Forget Italy and France in 2010: the T-shirts, the hats, the over-size plastic banners collected and recycled at the South African tournament as a disappointing rite of passage by tens of thousands of fans. When it comes to underachieving, Luxembourg is the shocker. A few players are routinely spotted at the Jeunesse Esch ground—a stadium which registers an average of 1,017 spectators during the matches of the country’s football league. They pass and discuss their soccer know-how like a 1915 scene in the public gardens of former Jugoslavia, where kissing is going on and an agent of the counter-intelligence is about to be shot by a Serbian spy. Luxembourg is so bad at soccer that only the 2-1 beating of Gambia, during a friendly exhibit in 2007, interrupted a sobering period of twelve years in which the national team failed to win a game.
During a 2001 world exclusive interview, Joel Wolff, secretary-general of Luxembourg’s Football Association, shilly-shallied for a while, but then chose a polite periphrasis of continental irony to rectify the audience’s expectations for the future: “Let’s say that we have arrived at a relative nadir.” The meeting broke up peaceably. Wolff is not a plutocrat, but a real gentleman of international interweavings. His familiarity with Goethe hides with fashionable elegance the fact that the current FIFA standings of Luxembourg are only fractionally better than a landscape of ruins.
In what seems a deliberate mismatch of mood and desire, the Arsenal fans gathering at the booths of the Emirates Stadium also decided, lately, that their coach never achieved real virtuosity at orchestrating, and that his failure at delivering adequate performances is now making of him a candidate for the chopping board. Like nomadic wolves around the oak of their ancestors, the symptoms of disaster are everywhere to be seen in his lackluster economy of unnecessary emotions. There is a superficial rightness about these remarks, and at the same time a profound and distressing misconception at their heart. (The nadir of results, at Arsenal, is still an apex of technical modifications.) A trained economist and a man whose charm is somewhat elfish and inscrutable, Arsène Wenger uses his intelligence like a razor against the recognition of things painfully in good taste. Wenger is, perhaps, the Maurice Ravel of modern soccer: not in the way the suave and dandified musician tried to mask his stylistic anxiety, but because the fastidiousness of his preferences might have become a way of disguising emotional sensitivity.
Both in himself and in his work, Wenger has always eluded labelling, and it seems that the more closely you look, the more precision recedes into Ravellian atmospherics. One doesn’t have to love Wenger’s tactics to hear, and perhaps rebel against, its intense nervous energy. No doubt these are idiosyncratic responses. But they are not necessarily altogether subjective. The spectators at the Emirates are looking in anguish at their manager’s red tie, impeccably knotted, and so do the players. He glances back with the menacing tension a conductor of Wagner is staring at his musicians in the pit, during (for instance) the Good Friday music in Parsifal. To this day, the most nerve-wracking soccer memories of Wenger’s life, while in charge of the Gunners, came from the humiliating 8-2 defeat by Manchester United, which must resonate in his ears with the tremolo and musical aptitudes of a lurid tourbillon of death.
The Guardian critic Richard Williams, a sworn enemy of Wenger’s style, excoriates his petitesse de l’esprit, if not his imposture. Even a George Best biographer as painstaking as him is unable to do Wenger justice, apart from the journalist’s reasonable desire to refuse anything to do with cliches, deference or homage. If Williams were to compile his own Master Tacticians of 2011, we’d probably learn about Wenger’s somewhat unbalanced soccer education, including, as he admits, middle-class upbringing and academic degrees in economics. The manager’s residency at the Emirates, far from meriting him a foreign honor such as the Légion d’Honneur, would go down as the experience of a poor teacher who could not resist the allures of self-promotion, while also accepting countless Frenchmen and football amateurs with no reluctance. Only in the second half of August, prophetically, we learned from Williams’ admirably light touch about Arsenal as an ‘almighty mess’- an inexperienced XI whose style of playing, given the coach’s continuing inability, ‘fizzle out after early promise, just like last season‘ - and about Wenger himself as a ‘general stripped of his virtue’.
Richard Williams’ intolerance of Wenger, both quirky and grimly appropriate to the current darkness at the Emirates, echoes the first impressions recorded in his autobiography by Tony Adams, a former captain who is exactly the kind of player the Gunners would need right now. “What does this Frenchman know about soccer?,” Adams confessed he caught himself thinking; “He wears glasses and looks more like a schoolteacher. He’s not going to be as good as George [Graham]. Does he even speak English properly?” It would be ironic indeed if Williams, self-appointed chastiser of Wenger, had inadvertently redirected attention from the current alarms to a past leader of Arsenal, and sporting hero to many, in his recollection of the kind of emotional impact the French manager inspired to acquire that additional edge.
Waiting for failure to be laid at his door, Arsène Wenger started taking international games as a malaria prophylactic. He spotted one or two errors in previous performances of the English Premier League—an acoustic environment echoing domestic claustrophobia. He understood that an attacking ‘high-diamond’ is too tedious a speech to remain impressive for long. At a time in which his players were traumatized by the predatory kidnapping of their former captain, Cesc Fabregas, by the mighty Barcelona and the impending transfer of Samir Nasri to Manchester City, an assortment of soccer authorities as imposing as a romantic opera house, Wenger had to issue a shoot-to-kill siege-busting policy. The possibility of a threatening turn was raised early by the struggle against Udinese, a provincial side that lives alongside the warlike tribes of the Serie A like a tributary downriver. Once elevated from their murky brown waters, everybody embraced the Friulani as an ideal adoptive childhood: a cultural milestone of the underdog team.
The meticulous Guidolin was largely credited - in a move that did not scandalize the British press - with the Orphic ability to soothe his bursting gang of youngsters into the royal chapels of Champions League football. (Italian bel canto, after all, displays an unexamined faith in the moral power of artisanal practice.) And in truth, Arsenal’s nervy win in the first leg of the fixture could have been a lot bloodier, had Udinese only managed to give Antonio Di Natale, their most dangerous weapon, the necessary support in terms of manpower and strategy. The prospect of waking up in Friuli, screaming and sweating, made a comparison with Heart of Darkness all too plausible.
At daybreak, cold air on his face, Wenger hoped that there would be no waste or injury in picking up the starting players, but more than this he hoped that after Udine there would be available data - the statistics, soon to be the object of his obsession, the kind of evidence you need to get ahead, like the number of kilometers run by each player in a game. ‘If you use figures’, Wenger had once conceded to a friend during winter, as he saw windows outlined by candlelight, ‘you’ll see more and win more’. The final game with Udinese, meanwhile, turned out to be neither a radiant tale of redemption, nor a breathtaking fight in the easternmost Italian jungle with a black-and-white anaconda. Guidolin’s reliance on the saves of Handanovic, the ever-remarkable Slovenian goalkeeper, or his fixation on Di Natale, whose braggadocio at times borders on genius, betrayed an oddly fatalistic approach. Quizzical and thin-shouldered, Guidolin is still crouching down the pitch like a geologist to fit the recalcitrant pebble through the scattered junipers. He had ditched, though, the hybrid 3-5-1-1 system, whose impact on the Serie A had been frighteningly ebullient, in favor of a conventional, zonal shape of 4-4-1-1 which has seen, by now, better days. The conversion of Udinese’s two wing-backs, the valiant Isla and Armero, into auxiliary playmakers also did not pass the test, with a lot of territory left to run between the two banks of players, and the Ghanaian Agyemang-Badu added an offhand casualness to the game, merely jogging back when outpaced in the middle.
So weakened was Udinese by its seasonal liquidation of players that it would have been probably relegated to the Europa League anyway, had not Guidolin decided to spare them the embarrassment by envisioning one of his customarily prudent plans. By the second half of the second leg, though, when Wenger had a double stroke of tactical mastery by calling Tomáš Rosický from the bench and by making of Theo Walcott an ‘inverted’ winger, nothing could save them. And the proud Friulani, as they were by then known, slipped out of the Champions League top flight. Rosický was rightly promoted to the first squad to patrol the space left unattended by Gervinho, a man who relies on dribbling like the Swiss Red Cross on aerograms during the Second World War, while the young Walcott was greatly improved by tweaking his runs inside (though he would not follow, as I hear it, Fabio Capello’s identical order). If that seems symptomatic of Udinese’s wider decline, the worse is to follow, until they will rebound, as they always do.
Guidolin, who is so honest that he would probably agree to ride the entire Tour de France on Perrier water, looked defeated. He had none of the appetite for racing, and for winning, that he loved in the cycling heroes of his youth in Vicenza, like Eddy Merckx, the ‘Cannibal’, with his formidable, prehistoric-looking mandibles jutting down the chin before the era of wraparound sunglasses and new-age helmets. To praise the Gunners’ victory purely on Wenger’s perpetual innovations is, perhaps, oversimplistic. By the time of the match, Arsenal, a team which is supposed to be ‘in transition’ since the 2006-07 season, was probably past its peak. They flickered towards success in the Champions League, and among their traditional bêtes noires only Manchester United was left. Eventually, United would thrash Arsenal in the hyperbolic 8-2 that forced the squad to suffer public resentment and scorn as a result. The rise of chauvinism against Wenger himself is a coincidence, but it symbolically delivers a clear message: the French ended English soccer at the Emirates.
Nonetheless, Wenger still stands among the greatest managers London has ever known. He was brilliant enough to let even the recollections of the glorious past under Herbert Chapman, the coach who pursued an influential WM formation in the 1930s, slip into the past. Each generation in England, it seems, has been burdened with the knowledge that they will never be as good as they once were when they laid down the foundations of football itself. (Eduardo Galeano has traced a similar mentality in Uruguayan soccer.) As much as fans would like to come back to that mythical age, however, they tend to demand a lot more from managers in this time. Rumors circulate wildly, and journalists attack coaches with the same subterranean violence by which Khrushchev denounced Stalin in the ‘secret speech’ of February 1956. I have spoken to several people about this issue, and here’s the point. Managers are expected to act like entrepreneurial contractors hired by the club. Wenger’s avoidance of big repayment loans and his deep attitude of staying within the shell, buying only as little as necessary, undeniably exacerbated the general mood of discontent. Among Arsenal supporters, the hunger for consolidating the roster’s holes runs high. Should the French manager ‘borrow’ money from the club funds and gamble it at a casino - which is what happened to György Bognár, being sued while coaching the Budapest team of Honvéd in 2005 - people would not demand his head but rather hail him, once more, as an ingenious tycoon.
This is more or less where physiognomy comes in. Great football is often permeated by an awareness of the natural history of man: Lucretius and Leopardi, for example, and heretical yet affable coaches such as Márton Bukovi or Mircea Lucescu, whose genius and yearning for perfection have been shaped by the restraining, millenary history of the landscape in which they breathed - Hungarian café music and funeral marches from the Balkans, masses of herons making loud and monotonous cries, shaggy pigs, village troubadours and the eternal wanderers of the ravines and mountain gorges. Natural symbols are looming over soccer parks like a lone bird of pray. Arsène Wenger the strategist is also a potamologist, historian, man-of-letters, mineralogist, limnologist, and cartographer. He still possesses an overall classic, humanistic concept of life, but he understands the material structure of the individual, how it is grafted in the minimal work of flora and fauna. Unlike Buffon and other traditional naturalists, striving to impose on the natural world a hierarchy reflecting that of human society, Wenger is a socialist among the animals. He does not disregard unattractive beasts, nor does he try to mitigate the permissible subordination of those who resign to a floppy and inept style of playing.
Kantian, brotherly solidarity extends to the locker room, but there it stops. The democratic coach would believe in distinction and anthropomorphism: that the striker-horse is nobler than the fullback-donkey, the swan-winger posher than the goose-goalkeeper. But otters, bats, gudgeons and rats all fall into the squalor of the same sketchiness for the naturalist manager, who, by contrast, would rather follow Carl Linnaeus and his binomial Latin nomenclature of living mammals. “The irredeemable woe of animals, that obscure people who follow our existence like a shadow,” writes Claudio Magris in Danube, “throws on us the whole weight of original sin.” A discovery of the shadows which accumulate in us with the death of the living beings off whom we feed is, perhaps, at the root of the instinctual mechanism why coaches like Wenger incline towards the governing figure of the holding midfielder (Aaron Ramsey, Alex Song, and the acerbic Emmanuel Frimpong being the latest spread from this tribe). He seems comfortable to believe, as footballing ideals go, in a kind of cosmopolitanism. For the purpose of this ethological cosmos, every fault can be corrected. ‘If I cleaned you up’, Wenger must have thought of the countless inexperienced players he shaped into the latest brand of Arsenal pathos, ‘you’d look just fine’. Suppose, for a moment, that a scrupulous book-agent from Belgium were to approach Wenger and scout for a semi-fictional compendium of his years at the Emirates. It is more than likely that the response would be positive with a touch of asperity, given his perennial stance as the iconic outsider. The resulting works would be written in at least two different languages, given the diversity of primary sources. Only in a few years, he would pen The Condition of the Arsenal Empire, the Growth and Disease of the Same, but he would be also the author of the Histoire physique de la rotation, ou déroulement en milieu du terrain (including a preface from the late Jack Wilshere). Wenger’s dissertations would be filled by urbane yet overwhelming details, like, say, a treatise on mushrooms, on phosphorus and on the hydraulics of stagnant waters.
After a lot of research, the mosaic I was putting together on Arsène Wenger was nearly completed, but one small tessera was missing. I had lost track of a certain physiognomic correspondence, maybe in an attempt to evoke in larger brushes the fervent cultural scene behind the manager, or rather by pursuing Wenger as an avant-garde French tactician who had been a member of the most embattled experimental groups. (Guus Hiddink, who never gets jittery under threat and considers himself a comrade anyway, would confess without hesitation Wenger’s talent, trying not to miss the cutting edge of his colleague’s remarks; Sir Alex Ferguson, characteristically, went overboard to state that his teams would never go six years without silverware, not a chance under his watch, while also cautioning Arsenal fans to be very careful about what they hope for their future, should they depart from the ex-sweeper from Strasbourg.) Perhaps the fascination of this debatable soccer activity—my fancy and passionate desire to become a soccer detective - does not consist in making sophisticated interpretations, but in having the bloodhound scent that leads me to rummage in a certain drawer, or library, and to find the secret of someone’s life. In this way I found the ring-tailed lemur. That is, I learnt that he was alive, that he is endemic in the island of Madagascar, that he is called Lemur catta in Latin, hira or maki in French, and that his elongated, black and white tail somewhat recalls the symmetric elegance of some of Ronsard sonnets rhyming a b a b. . . Belonging to the larger family of strepsirrhine primates and representing, in a way, the Creole minority living in Africa,he is now celebrated as the patriarch of the stink fights by which he impregnates his opponents to the wafting point. This year his two-hundred and fifty-third birthday has been celebrated, since his first mention appeared in the tenth edition of Carl Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae.
It may be in analogy to these ghosts from Roman mythology that I thought Wenger would carry within himself the souls of soccer ancestors. (José Mourinho, who can boast to be an expert of the amino acid sequences of his rivals and who became involved, while at Chelsea, in a war of words with Wenger, trivialized my physiognomic studies by taunting the Frenchman a ‘rat’ and a ‘voyeur’.) Think of the purring vocalizations by the side line. The ghost-like appearances, the noiseless movements, and the reflective eyes may all have been a factor as well. According to the biologists, the ring-tailed lemur is female dominant, sunbathes, and relies on group cohesion and a territorial sense of smell; he also reaffirms social bonds by huddling together forming a ball. What’s more, this type of lemur can organize equations and understand basic arithmetic operations. Wenger may find himself inhabiting a spiny scrub in the English section of the soccer pangaea, like his avatar, the maki in the southern region of Malagasy. But this creature’s talent for analytical tools would make of him the most omnivorous and terrestrial of coaches.
I have to confess that Wenger’s style has often in the past left me cold. (It seems awkward to say this, but the high drama and irreverence of the deepening crisis at the Emirates leaves no room for obituary flannel.) I know the rebranding by him of players at Arsenal who strike me as successes, and they are rather few. Dennis Bergkamp is one. Thierry Henry is another, especially if extracted from his slightly overbearing series with the national team. To my father’s understandable distaste, a native English combination of raw runs and savage stroke-play was replaced, under Wenger, by something whose aesthetic, keyboard-like refinement, can only be described, to state the obvious, as ‘French’ - a courtly painting called Return to Soccer Parnassus bound up with haphazardness, always in search for a moment at which the opponent’s faltering defense, inattentiveness and whimsicality would tilt the balance of the game towards a new order of things. That escaping, or so the coach hopes, one would be left with the white noise of deskilling, like a nudging matter-of-factness hovering and decipherable in the postwar Alsace of Wenger’s childhood. These were encounters with the silliness, and indiscipline, of the soccer world. This, too, appeared to embody Wenger’s vision of football and to explain his deep fondness of Patrick Vieira: a condition very close to acedia, where the scruffiness and inconsequentiality of man-marking seems to hum with the laziness of art. And to the aleatory, the uncentered, or the il n’y a pas de holding midfielders avec moi. Like Debussy and Ravel knew already, modesty is too difficult an art. By the late 1990s, Wenger’s big ideas - as stale as they were impeccable - were firmly in charge.
A tolerant man and Arsenal’s first manager from outside the United Kingdom, Arsène Wenger claims he owes everything he knows about soccer to growing up above a pub: a bistro that his parents owned in the village of Duttlenheim, called La Croix d’Or. ‘I learned about tactics and selection from the people talking about football in the pub’, he mused to an audience of industry leaders, ‘who plays on the left wing and who should be on the team’. Without being timid about his personal purism, he also admitted that early exposure to alcohol convinced him that ‘that drink ought not to touch the lips of a player’—a central tenet of his coaching philosophy, which has been implemented since the inception of his days at Arsenal by a rigorously controlled diet. In the same series of interviews one can find abundant testimony that the Alsatian manager believes in the persuasion of physical power. Implausibly tall, tireless and unsympathetic, Wenger recognizes that in his job, as he put it, ‘you need to be an animal’. (You have to begin wondering why the staggering 73 red cards accumulated between 1996 and 2008 didn’t just come over the garden wall, along with the physiognomic symbolism.) It is an awareness of these familiar qualities, and their latent melancholy, that leads me to believe that Wenger is, perhaps, more a Mendelssohn or a Saint-Saëns type, rather than a Mozart or even a Berlioz. If a low-pitched, conversational tone can ever conceive rambling ambitions, it can also elucidate the context that brought Wenger, after his 18-month experience with the Nagoya Grampus Eight in the Japanese J-League, to write a lofty book, Shôsha no Spirit, which was originally published for the local market in Japan, but would be conveniently excerpted both in French as L’esprit conquérant and in English as The Spirit of Conquest.
Through a variety of styles, superficially incompatible with the dominant 4-4-2 shape, Wenger came onto the scene at a time in which French soccer had begun to explore regions of footballing language and expression beyond the scope of classically based textbooks. German soccer had always derived its energy from the bass-line, like the sap rising from the roots of a tree. Italian football, by contrast, being highly technical and largely individual, was dominated by melody and ornament—usually provided by a gravitational numero dieci—with bass-lines a more or less conventional necessity like steel defenses. The French tradition was weaker and more hybrid. Partly rooted in the stereotype of the Champagne-soccer, that old ballet de cour, with its emphasis on rhythm, Wenger had at some point, perhaps at Monaco, picked up the idea of continental harmony, but has misread it, in a Bloomian sense, as en enrichment of texture. In Ferguson, for example, top-line melody is always paramount. Think of the sublime idée fixe of the winger/striker, be them Nani or Young, in the recent thrashing of Arsenal by the Red Devils of Manchester. Wenger’s harmony, however, tends either to get stuck or to meander, as the hybrid 4-2-3-1 or 4-3-3 formation against Udinese, which took a long time to stretch playing and to avoid being funneled through a narrow middle ground. Arsenal’s texture is made exciting not by harmony, but by orchestral coloring; for Manchester United the opposite is true. Ferguson is trying to find a corrective to Barcelona’s return to the Pyramids by observing the permissible intervals between different banks of players, which he studies as fiercely as a Protestant organist or a Dutch choirmaster would do.
This may sound like a simple matter of style, but its geopolitical consequences are great. As a student in the 1980s and early 1990s Wenger was continually at war with the fusty theoreticians of the Italian defense mechanism. He was getting busy, on the other hand, with a remarkable disposition towards attacking football. For an Englishman, what is theoretically absurd isn’t beautiful at all. In the South American school there is no theory. And the French teachings would simply seem to suggest to the young Arsène, ‘you have merely to look. Pleasure is the law’. (There is a wonderful conversation, recorded in a biography of Debussy, between the musician and his old composition teacher, Ernest Guiraud, in which Guiraud, sitting on a grand piano at the Conservatoire, plays a sequence of simple parallel chords and asks Debussy how he would ‘get out of this’.) This is when, I suspect, Wenger could have become obsessed with Wagner, had only half a chance presented itself. The point is that tactics, for him, is all melody turned into texture.
And indeed Wenger’s Wagnerism, if I could prove it other than through the similarity of vowels involved, neatly transcends the fragmentation of its own parts. The diagonal movements of the players, both with and without the ball, are hefty works, despite their miniature scale. At the peak of this synthetic style, every component would dedicate each movement to an ideal of one-act and at the same time help the friends wounded in fighting. Once a squirrel is injured, to return to my physiognomic dénouement, all the other grateful animals lead him back to his mother, bandages in hand. By cutting a small square out of the technical canvas and enlarging it into an abstract shape, you’d see a system intended to create a perpetual threat from all over the places, without loosing sight, though, of the overall shape of the team. Wenger’s tactical Wagnerism appears neither as the huge structural process of the Bayreuth music drama nor merely as an exploration of sensuous moments, as it was customary in the French tradition; rather, it appears as a departure from the type of striker that Jonathan Wilson, citing Brian Glanville, has once called ‘the brainless bull at the gate’. A centre forward such as Robin Van Persie, launched by the Alsatian coach, often drops deeper than the ball, using his skill to hold up and release the play to the wingers in a first phase of the attack, before moving up the pitch to finish up the second part. This technique of the ‘false nine’- in which Van Persie himself is the falsest of the bunch - can produce quite different results: from an unpredictable and at times unstoppable team to a frankly toothless side. Wenger evades the mawkish aspects of modern soccer and avoids turning it into what amounts to a series of revue sketches in the spirit of American musical comedy. It could never be underlined enough how the contemporary fashion in football, inspired by Barcelona’s hypnotic web of little passes between players who stay very close to one another, resembles a score of catchy, jazzy, waltzy Fred Astaire parodies. These sequences are linked by a neurotic urge to progress, like the turbulent first bars of Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements or the fanfare of a wartime Requiem. The danger is that such a compilation of vignettes would become less than the sum of its parts. That this, for better or worse, is emphatically not the case at Arsenal must stand as one of Wenger’s highest achievements in his managerial career.
One might even speculate that, like many repressed tacticians (the results of Hans Keller’s notorious diagnosis of Stravinsky would also apply to Arrigo Sacchi as a sado-masochist), Wenger found it convenient to base himself on models. Ravel’s so-called Debussyism is to some extent a modelling of this kind. In sheer sensibility, Rafael Benitez and Wenger - two men who adapted to England as a football nation by producing, at some point, a similar workshop of 4-5-1 formations - were profoundly different, which may go some way to explaining their cool relations in later years. Benitez takes a single tactical image, a high-line defense or the high lying winger/playmaker, for example, and turns it into a highly refined concert display, whereas Wenger seems to explore every interior detail of texture, even laying out the players in more than three banks to ensure the correct separation of the elements. Only mixing these influences together, and adding as a crucial element the 4-2-3-1 shape of Dutch total soccer (which I like to think stirred his French blood like the fashionable hispanism or the Javanese pavillion at the Paris Exhibition of 1889), one could be able to concoct a state-of-the-art ‘Wenger idiom’.
Some would question, in light of the two key defeats against Liverpool and United, whether such idiom is, sadly, in need of a reassessment. Arsenal supporters are currently frozen in the inability to emerge from the emotional world of Wenger’s triumphs; they ignore, perhaps, that this is just a protective disguise to allow them not to pronounce the fatal farewell. The manager, alone, walks his mind like Actaeon in the forest, sending himself into dark places. The hunt comes on and on, and in his nerves the scent is more violent than the ring-tailed lemur: skull erupting, blood shaken down. And the noise, the hounds. . . Why these differences in outcome, or why this unrest and rowdy skepticism? Who would have thought that a radical transformation at the Emirates was possible? Wenger’s ‘reformed’ 4-3-3 may very well be the footballing jargon of the future, but for now the coach appears to be stuck in musical pictures of sparking fountains, unable to peer down the deep pools of the English Premier League and the high pressure of its big steamers. A grim procession of circumstances raises in him the human thing the French baroque began to call comedy. (A loving parody, of course.) As the doom impinges on his senses, there seems to be only one answer: say goodbye, Arsène. But it is horribly hard to turn your back on modernity’s only soccer utopia: after all the systematic dispersal, the carefulness, the overplotting. With the funereal spell all over, the final image is a marble mausoleum, resting on soft moss, against a storm-warning sky. The label on the box reads: THAT WHICH I SHOULD HAVE DONE, I DID NOT DO. A few devoted Gunners bring roses that decay on the unlovely pebbles, and some would swear they heard in an echo (though not, I take it, self-vaunting) ‘Je n’ai rien négligé‘. In a sense, Wenger simply faded away.
POSTSCRIPTUM
Wenger’s political views are largely unknown, as it befits his self-contained style of communication, but the inner pressure, at each occasion, is diverting itself to a barometer of bleak neo-liberalism. “Everybody is replaceable,” the manager told the press in the aftermath of Fabregas’ departure, “the cemetery is full of replaceable persons.” In other circumstances, a certain penchant for sociological analysis may explain extemporaneous speeches like this, which Wenger gave out at a press conference:
Soccer has different types of people coming to the game. You have the client, who is the guy who pays one time to go to a big game and wants to be entertained. Then you have the spectator, who is the guy who comes to watch soccer. These two categories are between 40 and 60 years old. Then you have two other categories. The first is the supporter of the club. He supports his club and goes to as many games as he can. The you have the fan. The fan is a guy between 15 and 25 years old who gives all his money to his club.
In 2002, Wenger really did win a Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest achievement for distinguished expatriots, but his fame went arguably deeper than that when a belt asteroid was named after him, the 33179 Arsènewenger. This is the motivation provided by the astronomist Ian P. Griffin, an Arsenal fan who discovered it:
Asteroid 33179 Arsènewenger is named to honour the achievements of Arséne Wenger OBE (1949–), a French football manager, who has been manager of Arsenal in England since 1996. He is the club’s most successful manager in terms of trophies won. In 2004 he became the only manager in Premier League history to go through an entire season undefeated. Wenger’s teams are renowned for their beautiful approach to the game. The asteroid, which is between 3 and 9 kilometres in diameter orbits between Mars and Jupiter taking 4.23 years to complete one circuit of the Sun.
Source: Stefano Gulizia, The Catch 22 Review on 2 Sep 11
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