Arsenal's 'Pundit' thinks back

The manager's contribution to modern European football becomes apparent in his autobiography

When Arsène Wenger appeared as a pundit on beIN Sports for its Champions League coverage last year, the first time he was doing so since stepping down as Arsenal manager, you couldn’t help but be struck by his football intellect. He may have briefed journalists in hundreds of press conferences over the years, but this was Wenger in a completely different avatar: sharp and straight, effusing the kind of footballing luminosity that we rarely expect from those who analyse the game on television.
 

The term revolutionary in the context of football managers is often applied callously, but Wenger’s broadcasting gig showed why he truly belonged to that rarefied class, an elite thinker who viewed things differently from the rest. For once, it was nice to see a coach unshackled from the responsibilities of leading a big club, willing to share what made him so great.
 

Wenger’s contribution to modern European football becomes all the more apparent while flipping through his autobiography, My Life in Red and White. In his own words, he took over at Arsenal in 1996 when they were a “boring team”, with a slow playing style where the only thing mattered was the result.
 

The Frenchman set about to change that with drastically different training methods and diet plans — caffeine drops on sugar cubes instead of fizzy drinks and Mars bars at half-time — and signing promising young foreign players like Patrick Vieira and Robert Pirès at a time when the Premier League was dominated by English players. Wenger also persuaded the club to hire psychologists and osteopaths, a comprehensive managerial approach fairly prevalent now but unheard of 25 years ago.
 

For Wenger, his pedagogical inclinations meant that a lot of these innovations came to him naturally. It was supplemented by an insatiable appetite for football, the foundation of which was laid at the bistro his parents owned in a village near Strasbourg, where men chugged one beer after another and talked “non-stop about football”. It was a simple, happy childhood, but opportunities were tough to come by.
 

Wenger received no professional coaching as a player until he was 19, which invariably hindered his progress and led to a middling career that met its premature end at RC Strasbourg. Coaching followed, first at Nancy and later Monaco, where he first came across an emerging Thierry Henry, whose incandescent talent would later go on to define Wenger’s reign as Arsenal manager.
 

While Wenger’s insistence on not relying on a ghostwriter is commendable — he took the help of two translators — that’s perhaps one of the reasons why the book lacks sufficient detail. What, for instance, propelled Arsenal to offer him a job while he was coaching in Japan of all places? How did he manage to change the culture of the club in just a matter of a few years? What was his relationship truly like with Alex Ferguson, or why did José Mourinho get the better of him so often? These are questions that you’d imagine a semi-retired Wenger would be keen to address. Except, he’s not quite there yet.
 

He, however, presents a more sincere account of the 2003/04 Invincibles season, conceding that going unbeaten through an entire league campaign had become an obsession for him and his players, a pleasing departure from the “one game at a time” drivel often spoken about by managers. Equally readable is the part where he talks about Arsenal’s heart-wrenching loss to Barcelona in the 2006 Champions League final, a missed opportunity that continues to torment him even after all these years.
 

It’s perhaps worth pointing out that Wenger’s decline at Arsenal — he never won the league after that remarkable 2003/04 season — coincided with rampant changes in English football. Billionaires with plenty of cash at their disposal acquired the likes of Chelsea and Manchester City, while the commercial might of Manchester United remained unchallenged, slowly pushing Arsenal towards the fringes of the elite.
 

Wenger acknowledges all that, stating that he learnt to work with limited resources, channelling a lot of his energy into finding and grooming young players like Cesc Fabregas and Theo Walcott. But at the same time, he glosses over his final years at the club, when tactical naivety and timid capitulations became a norm with Wenger’s Arsenal. Much of that was due to his managerial obstinacy: once a prophet of football’s modern age, Wenger perhaps refused to accept that football had changed dramatically and that his style and methods had to be reworked as a result of the game becoming more about speed and less about technique.
 

Now, of course, there’s very little of what Wenger pioneered at Arsenal — in a playing sense, at least — that remains. Mikel Arteta’s emphasis on robust organisation is far removed from the style of Utopian football that Wenger desired and practised. Mesut Özil, probably the last vestige of his time in North London, has been frozen out and unlikely to play for the club ever again. That explains why Wenger looks back at his time with a sense of wistfulness, perhaps feeling pained at how he was treated in his dotage.
 

But in some ways, his giant shadow will forever linger at Arsenal. Whether it was his hand in helping build a spanking new stadium or introducing new scouting methods, the truth remains that Wenger turned Arsenal from domestic underdogs to continental giants — and that, unlike his autobiography, deserves ample praise.