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
