year, we reconsidered the Rioch appointment. We asked ourselves, ‘Is this really the man to take us to the heights?’ George Graham had given us a taste of success and we wanted it to continue. I was much more pushy the next time on Arsène’s behalf. The board, to their credit, said, ‘Okay, fine, let’s go for it’.”

First Arsenal had to negotiate Wenger out of his contract with Grampus Eight. When he arrived they were in 12th place out of 12 in the J-League. By the end of the season, they were second and won the Emperor’s Cup. Dein went to Japan with club chairman Peter Hill-Wood and director Danny Fiszman. “It had to be an undercover mission,” said Dein. “The press was speculating, rumours were abounding. Arsène said the earliest he could leave was October, after the start of the English season [in fact he started at Arsenal in September]. We said, ‘We’ll wait’, and came to an agreement.

“Now we’re heading back to the airport in Tokyo and we bump into three British air stewardesses. We were on a secret mission and were going to get busted by the aircraft staff from home. Luckily, they didn’t recognise us. We were paranoid our cover would be broken.”

Wenger was worth waiting for. He changed things almost in an instant. Not so much the personnel – although Vieira arrived, as if by magic, from Milan – but the ethos, the optimism and, above all, the game. “I did what looked natural to me,” he said. “To encourage the players to go forward, to express themselves. When I arrived, the dominating teams were Manchester United and Liverpool. That first year, when we went to Liverpool, we had a complex. We got beaten quite easily by United. But at home we beat them.

“I bought Vieira, but the rest were the same. I found Dennis Bergkamp here and still had the old defence, resilient and not ready to die. They were, as well, all intelligent. They understood they could all have a few more years. I revised my view that 30 was nearly too old for a player because they all had the hunger of a boy starting out. Nigel Win-terburn was so hungry. Dixon, Bould, Keown, Adams – when they were on the pitch they were ready to die to win.”

Wenger’s first game, against Sunderland in September 1996, featured Seaman in goal; Dixon, Bould, Adams, Winterburn; Platt, Vieira, Merson, Parlour; Wright, Hartson. How soon that would change. Parlour was put out to the wing, Adams was reinvented as a forward-foraging defender instead of a flat-out stopper and Hartson was let go.

“The career of a player should be decided by his psychological and physiological profile,” said Wenger. “They must be as close as possible to the [traits that suit the] position where he plays. Sometimes it’s by accident that he’s in a position. If you ask them where they played as a kid and why, most of the time they say, ‘Oh, I played central defender because the usual guy was off that day’.”

There were many examples of how Wenger switched a player from one position to another to improve them. Petit was moved from left-back to midfield, mid-fielders Lauren and Kolo Toure into defence, Mathieu Flamini from midfield to full-back.

But the culmination of Wenger’s skill would be the conversion of a winger called Thierry Henry into one of the world’s most renowned strikers.

The Arsenal Opus

- The Arsène Wenger and Ian Wright interviews on these pages come from the Arsenal Opus, published next week by Kraken Sport & Media. It has also published a similar tome on American football’s Super Bowl and Manchester United. Taking more than two years to produce, its 850 pages contain more than 400,000 words detailing the story of the club and exclusive interviews with the personalities who have defi ned it written by leading sports journalists

- The Opus, which measures half a metre square and weighs in at 37kg, boasts more than 2,000 photographs. It is a limited edition with a print run of 1,500 and retails for £3,000. Each copy is signed by Wenger. In addition, 500 copies of the Icons edition are available for £4,250 each, additionally signed by various legendary Gunners including Tony Adams, Patrick Vieira, Dennis Bergkamp and Charlie George among others. For further information visit www.krakenopus.com

Your chance to win a copy
All you have to do is answer the following question. Who did Arsène Wenger succeed as manager of Arsenal? E-mail your answer to sportletters@sunday-times.co.uk with your name and address and a daytime phone number. The competition closes at midday on Wednesday, September 12

Plus: 10% discount exclusive to readers of The Sunday Times
We are delighted to offer the Arsenal Opus at an exclusive 10% discount to readers if ordered by September 21, 2007. To take advantage of this offer call 020 7213 9587 and quote reference AO1309. The Arsenal Opus is available to preorder at www. arsenalopus.com

The word according to Ian Wright

- Ian Wright joined Arsenal from Crystal Palace on September 23, 1991. In seven years he became a legend, breaking the club’s scoring record and picking up League Championship, FA Cup and League Cup winners’ medals. It was even more amazing for a player who, aged 19, had been rejected by virtually every London club before Palace gave him his chance

- First day as an Arsenal player ‘It happened so quickly. When Steve Coppell [Palace’s manager] said he’d accepted a bid from Arsenal he must have thought I was mad because I said: “Oh no, when do I have to be there? I’ve got to go and buy my mother a television”’

- First goal for Arsenal ‘I scored on my debut at Leicester. That relaxed me and I got a hat-trick at Southampton in my next game’

- First trophy ‘In 1993 we won the League Cup and the FA Cup in the same season. I was pleased because in my fi rst full season I’d won the Golden Boot, which I’d always wanted’

- Greatest goal ‘We were at home to Everton and a long clearance fell to me. I pulled it over Matt Jackson’s head once, then I pulled it over again, and then as Neville Southall was standing there in the Everton goal, I pulled it over his head. Bang, bang and over’

- Breaking Cliff Bastin’s scoring record ‘It could have been embarrassing because as I scored against Bolton on September 13, 1997, I thought, “I’ve broken the record”, but I’d just equalled it. I’d only scored 178, but I lifted my shirt to reveal the T-shirt that said: “179 Just Done It”, so obviously, I needed to score another to save myself from feeling stupid. In the end I scored a hat-trick. Unbelievable’

- First impressions of Arsène Wenger ‘He looked like a science teacher, but the way he trained me and made me think about delivering the goods was fantastic. He extended my career by two years’

- First and last dream come true ‘If someone had told me when I was working as a labourer: “You’re 19, you’ve just been refused by Brighton, but now you’re going to go to Palace, play in an FA Cup fi nal, play for England, sign for Arsenal, become their greatest goalscorer. Are you happy?” I’d have said: “I’m not in the mood for jokes, right?”’

NEXT WEEK: In Part Two of this exclusive interview, Arsène Wenger talks about the move from Highbury and the loss of Thierry Henry