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

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I asked my players why we hadn’t won the title,” Wenger writes. “They told me I was putting too much pressure on them, that the goal of winning the Premier League without losing a match seemed unachievable to them.” French. I speak German and English well, and French very well [laughs]. I can understand Italian, Spanish, some Japanese, but I speak them less well. But if I live for a while there it’s OK. Do you think your passion for beautiful football made you less successful and are you OK with that? From the outset, we embark on a near 70-year retrospective where life is totally interwoven with the sport. He takes as the starting point the family-run restaurant in Alsace where Wenger was first exposed to football, courtesy of the weekly gatherings of the local village team, culminating with the intensity of his time in North London where his sphere of influence ultimately permeated every aspect of Arsenal’s daily activity. Full disclosure, I have been an Arsenal fan for over 50 years, and an Arsene Wenger fan since the day I saw him announced as our manager on the Jumbotron at Highbury in 1996. I was devastated when he eventually left Arsenal, even though I knew the day had to come sometime.

Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial?Arsene Wenger is the man responsible for breaking Manchester United's dominance in the Premier League in the late 90s, which is why as a Man United fan, I used to love to hate him yet grudgingly admire his achievements. The fact that he was also a suave, well spoken and intelligent man made him almost the perfect adversary to Sir Alex Ferguson who although might have been a very intelligent man himself, he did not come across the same manner that Arsene Wenger did. The one that got away: Cristiano Ronaldo playing for Manchester United in 2003, the year he signed for the club. Photograph: Petros Giannakouris/AP But in the subsequent 14 years, the club failed to win the league again with fans turning on him and "Wenger Out" banners popping up across the globe. Banished was the players’ diet of fizzy drinks and chocolate, introduced were caffeine drops on sugar cubes at half time, physical and mental preparation was revolutionized, relative to what was then the norm. Facilitating the improvement of human performance through tailored man-management is a constant ambition. Passages relating to the 2003/04 season where Arsenal’s Invincibles won the League unbeaten provide great insights, particularly of the mental toll exerted on him. The anguish of losing the 2006 Champions League - to Barcelona - is recalled in one of the book’s best passages. Arsene Wenger on a recent Late Late Show interview

What to say? That this book left me underwhelmed is an understatement. I don't think anyone going to read this ever thought Wenger would lift the lid and dish out some nastiness or air vendettas against people, but what I expected was more emotion. More honesty. I was there for all the events he described. I know what happened. But I didn't need that. I wanted to know how he felt after the big decisions, the big games. Especially where he felt there were injustices. Wenger opens up about his life, sharing principles for success on and off the field with lessons on leadership, personal development, and management. Wenger has not returned to the sidelines since leaving Arsenal, but as of November he has brought characteristic rigour to his role as Fifa’s head of Global Football Development. He separated from his wife, Annie Brosterhous, in 2015; their daughter Léa is finishing a doctorate in neuroscience at Cambridge University. He divides his time between London, Paris and Fifa’s base in Zurich, often staying in hotels, and he admits that the hardest part of Covid-19 for him was when most of the leagues around the world were suspended. “I don’t know why but football games are my life and I don’t think that’s ever going to change,” he says. “So I missed it very much.” It was beneficial for me because it made me more open-minded. Let’s not forget I came from Alsace and I worked in Monaco; Monaco is a different country compared to Alsace. After that, I worked in Japan, then England, which is again very different. These kinds of experiences make you more tolerant, more willing to understand other people and realise that, at the end of the day, the culture in each country [consists of] reflexes that we have built in our childhood. To meet somebody else means you have to get out of yourself and try to see who the other guy is in front of you. And it’s part of the job of a manager.

Wenger, 70, famously led the club to the best period in their history, including the 2003-04 Premier League-winning Invincibles.

Living in Strasbourg, his main clubs were Racing Club de Strasbourg and German club Borussia Mönchengladbach – but Real Madrid held a special place in his heart. You brought about a revolution in the way British footballers considered their diet and wellbeing. Psychology and mindfulness are the current fashion in elite sport. What do you think could be the next big game-changer? He's solely responsible for making Arsenal a powerhouse team culminating in that incredible Invincibles Season. A hugely disappointing book. The footballing content is abysmal, especially the Arsenal part. Wenger spent 22 years at Arsenal and merely glosses over the two decades in such an inconsequential way that beggars belief, though his self-aggrandisement is prominent throughout.In 2002/03, the season in which Arsène Wenger announced to the press that Arsenal could go the whole season unbeaten, his team fell short. They won the FA Cup, but gave up an early lead in the title race to Manchester United, eventually losing by five points. Including Real Madrid, twice. “It’s terrible to have to turn down your childhood club,” he says. “But I had a mission at Arsenal, a contract to honour, and I’d given my word.” If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. Apart from that, I believe book is a must read for anyone who intends to go the distance in the field of management. For instance, how manage difficult characters, how to make sure your employees achieve more than they are doing it now. Importance to help make them realize that what you achieve as human being is far more important than what you achieve as the professional. 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.”

Gone for three because I love the man and couldn’t bear to go any lower, but it probably should be a two. It was definitely readable, and I’ve got a deep respect for anything Wenger has to say. However, he doesn’t say all that much. With the wide margins, large font and the fact that the book is fairly short anyway, it doesn’t really go any deeper than as to briefly describe a situation (sometimes a whole premier league season in a couple of paragraphs) before adding a passing comment or two, or a general description of how he felt during each period. It was extremely interesting listening to his life at Arsenal. How he discovered players and united them behind the vision of winning. Arsene has always been great at cultivating talent and his scope on developing/scouting young players was a pleasure to listen to. One even joked: "The last time I had this excitement for a book was for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows." The book is perhaps most interesting on Wenger’s early life and career – as this is little covered elsewhere. Another area that is perhaps even clearer from the book than I already thought it was is how the Invincible Season was an extremely deliberate and very explicit target (and it was interesting to read this part only 5/6 games into the 2020-21 season when already every team in the Premiership has lost).Asked what he did in life, he proposes that his answer will be that he tried everything within his power to win football matches. In isolation, it is a statement which could be considered an attempt at humor but taken in the overall context of this published reflection on his career it is not an unreasonable assessment of what appears to have been Wenger’s primary objective in life. I suppose it speaks to Wenger's character that he hasn't engaged in gossip, which I give him huge credit for. It's also clear he has, unsurprisingly, huge knowledge of the game and a passion for its advancement. What were you feeling when you watched Manu Petit score a goal in the 1998 World Cup final [to confirm France’s 3-0 victory against Brazil]?

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