My Life in Red and White: The Sunday Times Number One Bestselling Autobiography

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Wenger outlines that he was a difficult character to manage but it remains annoyingly unexplained how we managed to let him go and end up with Mykhi instead. This site is my blog of reviews of classic and contemporary sports books that I have read and am reading. The opening chapters of what is a surprisingly short book, about Wenger’s childhood and playing days, are elegiac and rather moving: he grew up in Alsace, in a village with three blacksmiths, where the local farmers used horses rather than tractors. The acme was in the 2003-4 season, when Arsenal won the league without losing a game, a feat that seems unlikely to be repeated. In a career as long as his, perhaps the sheer number of players you have disappointed, fans you have upset by selling their idols, journalists to whom you haven’t given decent quotes and opponents that you’ve beaten once too often just becomes too long.

The book was better than I expected all about Arsene Wenger early career up till the departure from Arsenal. On the one hand, you have insightful and gripping works by the likes of Sir Alex Ferguson and Paul Merson; and then on the other hand, books such as Ashley Cole’s My Defence, standing out in the memory for all the wrong reasons. During the week of the book’s release, I watched most of the interviews he was a part of, happy to see him incredibly fresh and relaxed in the two years since he left the club. In his later years at the club, Arsenal failed to mount a title challenge and went through a nine-year period without winning any silverware.Wenger to suddenly open up his puffy coat and reveal the secrets he has long kept to himself has come to the wrong memoir . He was willing to sign a new contract with us around the time we went out of the Champions League to Bayern losing 5-1 in each leg.

Writing on his daughter Léa, Wenger concedes ‘she must have suffered sometimes from my absences and from our separation, although she never said anything to me. The answers, unfortunately, are either missing altogether from My Life in Red and White, or expressed in a way that is long familiar to us: the English players stopped drinking and eating Mars bars; he used to have his ups and downs with Ferguson but they get on fine now. It is these connections, the “crossing paths” and mutual support that are evident throughout his early years in football, whether at AS Mutzig, Mulhouse, or Racing Strasbourg, the club where he juggled playing and coaching roles and that would serve as his first “laboratory” (bringing a psychiatrist into the club for the first time, among other things like “invisible training”—dietary regimes, massage, mental preparation, sleep, quality of life, the people the players surround themselves with), and later at Monaco, Nagoya and Arsenal. Perhaps you are interested in how the manager elaborated on his tactics, how he approached certain crucial matches (say, the final of the Champions’ League), or what happened when Arsenal lost heavily (say, against Manchester United in 2011, 8-2).As others have said, a kiss-and-tell was never likely, and AW still has a day job in football, which limits his scope to burn bridges, not that he is the bridge-burning sort.

That afternoon, Arsenal looked years away from being able to challenge Manchester United, the then perennial champions. We did a swap which provided both clubs with players who both underperformed and cost a fortune with little resale value .However there are probably many more examples of players who were signed on the back of a flukily excellent season and revert to their mean level. Afterwards, Wenger asked his father what they’d been talking about and received the reply, in effect, “No idea, I could hardly understand a word he was saying”. To quote the title of TTG’s excellent match report, “Seven days is a long time in football” and as the interlull is 14 days it would be tempting to say it will be twice as long as the interval between our last two league games but considering the Villa result I have a feeling it’s going to seem a good deal longer than twice. In fact, it was a cigarette and decent English skills from his months spent in Cambridge as a twenty-nine-year-old that got him an invite to David Dein’s house where a most enduring friendship began because of Arsene’s skillful charades rendition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream! He mucks in at his parents’ bistro, takes up smoking and thinks nothing of going without sleep if it means more football.

Major players in Wenger’s teams get a few paragraphs but we gain no insight into who those players are, what Wenger’s relationships with them were like, why they were pivotal players. But is still a well-paced and well-thought-out account of one of football’s most iconic and influential figures, and entirely befitting of its remarkable author. Although he talks in the abstract about what makes a good player and coach, specifics are thin on the ground. Who replaced Merson with Overmars and then Overmars with Pires , who replaced Petit with Gilberto and Vieira with Fabregas and made a profit on every deal after taking their best years for us.

Throughout the book, even in the latter parts that sometimes read more like Wikipedia entries, there is a clear acknowledgement of not just the people who influenced and helped him, but also those who deserve a mention because they formed a part of the journey, however small (for example, his friendship with the legendary Carlos Alberto Torres and his son Alexandre who was one of his first signings when he went to Nagoya). Chapter 3 covers Wenger’s first couple of coaching jobs – a year at Cannes, then in Ligue 2, and three years at Nancy in Ligue 1. He did, however, go on to lead the Gunners’ to three FA Cup titles in 2014, 2015 and 2017 before he resigned at the end of the 2018 campaign. I enjoyed these discoveries—how he was an integral part of the Cannes centre de formation where, later, stars like Zidane and Viera would develop, how pivotal to his career his relationship with Glenn Hoddle would prove to be even after he was no longer his coach, how the team he most admired as a young boy was the legendary Di Stefano-led Real Madrid team of the 50s—and wished their occurrence was more consistent once we reached the Arsenal years of which much is already widely known in comparison.