By Myles Palmer
TWO THINGS :
(1) A Merry Christmas to all our readers – and to Arsenal’s superb squad of players, especially those I sometimes criticise.
(2) Here is the Epilogue of The Professor-Arsene Wenger at Arsenal, which I had to cut for space reasons from the paperback when it was published in September 2002.
If I had updated the Epilogue at that time it would have been slightly different to this version from the hardback in September 2001.
The Professor shares many things with ANR, naturally.It has similar themes,descriptions and analysis.
But, being a chronological book written for mainstream middle class readers, it’s not as quirky or as rambling as ANR.It’s a lot tighter, more disciplined.
This piece is intended mainly for ANR readers who bought the paperback.
The Professor is widely distributed but unreviewed and unpublicised.
It’s doing well in an underground/word-of-mouth way and was reprinted in early November.
Clearly, this Epilogue/Conclusion will also be of interest to busy folk who would never read a book, but want to know what the book says.
PS
It’s only fair to mention that the following anecdote from former Arsenal ClubCall man Dickon Geddes has been described by Arsene as “absolute rubbish”.
But it is NOT rubbish.
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EPILOGUE
When Anthony Sampson wrote The New Europeans in 1968, he described technocracy, the French educational system and the Ecole Polytechnique, where engineers had been trained for 200 years, and where the graduates combined mental agility with assurance and rigorous training.
Sampson quoted the Fulton Report, which proposed to reform the British civil service and make it more like that in France, where the men in top jobs ‘were lucid, expert and possessed of that confidence which comes from the achievement of high responsibility combined with a certainty that one knows one’s own subject as well or better than anyone else’.
Arsène Wenger is lucid and confident, knows his subject as well as anyone, came to England at the right time, and has given Arsenal world-class players, style and national popularity. He has achieved high responsibility.
The club’s new training ground has become, on Fridays,the court of King Arsène, a place where limited access is cordially provided for an hour or two. But the access is to him, not to the players,most of whom prefer to let the manager talk for them.
In English football the managers have become the superstars because they do more talking than the players and have more interesting things to say.
We have come to marvel at Wenger’s equilibrium, which seems to come from an awareness that today’s match,or tomorrow’s, was just one small episode in a bigger story.
We know him as someone who is magnanimous towards most of his fellow managers, willing to accept that referees have a very difficult job, but at the same time a man with a steely determination to fight his corner against officialdom, as he did when he overturned his twelve-match touchline ban for the Sunderland tunnel incident on 19 August 2000.
Over the past five years Arsène Wenger has become the most integral component of the Arsenal brand, a symbol who defines the club.
By being so decent, intelligent and reasonable he makes Arsenal look like the most decent, intelligent and reasonable club in England. His public relations are superb because he takes so much pressure off his players and directors.
He is a thoroughly modern manager of millionaires, and yet, at the same time, a little bit old-fashioned, like a gentleman-adventurer from the early twentieth century.
An attacking coach, he wants to score the first goal in every game, and the second goal as well, so he builds his team on pace, pace and more pace, and on pressing, which might be defined as atttacking when you donot have the ball.
His training is designed to maximise the athletic potential of each player, as it was at Monaco, and he tries to mould the players into an attacking machine which can penetrate, score and blitz their opponents.
It is, at its best, a highly entertaining style of football which is very hard to contain, and the last five years have shown that when opponents stoop to holding, shirt-pulling and diving, the Arsenal team and their manager get bent out of shape, tempers flare and red cards are shown.
Since 1996 Wenger has proved himself a sporting scientist who works logically and patiently, testing out his ideas, but he is also, paradoxically,a gambler who likes to take a punt on unknown players like Mendez,Malz and Wreh. He takes big risks in signing players with baggage – in one case, accepting a player with baggage.
Bergkamp won’t fly to away games? Fine, I’ll build my team around him. Vieira is an unused squad player at AC Milan? Come and play for me. Petit is an athletic defender at Monaco? OK, let’s make him a midfielder who can win the World Cup.
Overmars’ knee was smashed up? No problem, turn him into a goalscorer and win the Double. Anelka is a seventeen-year-old reserve at Paris Saint Germain? Sign him up and develop him into the number nine France need.
Kanu has had heart surgery and cannot get into the Inter team? Make him my Plan B and stick him on to score a goal when Plan A is not working.
Thierry Henry is an unhappy flop at Juventus? Give me a call in 1998 and I will turn you into France’s Footballer of the Year in 2000.
There is no doubt about it: Arsène Wenger is a little bit like Bob Paisley,the aficionado of horseflesh, the racehorse trainer in football boots who guided Liverpool to thirteen major trophies in nine years.
Paisley was able to turn Arsenal striker Ray Kennedy into a superb midfield player because, like Wenger thirty years later, he could see things in footballers they did not see in themselves.
Wenger arrived in London at an interesting moment in our sporting history. The English have always boasted that they gave sports to the world, but it took us a long time to realise that other countries were playing those sports better than we were, and it took us until the 1990s to admit that we needed help.
Olympic hero Steve Redgrave and his fellow rowers were coached by Jurgen Grobler, a German; Denise Lewis has a Dutch trainer, Charles van Commene; England’s cricket team improved a lot under Duncan Fletcher of Zimbabwe; and the Welsh rugby team has been revived by Graham Henry, a New Zealander who coached the British Lions in summer 2001. At the end of the last rugby league season all but one of the fourteen British clubs had foreign coaches.
The England football team is now being managed by a Swede, Sven-Goran Eriksson, who speaks good English and talks quietly to his players.
To his eternal credit, Wenger still keeps faith with the mission statement he made on that Sunday morning in September 1996: I want to win every game, I want to improve the squad with my ideas, it’s up to the players and me to present the game that the fans love, I want to keep the spirit they showed in a difficult period before I arrived, the life of a club never stops.
His current team represents him faithfully and directly reflects his values in life and sport, his loves and hates, his ideas and ideals. The players he has bought and sold tell us a lot about his views on football and footballers.
He never said Ian Wright was finished at Arsenal, but he picked Wreh with Anelka for the 1998 FA Cup Final, and when he took Wreh off he put Platt on and left Wright fuming on the bench.
Actions speak louder than words, and transactions speak even louder. He sold the boozers, gamblers and dead wood, and then he made the remaining players fitter, faster, stronger, healthier, happier, richer and more confident.
He made them all realise that players who take the game seriously achieve more, earn more, play longer and have a better life.
He also admires honesty. He creates a moral as well as tactical universe that helps him in the long term. His job is to manage the season as well as the match, and also to manage the future.
He has fulfilled his brief by achieving the management of change and making Arsenal, once again, the main rival to Manchester United Megastore plc. The successful management of change sometimes includes keeping the best of what was there before, and Wenger proved perceptive in that department too.
He remodelled the team in 1997 but he did not dismantle it. As he said later,’When I first came to Arsenal, I realised the back four were all university graduates in the art of defending. As for Tony Adams, I consider him to be a doctor of defence.He is simply outstanding.’
Sir Alex Ferguson felt that Wenger did not show sufficient sportsmanship in admitting United’s superiority after they won the 1999/2000 title by an eighteen-point margin, and he claimed that Wenger’s carping about United being allowed to drop out of the FA Cup had not impressed other Premiership managers.
But still, in his autobiography Ferguson revealed that he would like to get to know Wenger better, since people who knew him well said he was a good man.
‘But I don’t suppose I’ll ever find that out for myself. He seems to pull down the shutters when you meet up with him and never has a drink with you after a game. I was brought up in football to believe that, no matter how fierce the competition is between clubs, the opposing managers should have the grace, win or lose, to have a drink and a chat once the dust has settled. We all hate to lose, but there is a bond connecting us and we all tend to feel for any one of our number who is going through a bad time.’
If by this Ferguson was implying that his team was better than Wenger’s and the Frenchman just would not admit it, that he was a nicer guy than Wenger, the Scot has a short memory. It was Sir Alex who said on Sky Sports in April 1997, ‘He has no experience of English football. He’s come from Japan. And he’s into English football and he is now telling everybody in England how to organise their football. I think he should keep his mouth shut.’
After a while Ferguson realised that the odds on Arsène Wenger keeping his mouth shut were about the same as the odds on Rangers running out at Ibrox wearing green and white hooped shirts.
It’s not just fellow managers; the English public rarely gets a glimpse of Wenger’s private life either. Which is as it should be, since large parts of his working life are lived in a goldfish bowl. The Frenchman admits he has no other huge passions and rarely goes out. If he is not working he is usually at home with his partner Annie Brosterhous, a PE teacher, and their young daughter Leah.
He watches football on his big wall-mounted flatscreen television.Arsenal’s former ClubCall man Dickon Geddes, a rather boisterous interviewer and broadcaster, recalled the night in March 1998 when Manchester United played Monaco. United had played the first leg of the Champions League quarter-final in the Louis II Stadium and drawn 0-0.
Some critics reckoned they should have attacked more and tried to score an away goal, but they were expected to win the second leg at Old Trafford. Then Trezeguet scored early on with a scorching shot. Solskjær equalised in the second half, but Monaco went through on the away goal.
Geddes said,’Arsène had some friends round to watch the game on television with a few bottles of wine. The next day he took the players out training and brought them in after 45 minutes. He had a headache. I asked him if he would do a piece, and he said, “Yes, as long as you speak quietly.”‘
Wenger, as we have seen, is a supremely disciplined character who looks after himself, sets an example to his players and knows about the physiological effect of one, two, three glasses of wine. We can be fairly sure that his guests drank most of the wine that night, so it was surprising to discover that the fitness guru had a headache the following day.
What can be said about Wenger’s career as a whole? Just this. A football manager whose career takes him from Cannes and Monaco to Nagoya and Arsenal is an exceptionally shrewd man who has chosen to go only to clubs where he can make a difference, where he can have the maximum amount of control.
Mainly, he wanted to be master of his own destiny. He wanted, above all, to build, train and select his teams without interference. His ideas proved themselves so quickly that Monaco won the title in his first season, Nagoya zoomed up the table, and Arsenal were champions in his first full season in England.
Monaco was the laboratory where he first tested his ideas, so Wenger was an experimental sports scientist in the south of France, a missionary in Japan and a revolutionary in England, bringing in a new philosophy and creating new horizons while wheeling and dealing to pay for a new infrastructure for the club.
On arrival he found a booze culture, a magnificent defence and a £7.5 million star, Dennis Bergkamp, using obsolete training facilities. Only three years later he sold Nicolas Anelka for £23 million, had built his new training ground for £12 million and signed Thierry Henry for £8.5 million.
In his five years in England, Wenger has created a new style of football by blending foreign technicians with British warriors.
He quickly realised that Adams, Parlour, Keown, Bould, Winterburn and Dixon were the finest platoon of English squaddies ever assembled by a London team, over-my-dead-body defenders of the club colours, and he added Vieira, the tackler-interceptor, partnered by Petit, the presser and long passer, and Overmars, the young veteran.
He also encouraged Bergkamp,the golden Dutchman, to spring Anelka, the greyhound from Trappes, out of his trap, and suddenly it all gelled into a truly formidable team which had flair and finesse as well as hearts of oak. The new Arsenal, by the spring of 1998, were simply irresistible.
Unfortunately, that November they bumped into Lens. Wenger has, in fact, created a style of play which is so distinctive that he could be regarded as a football auteur, a choreographer of contact sport who wants to see the beautiful game played skilfully at lightning speed.
He has already given Arsenal fans more entertaining football than they have ever seen before.He is a man who has accepted that his obsession with the game will exclude almost everything else from his life, and as the years went on he gradually became comfortable with that.
He summed up this process in acomment he made just before the epic FA Cup semi-final against Manchester United at Villa Park in April 1999, when he said, ‘At the start of your career you sacrifice even more because you are not used to the pressure and the decisions. Maybe today I have more pressure in my job than when I started, but now I have the feeling that I don’t have to sacrifice anything because it has become my natural way to live.’
In decades to come, Wenger may be remembered as the French revolutionary who created harmony, which is highly appropriate since Arsenal’s famous badge carries the Latin inscription Victoria concordia crescit – victory through harmony.
And he has done a lot more than simply graft French and Dutch flair on to a solid English foundation. His sophisticated leadership has created a much more harmonious atmosphere at the club than there ever was under the autocratic George Graham.
Anybody who can reintroduce team values at a point in football history when the Bosman ruling has hugely increased player power must have special leadership skills.
The atmosphere within a club is very, very important, and a good atmosphere depends on the manager and his board singing from the same hymn sheet. One of the oldest unwritten rules in football is: What you see on the field on a Saturday afternoon always reflects what has gone on at the club between Monday and Friday.
But will Wenger stay at Arsenal after 2002? Nobody but Wenger knows that yet, but his past attitude before signing contracts has certainly been unusual. He waited ten months to sign a deal at Nancy, his first club, andhad managed Monaco for a full season before signing his contract there.
Even at Grampus Eight he did not sign until he had been in Japan for four months. He wanted, perhaps, to audition his bosses. He knew that he could do his job, but he could not be one hundred per cent sure that they could do theirs.
Most worrying for Arsenal is that there is a shortage of managers who can do everything Arsène Wenger can do, so he will never be short of offers. But in April 1998, when his first contract had a year to run,Wenger told L’Equipe that he regarded Arsenal as one of the best clubs in Europe.
He noted that the personalities of the presidents of many big European clubs were more important than the structures of their organisations. ‘I can’t very well see myself returning to a system where I would lose some of the responsibilities I have now. At the moment I’m in one of the great clubs of Europe and I want to test my ideas here. The choices that are offered to me don’t give much of an opportunity to progress. One can speak of my going to Real Madrid, but I doubt if I would have the same freedom of action that I do here.
‘For a French,Italian or Spanish club to tempt me, it would have to give me the same types of responsibilities as Arsenal. To go elsewhere without such a guarantee would be ridiculous. I can easily see myself returning to France, but in the role of a director.’
This sense of ‘freedom of action’ comes in part from Arsenal’s status as a private company. Each year, after the AGM, one wonders whether Arsenal will ever float. But at the moment the directors enjoy the executive flexibility that plcs like Tottenham and Manchester United now lack, so a flotation seems unlikely.
The key issue is that David Dein and Danny Fiszman want to retain control. Running a football club is a difficult, expensive and challenging business, but the Arsenal directors have lately proved to be rather good at it.
Broadly speaking, the club has been successful for the last thirteen years because the executives have the freedom to make their own decisions.
If the board hires a French manager who wants the club to buy some land near St Albans and build a state-of-the-art training ground, they can do it. If it costs £12 million, a serious sum, David Dein does not have to consult with a plc board.
He can say, ‘It’s a capital asset, we need a top-quality training ground for our world-class players, and we trust Arsène to produce good young footballers, so let’s get on with it.’
Wenger expresses his deep love of the game in coaching, talent-spotting and team-building. He was never a famous footballer, so Arsenal’s success in 1998 was the pinnacle of his career. He has spent seventeen years learning how to be a Champions League manager, gradually expanding his areas of responsibility and taking on bigger challenges.
However, he claims to take a fairly detached view of his career. In 1998 he said, ‘Being a coach is always the same job, just with different people. The hardest thing is to arrive at the right time and leave at the right time.It is like a love affair – one always wants to split up less than the other, and when it is over they take longer to overcome their disappointment. There are people who keep thinking about it and chewing it over before getting on with things. There are also those who couldn’t care less about it right away. That is more me.’
However, there are recent indications that Arsenal has become more than just a job to Wenger. It may have become a mission. He already wears a lot of hats, since he is coach, manager, chief scout, spokesman,psychologist and spin-doctor.
He arrived at the club at an opportune time,after a period of success under George Graham – a bright, tough, working-class lad from Glasgow who had turned himself into a dynamic colonel of an elite regiment – had collapsed into mediocrity and tedium,and when a new direction was urgently needed.
Arsène Wenger, a bright,tough, middle-class technocrat who had gone abroad to seek his fortune,stepped in and wrought successful change.
The attraction of his present job is the fact that he now has more freedom than ever to create his own destiny, and he sees the Champions League as an attainable goal,something within his compass. He would love to win the Champions League – maybe Arsenal is the perfect vehicle for him.
Maybe this is the club where he can use everything he has ever learnt to achieve everything he has ever wanted to achieve.
If not, he has already made a remarkable impact. As he says, it is not easy to choose the right time to go. But, as he also says, whatever happens, the life of a club never stops.
ENDS