Wenger: My Life and Lessons in Red and White

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Wenger has not returned to the sidelines since leaving Arsenal, but as of November he has brought characteristic rigour to his role as Fifa’s head of Global Football Development. He separated from his wife, Annie Brosterhous, in 2015; their daughter Léa is finishing a doctorate in neuroscience at Cambridge University. He divides his time between London, Paris and Fifa’s base in Zurich, often staying in hotels, and he admits that the hardest part of Covid-19 for him was when most of the leagues around the world were suspended. “I don’t know why but football games are my life and I don’t think that’s ever going to change,” he says. “So I missed it very much.” Gone for three because I love the man and couldn’t bear to go any lower, but it probably should be a two. It was definitely readable, and I’ve got a deep respect for anything Wenger has to say. However, he doesn’t say all that much. With the wide margins, large font and the fact that the book is fairly short anyway, it doesn’t really go any deeper than as to briefly describe a situation (sometimes a whole premier league season in a couple of paragraphs) before adding a passing comment or two, or a general description of how he felt during each period. Hostility no, competition yes. It was vital [at Arsenal] that you beat Tottenham for the respect of the club. Competition is important, as long as it’s not crazy. When you [were due to] play Tottenham, at the start of the week everybody was a bit more nervous than usual. It’s one example but there were so many. The history of a big club is full of missed great players!

Being hard on him doesn’t work. Like all artists, he needs to feel supported in his creativity. He has a feel for passing and an exceptional sense of timing when he passes,” he says. “There is something magical and simple about his playing style. The Premier League is a train that goes by at 200 kilometres per hour, and Özil doesn’t always go at this speed, but you always have great affection for his artistry.” His first match was a victory… or was it?

Customer reviews

Gutted - I really wanted this book to be good but to be honest you don’t get anything you couldn’t have learned reading a few post match interviews, and really they would contain more detail. In 2002/03, the season in which Arsène Wenger announced to the press that Arsenal could go the whole season unbeaten, his team fell short. They won the FA Cup, but gave up an early lead in the title race to Manchester United, eventually losing by five points. As well as this we get his views on what a coach should be. But again there's no personality injected into his words. It comes across so mechanical and impersonal that it was boring to read and made him come across as emotionless robot. Case in point, his wife. She's barely mentioned and at one point he describes their relationship as "friendly". Can't you just feel his love radiating as you read that? I do hope that history is sympathetic to Wenger. Many of his contemporaries, were not. He was very successful. He did bring great times to the club. He does make contentious claims in his book that the rivalry with the other lot, who play in white and blue does not hold the same 'tensions'. He also claims that it is 'harder to win the Premier League than the Champion's League'. On both points I am not sure. Unfortunately, his own fans that we gooners once were, would, I am sure, argue vociferously that the rivalry will be as fierce and tension filled as always and that if the second point was correct, why did we not win the Champion's League? In the years following they would holiday on Dein’s boat, and the Arsenal board member would watch Monaco’s matches in France. After some time in Japan, the invite to manage Arsenal arrived. He loved Real Madrid as a youngster

The book is perhaps most interesting on Wenger’s early life and career – as this is little covered elsewhere. Another area that is perhaps even clearer from the book than I already thought it was is how the Invincible Season was an extremely deliberate and very explicit target (and it was interesting to read this part only 5/6 games into the 2020-21 season when already every team in the Premiership has lost). Arsenal fans may benefit from, but ultimately take issue with his insights regarding finances and the reality of the restraints on the club’s ability to delve into the transfer market in his latter years. The book just fails to come to life – I was at many of the games featured in the book but almost never did I feel that the book was adding anything to spark my memories of the matches. And many iconic moments are simply not mentioned at all. I found myself invited to David Dein’s house that evening. He had said to me: ‘We’ll talk about football.’ I mainly recall a very sociable evening with a lot of laughter and games, a kind of charades. I seem to recall one of the subjects they asked me to enact was A Midsummer Night’s Dream – no easy task – and I got through it pretty well!” He says. “The friendship, complicity and understanding between David and me date from that first dinner, and from all the times we’ve seen each other since.”I had the opportunity to get to know you at U efa and F ifa meetings and dinners. With your culture and vision, I believe you have the qualities to be a top exec, such as a CEO or director of football, at a club. Would you have ever considered such a role at Arsenal or was your desire always to remain on the pitch? He was manager at Arsenal during a time when football changed dramatically. Traditionally the owners of the big clubs tended to be wealthy local businessmen with a love of the game. Gradually foreign investors injected huge amounts of capital into Premiership clubs, American entrepreneurs, Russian oligarchs and wealthy Asians now own England's top football clubs. Wenger commented on the growing number of staff employed by Arsenal who looked after the marketing and branding of the club. This was an interesting aspect of the book. Living in Strasbourg, his main clubs were Racing Club de Strasbourg and German club Borussia Mönchengladbach – but Real Madrid held a special place in his heart. Many of us deplore the growing inequality in football, where Premier League clubs ‎have incomes of many millions and lower league and semi-professional clubs struggle to survive, mirroring other industries and services, where the economic system produces extreme wealth for a few and poverty for many. How can supporters, players and managers come together to change this? As a life-long enthusiastic Arsenal supporter (God help me), this was a book I was always going to buy - well get as a Christmas gift. The overall feeling is that to a large extent it was missing so much. Arsene Wenger was such an innovative coach who looked holistically at players development, the cohesion of the team and the structures within the club itself. So why were the details of that creative thinking missing? Unless it wasn't as creative or innovative as I imagined. I appreciated watching Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger just how important the manager was to a club, how they instilled the culture, the belief and all the science and training that helped develop players. I would love to have learned how they achieved that and what their secret sauce looked like.

Arsène Wenger is undoubtedly a great manager. He took Arsenal from being a mid table team to champions and changed the entire dynamic of the club in terms of dietary needs and preparation, to the point it's now the norm throughout the English game. So even though I'm not an Arsenal fan I thought I'd enjoy his autobiography as he shared insights on his life and career. The writing also it has to be says is a little off - its hard to know if it is the original or the translation, but its an odd assortment of very simple and clunky sentences with rather enigmatic statements (which I suspect are in the French original). Arsenal had a style of play that was criticised, but there was a style of play,” he says. “I can understand that people want only to win, but you need to have the desire to transform the team expression into art. When the supporter wakes up in the morning, he has to think: ‘Oh, maybe I’ll have a fantastic experience today!’ He wants to win the game but as well to see something beautiful.” I just loved Real Madrid. I thought it the strongest, the most beautiful, the most impressive of all clubs,” he writes. “The players were all in white, looking magnificent. There were players I admired, like Kopa, Puskás and Di Stéfano. It really was the dream club.” He rejected a lot of top jobs Football to him is not merely a profession, most certainly not a hobby, it is framed much closer to an obsession. For the tall Frenchman, it has been a foe who can bring with it sleepless nights, the occasional gift of unbridled joy but consistently a entity against which he battles to improve himself, his players and in much more than a philosophical sense, the game itself.The pictures include a picture of a banner-trailing plane – but unfortunately not the one I helped crowdfund. Therefore, as I am sure you have realised, I have a profound emotional investment in Mr Wenger's autobiography; or certainly a huge part of it. His theories on player recruitment, scouting and management are for the most part thought-provoking and demonstrate why he is so in demand as a speaker amongst the denizens of the international business world. There are passages of extreme self-examination. He implies that too many things in life became secondary to football, to great personal cost in effect. Towards the end of My Life In Red And White, former Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger ponders the conversation that will take place should he eventually reach the gates of heaven.