![]() I thought it’s more important to be kind, master the situation and give an indication of what you should do. ![]() ![]() If you do that every week, people adapt to the behaviour of their manager. “The hairdryer method is more to get your frustrations out – and it’s not very efficient. “I felt always that the most important thing is that you get a good diagnosis of what’s going on,” Wenger says. Wright says Wenger was the first manager he had who didn’t indiscriminately “blast you down” at half-time. And he brought calmness to the dressing room. Wenger transformed Arsenal’s style of play from one of safety first to a more expressive, improvisational attacking game – which at its peak was christened “ Wengerball”. There was a marked culture shift as players started drifting in from the continent, and individual performances were bolstered by revolutionary concepts such as a healthy diet and not following Ray Parlour’s lead by sinking 10 pints the night before a match. Photograph: Clive Mason/Getty Images Sport At that stage, I felt surprised, but I felt: ‘Let’s do what I think I can do, which is to manage a football team.’ So I was not destabilised.”Īrsenal manager Arsène Wenger lifts the Premiership trophy at Highbury in 2004. “I think I have one quality, maybe, when I’m in adversity: I can concentrate on what is important and what is less important. “I had enough maturity to deal with it,” says Wenger. Wenger held an impromptu press conference on the steps outside Highbury, Arsenal’s stadium at the time, and said he was ready to refute the lies. It climaxed with false reports of Wenger’s dismissal and rumours that a newspaper was set to print a highly compromising story about his private life. Winning games turned that scepticism into hostility, “a mass of negativity because he was a foreign manager and he was doing things that are different,” Arsenal legend Ian Wright claims in the documentary. The press was sceptical – “Arsène who?” asked one infamous Evening Standard headline. Wenger was one of the first foreign managers in the league, and his arrival contributed to English football’s transformation from an inward-looking monoculture to the global game it is today. “If you don’t set high targets,” he says now, “you don’t push people to go as far as they could be.”īut there were obstacles off the pitch as well as on. Two years before the Invincible season, Wenger had announced that he thought his team could do it – and been mocked for saying so. Even his greatest rival, Sir Alex Ferguson, had to give Wenger his due, commenting: “The achievement stands aside, it stands above everything else.” Arsenal still hold the record for the longest unbeaten run in league history, at 49 matches.Īrsène Wenger holds an impromptu press conference on the steps outside Highbury in 1996. His crowning achievement was in 2003/04, however, when Arsenal became known as the Invincibles after winning the Premier League title without losing a single game. He won the Premier League title and FA Cup in his second season, becoming the first foreign manager to win the double, then did the same again a few years later. When Wenger came to Arsenal in 1996, the impact was almost immediate. I was not a genius I had to dedicate my whole energy to one thing.”īut there’s no denying that it worked. ![]() “Maybe only geniuses can be successful in many multi-territorial things. “There are other important things in life – art, for example – that I didn’t explore at all,” he tells me, when I ask what’s so scary about this single-mindedness. Sometimes I’m afraid of that.” His father, Alphonse, would never tell his son: ‘Well done!’, only: ‘You can do better’ In a new documentary about his life and career, Arsène Wenger: Invincible, the 72-year-old declares: “The meaning of my life was football.
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