[ARETE] Wenger

[Duncan Jamieson]

All,
Please find below and attached Phil Wedge's review of *Wenger: My Life and
Lessons in Red and White, *by Arsene Wenger, Arsenal Football Club.
Thanks
Duncan

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*Wenger: My Life and Lessons in Red and White*

Reviewed by Philip Wedge, University of Kansas

Arsene Wenger managed 22 seasons at Arsenal Football Club from 1996-2018,
winning three league titles, and seven FA cups, and finishing in the top
four in all but the last two seasons, when they were fifth, and in the
final season before he was pushed out with one year left on his contract,
sixth.  Yet Wenger covers his time at Arsenal in about one hundred pages in
his new autobiography, *Wenger: My Life and Lessons in Red and White*,
translated from the French by Daniel Hahn and Andrea Reece. He does,
however, give a full chapter to his team’s crowning achievement, the
“Invincible” season of 2003-04, in which the Gunners went a full Premier
League season without a loss, the only team in the league’s history to
accomplish that feat.

I enjoyed reading Wenger’s take on the Invincible team, the meshing
together of holdover players from the George Graham era—Tony Adams and Lee
Dixon, for example—with those acquired by Wenger after he began managing
the club, such as Thierry Henry, Patrick Vieira, Jens Lehman, and Sol
Campbell. Wenger had challenged this team before the season by saying they
had it in them to go undefeated:

              At the start of the season, I had told the team: ‘I know that
you can win without

            losing a match.’ I was convinced of it and I wanted them to be
convinced, to internalize

            the challenge . . . . When setting lofty objectives, it takes
time and patience for them

            to become fixed in people’s minds. But my aim was to win all
the time, to defer

            defeat and make the fear of losing disappear. (Wenger 155)



This passage is fairly typical of the “my life and lessons” part of the
autobiography, a coach’s distillation of what he sees in his sport and a
rationale for how events unfolded.  Wenger says his team achieved “a state
of grace” that season, “a unique spirit specific to that particular team”
(Wenger 156). Wenger’s idealistic view of the world comes through here, his
self-belief in what he can get out of his team by predicting their ability
to go undefeated in thirty-eight football matches.

As Amy Lawrence showed in her book on that season, *Invincible: Inside
Arsenal’s Unbeaten 2003-2004 Season*, the players were less convinced about
the merits of this challenge, especially after clinching the league
championship with four games left to play. Kolo Toure found the Invincible
challenge “stressful,” and Vieira added, “we didn’t want to put any more
pressure on our shoulders” (Lawrence 176). As Henry observed, being
Invincible was an abstract prize rather than a trophy or a medal: “You are
fighting for something you will never see” (Lawrence 177). Yet Wenger is
right in the end to take credit for the vision, for pushing his team to see
the imaginary as possible. Ironically, though, as bemoaned by many a
frustrated Arsenal fan, that team was the last one to win the league
championship! The Ferguson era at Manchester United and the financing of
Arsenal’s move from Highbury to the Emirates Stadium, among other factors,
would see to that.

To be honest, the most interesting reading for me in Wenger’s *My Life*
were the chapters leading up to Wenger’s appointment at Arsenal, about his
youth in Alsace, his transition from midfield player to coach, and his time
managing Nancy and Monaco in the French leagues. Wenger’s parents ran a
bistro in their village of Duttlenheim, near Strasbourg, which was



filled with men who drank one beer after another and smoked unfiltered
Gauloises

and talked nonstop football—their team, the neighboring team, the team they
would

be up against next, and the team they so admired, Racing Club de
Strasbourg, which

fired them up, made them smoke more and drink more and then so often shout,
and

fight, and fall. (Wenger 18)



Wenger claims that from a young age, “I retained their fervor but not their
excess,” learning to love football but also to read people: “it gave me
strength and an incredible instinct for understanding people” (Wenger
18-19). Certainly, the ability to read people is essential to managing any
professional sports club.  His colorful description of meeting a player for
an impromptu try-out on the way to interviewing to become an assistant
coach at Nancy, playing four-on-four with him and then taking him to Nancy
to sign a contract is a good early example of player management. In his
chapter on his time at Monaco, Wenger discusses coaching philosophies he
developed which remained with him through the years at Arsenal, training
sessions that emphasize technical abilities, the mixing of zonal and
man-to-man marking, the importance of two-way communication between player
and coach, and the value of youth training through academy systems such as
Monaco’s *centre de formation* (Wenger 84).

            The final chapter, “My Life after Arsenal,” describes his life
without Arsenal, without “that pitch . . . that was my adrenaline, my drug,
my reason for living” (Wenger 216), but he has not rested in forced
retirement, having become FIFA’s head of Global Football Development late
in 2019.  This gives him the opportunity to promote the coaching and
development of playing the “beautiful” football he referenced repeatedly in
interviews and press conferences over the years at Arsenal. While he will
no doubt be a fine ambassador for the game, I think Wenger underestimates
the American youth soccer scene for lacking youth development—has he not
heard of the Olympic Development Program or academies set up by Major
League Soccer clubs? He also believes the greatest challenge for women’s
football is in gaining “technical precision” (Wenger 220). I wonder what
former Arsenal women’s stars like Kelly Smith or current Arsenal stars
Vivianne Miedema and Katie McCabe, who lead the WSL in goals and assists,
respectively, think of that comment.

            Wenger’s autobiography closes with a 90-page section of
statistics, “Career Record,” to please stats-freaks like me. After a 2-page
summary of Wenger’s statistics as a player (1969-1981), we get the league
records and standings for each team Wenger managed, from his first season
at Nancy (1984) to his last at Arsenal (2018), a summary of his
accomplishments at Arsenal, a list of every player who appeared for Arsenal
during Wenger’s tenure, and a list of the top ten transfer fees paid by
Arsenal during his time. I should mention the book also contains some great
photos, including a classic one from 2009 of Wenger, arms spread wide,
standing amongst the Old Trafford fans after being sent off the pitch by
referee Mike Dean—for kicking a water bottle!

            In some ways, *Wenger: My Life and Lessons in Red and White *is
written particularly with Arsenal fans in mind, assuming they can fill in
gaps in the narrative from memory while Wenger tries to mollify their
disappointment at the club maintaining a top-four level without ever
claiming a league championship during his last fourteen years managing
Arsenal FC. For those interested in the history of the Premier League,
Wenger’s autobiography is well worth the read, since he has been so much a
part of the League’s history, having managed more matches (823) than anyone
else. For the same reason, it is a must read for longtime fans of the
Arsenal, giving the manager’s perspective of their team, a manager who
changed the English game, injected a European technical flair, and brought
a host of European talent with him.



   Wenger, Arsene. *Wenger: My Life and Lessons in Red and White*, Daniel
Hahn and Andrea Reed, trans. (Chronicle Prism 2020).

Philip Wedge, English, University of Kansas
Remember to smell the roses as you recumber past

Duncan R. Jamieson, Ph. D.
Professor of History
Book Review Editor
*AETHLON: The Journal of Sport Literature*
Ashland University
Ashland, OH  44805
USA
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