How a quiet French intellectual revolutionised British sporting culture Andrew Anthony Just after Arsenal Football Club won the Double in 1998, David Dein, the vice-chairman, filled out a hotel form for his team manager, Arsne Wenger. He wrote down his name and address, and then, in the section marked “occupation”, he entered “miracle worker”. One of the rewards for success in football is to be accorded a kind of divine status, at least until the success comes to an end. Another, of course, is large sums of money, and last week Wenger underlined his achievements by signing a three-year extension to his contract, thought to be worth about 7,5-million. But its not the trophies hes conjured up for Arsenal hes won nothing since 1998 that make Wenger special, so much as the spell hes cast on British football. In a way, his greatest trick has been to turn wine into water. When Wenger arrived at Arsenal in 1996, the club had gained a reputation as a haven for boozers, gamblers and brawlers. The team captain, Tony Adams, had served time for a drink-driving offence. Midfielder Paul Merson had confessed to alcohol, cocaine and gambling addictions, and other players had been involved in fights after drinking. Although Arsenal had the most publicised problems, it was an open secret that alcohol abuse was endemic in the game. Symptomatic of laddish attitudes ingrained in footballers from youth, boozing was widely viewed as an essential component of team spirit. When the quietly spoken Frenchman started work at Highbury, the players, and much of the press, were not exactly convinced by his bona fides. Hed come from Japan, a footballing backwater, and before that he had managed Monaco which in the British imagination occupies roughly the same space as Never-Never land. Not only that but hed never made it as a player in a top side. “He hasnt got a clue,” thought Adams. The players called him Clouseau, a nickname that spoke of comic arrogance and bumbling incompetence. And he had all manner of strange ideas about fitness and diet. He wanted the players to eat broccoli, stretch their limbs properly, and avoid alcohol in the vat-like quantities that it had traditionally been consumed. Clearly the man did not understand the English game. The truth was the opposite: the English game did not understand the man. Yet five years later it is the sport, rather than Wenger, that has changed most dramatically. Arsenal is a teetotal environment and nowadays it is widely accepted that footballers are athletes and need to treat their bodies accordingly. Although this might seem a truism, it is one that was not readily embraced on these shores. The reason Wenger got his message across can be attributed to a mixture of understated determination and, crucially, the fact that he could show that his techniques worked. Not only did Arsenal start winning, they did so in style a word that had long been viewed at Highbury as suspiciously limp-wristed. Almost overnight, Wenger transformed the most boring team in Britain into a vision of speed and flair. But he could only do that by convincing the players of his new methods, and he could only do that by winning. To see how difficult that task was you need only look at Arsenals rivals, Tottenham. When they decided that a foreign coach was the answer to their decline, they recruited a Swiss tactician by the name of Christian Gross. Gross insisted that players wear flip-flops when not on the pitch. So thrown were they by this that when they were on the pitch they played as if they were still shod in flip-flops. Result: Gross out. Having won the Double, Arsenal players changed Wengers nickname to Windows, a reference to his rimless technocrats spectacles. Sven-Goran Eriksson, the England coach, also favours minimalist eyewear. But without Wengers initial vision, it is unlikely the Swede would have got a look in. The two men have much else in common. They are urbane, forward-thinking and multilingual. In short, everything that the old-style English manager was most emphatically not. In many ways, Wengers antipode is Sir Alex Ferguson, the Manchester United manager who, with the exception of 1998, has maintained the upper hand in their continuing rivalry. Ferguson is renowned for screaming in the face of his players, what they call “the hairdryer” treatment. Wenger is much less aggressive, preferring to administer the psychological equivalent of a shampoo and head massage. He gained his Zen-like ability to conquer his emotions during his time in Japan, where he enjoyed considerable success with Grampus Eight. Phillipe Auclair, the london-based correspondent for France Football, says that while Japan transformed Wenger, Wenger also transformed Japanese football. “He is an inventor. He invented football at Monaco, which had never had a decent team. He invented football in Japan. And now he has invented modern football in England.” Ferguson is renowned as a workaholic but arguably of the two men it is Wenger who is the most obsessed with football. “I cant forget about football for even a minute,” he admitted. “It can help to have interests outside of football and Alex has got that with horse racing, but my problem is that I have no other passions.” It is said that the only two routes that Wenger knows from his home in Totteridge, north london, are to Highbury and Arsenals training ground. He has been too busy to venture further afield. It seems strange that a man with a degree in economics, who can speak five languages, including Japanese, should devote so much of his brain power to the problem of how to score goals without conceding them. Wenger is nothing if not a paradox. Unusually open with the press, he is a fiercely private man. Of his life beyond football, such as it is, all that is known is that he lives with a French former PE teacher called Annie Brosterhous, and that the couple have a four-year-old daughter. He appears serious to the point of solemnity, but friends such as Dein attest to his “wicked sense of humour”. Auclair says it is when Wenger speaks English that he seems most German. Born in Alsace, the Germanic region of France, in 1949, Wenger displayed little of the local appetite for rich food and drink. He was a puritan in a Catholic stronghold. His one obsession was football. Yet his fellow players found him too calculated and thoughtful. “When you are a professional footballer,” he said of his time as a player in France, “you spend your holidays at Club Med. Me, I bought an air ticket to london. A friend advised me to go to Cambridge, where I hired a bike and enrolled on a three-week English course. My team-mates thought I was mad.” Wenger played a handful of games for Strasbourg in the year (1979) they won the French championship, but made little impression until he became a coach. Moving from Cannes to Nancy to Monaco, where he won the title in his first season, he established himself as an inspired motivator and began to build up an encyclopaedic knowledge of world football and footballers. Two events helped forge in Wenger an ethical code that is unusual in the flexible moral world of football. During his time in charge, Monaco were overshadowed by Marseille, a team that were later proved to have bribed their way to success. He retains deep misgivings about the corrupting influence of cash. “It has brought a lot of people to the game,” he noted, “who dont care about football, only money.” In his penultimate season at Monaco he was approached by Bayern Munich to become their new manager. He turned them down because he was under contract. Five games into the new season, Monaco sacked him. As one German football president observed: “Arsne is almost too good to be true. You would not expect somebody like him in a business like football. He is such a respectable, decent person.” Now, with the new contract signed, the reserved dignity appears to be paying dividends. Arsenal are playing their best football since he arrived, he seems set to eclipse Ferguson at last, and Arsenal this week got the go-ahead for a new 400-million stadium. The history books, of course, will judge Wengers legacy only by the silverware he accrues. What they wont mention is the effect he has had on British managerial thinking, and not just in football. With his philosophical outlook and studied demeanour, he is a Europhile posterboy. A couple of years ago, he was asked by supporters of the single currency to join the campaign for the euro. In private, he can mount a provocative argument for monetary union. But we have heard nothing from Wenger, because when it comes to discussing European goals, theres only one thing on his mind, and thats football.