Arsène Wenger - Wenger: My Life and Lessons in Red & White

First published in France as Ma Vie en Rouge et Blanc by ditions Jean-Claude Latts 2020.

First published in the United States of America in 2020 by Chronicle Books LLC.

Copyright 2020 ditions Jean-Claude Latts.

English translation 2020 Daniel Hahn and Andrea Reece.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data.

Names: Wenger, Arsne, 1949- author.

Title: Wenger : my life and lessons in red and white / by Arsne Wenger ;

translated by Daniel Hahn and Andrea Reece.

Description: San Francisco, California : Chronicle Prism, 2020. | Includes

index. | Translated from French. | Identifiers: LCCN 2020036563 | ISBN 9781797206158 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781797206189 (paperback) | ISBN 9781797206172 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Wenger, Arsne, 1949- | Soccer

coachesEnglandLondonBiography. | Arsenal Football Club.

Classification: LCC GV942.7.W42 A3 2020 | DDC 796.334092 [B]--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036563

Photos courtesy of the author unless otherwise noted.Endpaper photos in order of appearance: Matt Dunham/AP/Shutterstock, Colorsport/Shutterstock, Barry Coombs/EMPICS Sport, Matt Dunham/AP/Shutterstock.

Design by Brooke Johnson.

Typesetting by Happenstance Type-O-Rama.
Typeset in Mercury Text, Clearface Gothic, and AG Book Pro.

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all things excellent are
as difficult as they are rare

Spinoza, Ethics

to try to make men aware of the
greatness they do not know they
have in themselves

Andr Malraux, The Temptation of the West

I left Arsenal on May 13, 2018. The club had been my whole life for twenty-two years. It was my passion, my constant preoccupation. Thanks to Arsenal, I was able to pursue my managerial career in exactly the way I wanted: I was able to influence players lives, instill a playing style in the club, and experience some truly wonderful victories. I had a freedom and a power that managers no longer have today.

Leaving the club after all those incredible, intense, unforgettable years, and losing the intensity of that power, was difficult. Arsenal is still a part of me: I say my club when I talk about it, and even though its in other hands now, I am still as passionate as ever about the club, the supporters, the players who are selected, coached, supported, and pushed to give their best. What matters to me are the game and the people who love it, those moments of grace that football offers to those who love it and who give it their all.

Matches won are precious memories, and matches lost, the ones I still dont dare watch again, continue to haunt me even many years later: What should we have done? What happened? My whole life has swung between loving victory and despising defeat.

I am passionate about football and that passion has not dimmed.

When I arrived at Arsenal, the English didnt know who I was. The question Arsne who? came up time and again. I understood. I was only the third foreign manager in the history of English football. The first two experiences had turned out badly. The English are known for football just as the French are known for wine. We dont ask an English person to come over to make Bordeaux. For twenty-two years, I tried to make the truth of the game and the pitch prevail. I had already known defeat, disappointments, huge anger, departures, and fantastic players, but no team had become part of me quite like this one.

The club changed so much, and I changed with it, and football has changed with us. My kind of football, the conditions in which I pursued my passion, the freedom I had, my longevity as the manager of a club, these things have all but disappeared. I am not sure a player who still didnt have a club at fourteen, or a coach until he was nineteen, could today go from the French departmental championships to Ligue 1 and play so many matches and have so many adventures. Nor am I sure that a manager nowadays could have overall management responsibility for a team like Arsenal and choose his players in the way I did, with total freedom and total involvement. I was fortunate, but I know what sacrifices I made, too.

In recent years, football has undergone many profound transformations both pre- and post-match, notably with more analysis of the game. But one thing does not change: The ninety minutes still belong to the player, ninety minutes during which he is king. Some of the changes, I think, are more striking than others:

• There is an increasing number of foreign owners.
• The emergence of social media has posed demands and excesses on the sport.
• Players and managers are increasingly isolated and under greater pressure, at a time when expectations are higher.
• Europe is no longer dominated by three clubs, as it once was. Many other teams have moved up to their level.
• Analysts have taken on a very prominent role and are involved in matches right from halftime, making it possible to understand the game better and to have objective criteria for analyzing the match, where previously everything had been left to the subjectivity of the manager. Nevertheless, the manager remains the sole decision maker.
• The latest studies show that players today are demoralized by too great a use of statistics, no doubt because they feel their individuality is lost in the process. Statistics and science must be a part of performance analysis, but they need to be used in combination with a deep knowledge of the game.
• More than ever, a manager is responsible for a teams results even though he does not always have the means to influence every decision. Comments about him are always exaggerated one way or the other: Hes brilliant or Hes rubbish.

We are often involved in these transformations without really being aware that they are happening, and we remain focused on what we believe. But today I have emerged from my bubble and everything seems clearer to me: the unjustified attacks, the exaggerations, the loneliness of the manager. I read Lquipe every day; I watch two, three matches a day; I listen and wonder how whats being said can be fair, why certain things happen as they do, where the truth of the game lies; and I do the same with my life, my commitments, my passion.

I look at all these changes and I think about them, and yet I always see football for what it is and what it should be: a match where anything can happen; the players; ninety minutes; fantastic moves; an element of luck, talent, courage, a touch of magic; and, for those who are watching these men play, the search for excitement, for a memory, for a lesson in life.

Football lives under the pressure to perform. You need to know how to take a step back, to analyze things from above. In order to grow, a club has to rely on three criteria: strategy, planning, and application.