Arsène Wenger: ‘I try to read everything that helps me understand human beings’

The erudite Frenchman who transformed English football takes questions from politicians, artists, readers – and José Mourinho. Introduction by Tim Lewis

rsène Wenger often imagines what he will say to God when he dies. In most of these exchanges, God asks Wenger to justify his time on Earth, how he gave meaning to his own life and to others. “I tried to win football matches!” Wenger will explain. God looks at him, sceptical: “That’s all?” Wenger goes on: winning matches is really hard to do. If you do your job well, you bring joy to millions, a collective euphoria and catharsis. And if you don’t… At this point Wenger snaps back to reality.

“Sometimes I feel I’m scared for having only done football in my life,” says Wenger, who is 70, on a video call from Zurich. “So, when I speak to God, it’s a bit pretentious. It’s just that if God exists and they have a test to see if you go to hell or to heaven, it might look ridiculous to only have dedicated your life to winning football games. And that’s why I came up with that idea. I feel sometimes it could feel meaningless that you dedicated your whole life to that.”

Wenger was born in 1949, grew up in a village in Alsace, eastern France, and had an early insight into human psychology watching the patrons of the bistro that his parents ran. “Alcohol, brawling, violence, everything that used to scare or disgust me as a child,” he recalls in My Life in Red and White, his new autobiography. He became a hard-grafting midfielder, eventually playing for Strasbourg in France’s top division, but he always thought deeply, even obsessively, about the game, and in his early 30s he moved organically into coaching, first at Cannes and Nancy then Monaco and in Japan at Nagoya Grampus Eight.

I don’t know why but football games are my life and I don’t think that’s ever going to change

In 1996, Wenger, tall, whip-thin, like a sixth-former in a suit, entered the British consciousness when he was announced by Arsenal as the fourth foreign manager in the history of top-division English football (the previous three had not fared well). He held the position for 22 years until 2018, during which time Arsenal won three Premier League titles and seven FA Cups. While his great rival at Manchester United, Alex Ferguson, motivated players with the famed “hairdryer treatment”, Wenger became known for “invisible” training: a holistic approach that went beyond fitness and ball skills and overhauled the lifestyle and nutrition of the squad. Players were given instruction on how to chew their food; the traditional half-time boost of a chocolate bar and fizzy drink was swapped for a sugar lump with caffeine drops on it.

Underpinning everything was Wenger’s profound, all-consuming desire to win – and win with style. In My Life in Red and White, he describes football and Arsenal as “a matter of life and death” – not once, but three times. Does he really mean that? “I would say football at a top-level experience is like that,” Wenger replies. “Because if it’s not a matter of life or death, it doesn’t mean enough to you and you don’t survive a long time in the job.”

Wenger arrives at Highbury for his introductory press conference in 1996.

Wenger arrives at Highbury for his introductory press conference in 1996. Photograph: Richard Austin/REX/Shutterstock

Sometimes Wenger’s competitiveness spilled over, notably in his epic, bristling clashes with first Ferguson and then Chelsea’s José Mourinho. But anyone expecting mud-slinging from his autobiography has misread Wenger. There’s mention of Ferguson’s “crushing authority” on English football, but he nimbly sidesteps anything more damning; Mourinho isn’t mentioned once. “I didn’t want it to be a book of revenge or frustration or of injustice,” he says. “I didn’t want to show: ‘Well, he did that to me’ – all these things. But you know what happened in your life and you have to rise above that. I wanted it to be a positive experience of life. You cannot have the life I’ve had until now and be negative.”