The potential awkwardness is averted by the first of many passing fan requests for a picture. Wenger – or Monsieur Wenger as each supplicant respectfully calls him – is his usual impeccably polite and yet also slightly detached self each time. I feel bad now for calling you “Arsène”, I tell him afterwards. “That’s no problem at all,” he replies.
We go on to discuss his book. Did he write it himself? “Yes. With help. But it’s me.” It’s the first one he’s done, unusual in an age when players bring out their first memoir around the age of 24. “I’ve been asked to do it for many years. For me it was very difficult. First of all, I don’t like to talk too much about me. And second it was saying somewhere in my head, ‘I don’t manage any more. It’s the end of my experience.’ And I don’t like that. I didn’t want to sound like I’d retired. Then I thought, OK, I do it even if it’s only for my family [he separated from his wife, Annie, in 2015; they have one daughter, Léa, 23] so they would know one day what I did in my life.”
Does he want to manage a club again? “I’m not sure.” Because when he left Arsenal, he sounded certain that he did. “Yes. For 40 years I did only that every day in my life.” Two years on, he is enjoying having more time for himself. What’s he doing? “Making some sport. Visiting my family and friends. Holidays. Reading a lot. Enjoying life but in a sensible way, because I’m a little bit drilled by 30, 40 years of discipline, you know?”
I do know, having read in his book how he gets up at 5.30am and does an hour and a half in the gym, with extra cardio if possible. Most successful people, I say, are disciplined, but you’re… “Super-disciplined?” he suggests. I tell him I was going to say “fanatical”. Is that fair? “Fanatical, yes.” Most of us, including the famous, would recoil from the description. But Wenger chuckles, clearly relishing it. His early start comes after just five or six hours’ sleep. His energy is prodigious. During lockdown, which he spent in Totteridge, the north London suburb he calls home, he ran “8-10k a day”.
Part of that stamina comes from a rural upbringing, roaming the fields around the village in Alsace where his parents ran a bar. He grew up speaking the Alsatian dialect and French and learnt German at school. Football dominated the bar and the village. But back then, the French professional game lacking the depth and structure long established in neighbouring countries, Wenger could not even dream of his future career. “I’d never seen a coach until I was 19. It is the surprise of my life to spend it in football.”
The other great influence on the young Wenger was the church. “I still have religious morality,” he says. “I still like to go to church. It’s a place where you can concentrate. I watch Mass on television sometimes, but I cannot say I am a practising Catholic. God has a huge strength: you cannot prove that he doesn’t exist. On the other hand you cannot prove he exists. Religion has been created from us. It is a way to be happy in life. God forgives you for your sins; in the future we go to paradise. We can focus on the present.”
When he first arrived in the UK, Wenger cut an unusual figure on the touchline. Dapper, ascetic, erudite, he was nicknamed the Professor by the initially sceptical old hands at Arsenal. Back in the days when neither foreign managers nor foreign players, with their more sophisticated ways, were the norm, Wenger looked suspiciously posh in the context of England’s doggedly proletarian culture. And in a way he was. He relates in his book, for instance, how when he first met Arsenal’s vice-chairman at the time, David Dein, he ended up acting out
A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a game of charades at Dein’s house. Hard to imagine Big Sam Allardyce in a similar role.
Arsène Wenger with his ex-wife, Annie, and daughter, Léa, 2005
COURTESY OF Arsène WENGER
Back in 1996, Wenger’s insistence on the importance of concepts such as correct nutrition, radically reduced alcohol intake, regular sleep, stretching, mental preparation and resilience of character were met with scepticism. “We want our Mars bars,” his squad would sing on the team bus. Then they started winning, and his rivals decided these newfangled notions of “invisible training” might have some merit and promptly copied them.
Ironically, all the time Wenger was trying to persuade Tony Adams, Paul Merson and co to swap booze for broccoli, he was hiding an unhealthy habit of his own: he smoked.
“Yes, for a long time I smoked. My father smoked 40 a day. I grew up in a bar full of smoke. In France, smoking is normal.” Even so, he didn’t start until he was 34. “A friend of mine was a heavy smoker. We’d sit up at night talking and I’d take one, you know? I still smoked when I came to England, one or two after dinner, no more.” Did the players know? “I don’t think so. I never smoked with the team. Nobody has ever seen me smoking.” He has long since stopped – “My daughter complaining, you know?” – but still enjoys a drink. “Good red wine, not much.”
We move on to politics, in which he takes a keen interest. Rather confusingly, he says, “I am new liberal right. I’m for freedom but certain things – health, defence – have to be controlled by the government. I like Macron. He is centre. It’s very difficult to satisfy people in France. It’s difficult to govern.”
Yes, I say. Every time the government tries to change anything there’s a strike or a riot. Wenger shrugs. “I feel sorry for Macron, because he tries very hard.” He thinks the French commitment to short hours, long lunches, generous welfare, heavily subsidised agriculture and quite staggering bureaucracy is unsustainable. “It’s like in a family,” he says, presumably unconsciously channelling Margaret Thatcher. “It’s OK as long as you can balance your budget. Until you have to pay. Then it’s not OK. With the debt we have now, we cannot continue like that. Because the next generations will have to pay back. It’s not a fair way.” He thinks the German commitment to balanced budgets is the example to follow. “We behave like we want more and more no matter whether we balance our budget or not. Similarly in football.”
And what of his adopted country? “I love England. I feel sorry for England [he says that rather than Britain] because I am scared that they will suffer now [after Brexit]. You’re in a very weak position to negotiate. England has made the choice for passion and the desire for sovereignty. I can understand that, but unfortunately it was not a rational decision. I’m scared that they pay for that. Europe will have to make it hard for them or everybody will want to leave. They have no choice. I know [Michel] Barnier. He said from the first day they will be tough on England.” The irony of Brexit as regards football is, he says, “You want sovereignty, but all the English clubs are run by people who are not English.”
Arsenal fans call for a change of manager, March 2017 and, below, his final game, against Burnley at the Emirates, May 2018
GETTY IMAGES
GETTY IMAGES
There’s a sense Wenger is getting over the pain of enforced separation from the club where he “knitted my soul in red and white”, as he puts it in his book. He likes his role with Fifa. “I can share what I’ve learnt in my life and hopefully be efficient in what I share,” he says. The first year was tough for other reasons too. “I lost my brother and my sister in six months. My sister had Alzheimer’s. She was not well for ten years. My brother died quite quickly.” Their loss has made him value time spent with his daughter all the more, visiting her frequently in Cambridge, where she is a research student in neuroscience.
“I would have respected my contract,” he says, looking back on his Emirates exit. “The club thought it was better I stopped. I’d always lived with the idea that could happen. The supporters were not happy any more. Some of them. You can understand that, at some stage, 22 years, people want a change.” I tell him I’d interviewed Tony Blair shortly before he stepped down in 2007, how he’d said that after ten years, people are sick of your face. “Ah, so I punished them for 12 years?” he jokes.
Does he now think he might have stayed too long? He pauses for quite a while. “Listening to that question,” he replies, “makes me think, ‘Yes.’ ” Well, that’s the consensus, isn’t it? “Maybe I stayed too long,” he admits. “I don’t know. But I was committed like on the first day. I think I guided the club through the most difficult period in a very successful way. At some stage people say you’re too old, but they don’t really look at what you do. I served the club as much as I could.”
And served it to the exclusion of pretty much everything else. “I rejected those around me,” he writes. “I did not see beauty or pleasure or relaxation.” Infamously, he did not see any on-field skulduggery by his players either. When issuing his mantra in post-match interviews that he didn’t see the sending off or penalty appeal, he now admits, “Sometimes it wasn’t true. I’m a bad loser, yes. If you’re a good loser, you don’t last a long time in this job. That’s something I had from birth. I’m still like it. If I play cards, I want to win. You know what they say,” he adds, tapping me on the arm (he is surprisingly tactile). “Women can kill for love and men because they hate to lose.”
“
Maybe I stayed too long. But I was committed like on the first day
His obsession was the reason he didn’t become a father until he was 48. “I think basically this is a job for single people. I always cherish freedom. I had girlfriends, but my priority was always football. I liked the idea to take my luggage and go anywhere in the world tomorrow. At Cannes I lived over the Bay of Villefranche; when I was in Japan [in Nagoya, not a natural beauty spot] I had a view of a wall, but I always say if I won the game it was a great view and I was happy. If happiness is liking the life one lives, I can say I have been happy, and still am.”
Wrapping up our conversation, we deal with a few miscellaneous topics. He thinks Arsenal’s latest manager, his former player and Guardiola protégé Mikel Arteta, has “got the grip back on the team. They finished well, though they had a bad Premier League. Fifty-six points!” He thinks England’s national team are looking good for the Euros next year, bestowing the ultimate seal of approval on the manager in saying, “Southgate analyses well.” He thinks the pandemic will have no long-term deflationary effect on transfer fees, wages or the relentlessly spiralling hype around the game. “As soon as it is over, football will become mad again.” He worries, however, that, “The lower leagues will die unless the elite clubs help out.”
And he also thinks that without fans, football “loses its charm. We can take the fans for granted, but they are the only thing that hasn’t changed. The players, the game, the clubs, the stadiums all change. The fans don’t. When you arrived at Highbury, on Avenell Road, you got out of the bus, you shared it with the fans. At the Emirates, you are inside, all the security, it’s not the same.”
The grand old stadium was redeveloped as flats after the club moved. Wenger seriously considered buying one. As it is, he volunteers just before we part, “I drive sometimes through Highbury. The entrance is still there, the gates are listed…”
And what does he feel? “I feel nostalgia,” he replies. “We had good times there.”