Like most things to do with Arsenal in the 1990s, Nick Hornby summed it up best: “I remember when Bruce Rioch was sacked, one of the papers had three or four names. It was Terry Venables, Johan Cruyff and then, at the end, Arsène Wenger. I remember thinking as a fan, I bet it’s fucking Arsène Wenger, because I haven’t heard of him and I’ve heard of the other two. Trust Arsenal to appoint the boring one that you haven’t heard of.”

The bookies wanted Cruyff, but the Arsenal board went for Wenger. Club captain Tony Adams was unimpressed: “At first, I thought, what does this Frenchman know about football? 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?”

Wenger takes training in October 1996. Photograph: Darren Walsh/Action Images

Adams was not alone in his scepticism. On Wenger’s first day at training, a meeting was called and the new manager was presented to the players. He had won cups and leagues in France and Japan, and expected to be greeted by players who were familiar with his work and respectful of his success. But, as Lee Dixon recalls, it didn’t quite pan out like that: “The players filed in and in front of us stood this tall, slightly built man who gave no impression whatsoever of being a football manager.”

Wenger was very much a football manager and his language skills were not going to be a problem. Sir Alex Ferguson once derided the link between Wenger’s linguistic abilities and his mental acuity: “They say he’s an intelligent man, right? Speaks five languages. I’ve got a 15-year-old boy from the Ivory Coast who speaks five languages.”

Ferguson is quick with a one-liner, but he was a little off-target this time. Along with the five languages in which Wenger is fluent – French, English, German, Italian and Spanish – he also speaks Japanese.

Speaking English would not be a problem for Wenger, but he struggled initially to win the players around to his way of thinking. To say that Wenger revolutionised the diet of English football is almost as clichéd as to suggest that Arsenal like to walk the ball into the net, but the way the players ate in the mid-1990s is staggering.

Before his first game in charge, Wenger banned the team from eating chocolate, provoking outrage: “We were travelling to Blackburn and the players were at the back of the bus chanting ‘we want our Mars bars!’” Having grown up in a restaurant, Wenger knew the importance of nutrition and was not going to back down.

Foreign coaches may struggle to understand our culture

A lot has changed in English football since Wenger took over at Arsenal on 1 October 1996. Back then, it was assumed that only British coaches could win the championship. Even Wenger admits that Arsenal were “a little bit crazy” to give him the job: “They were crazy in the sense that I had no name, I was foreign, there was no history. They needed to be, maybe not crazy, but brave. I can show some articles where people tried to prove that the foreign managers can never win an English championship.”

The idea that foreign coaches were not up to the challenge of winning the championship sounds absurd now – no English manger has won the Premier League since its inception in 1992 – but Arsène’s eyes were not deceiving him. Those articles exist and this extract is the proof, courtesy of Jon Henderson, who was writing in The Observer on 18 August 1996.

The problem with foreign bodies

By Jon Henderson

What will Arsène Wenger bring to the party if he signs for Arsenal this week: coaching skills that will make the Gunners fire again, or simply a Christian name which more closely resembles that of his club than any other in football? To put the question another way, does British sport need foreign coaches? Did we make a hash of things in Atlanta because we didn’t have more of the likes of Jürgen Gröbler, the German rowing coach who megaphoned Redgrave and Pinsent to victory, or was this only part of the problem? Football’s experience presents a contrary proposition – that foreign coaches are the problem. Those few who have tried to transform the manly virtues of our national game into something more aesthetic have tended to disappear up their own intricacies while their teams have disappeared down the table. Aston Villa’s experiment in the early 1990s with the Czechoslovak intellectual Dr Jo Venglos proved an unqualified failure. Venglos spoke a different language, literally and metaphorically, from his players and so the club replaced him with Ron Atkinson who was perfectly understood when he exhorted a defender to “give it some wellie”. Then there was Ossie Ardiles at Tottenham. The Argentine taught his team to play a beautiful game, but forgot about the stamina that would be required in even greater quantity if his players were barred from delivering even a few “route one” passes on a treacly January pitch. Ardiles left and that pragmatic Londoner Gerry Francis arrived to put strength in the players’ legs and remove fancy ideas from their heads. Now it is down to Holland’s Ruud Gullit at Chelsea, and probably Wenger at Arsenal, to show that foreign coaches can produce a successful Premier League team. Gullit seems to have made a promising start, demanding a higher level of fitness from his players than was even required under Glenn Hoddle. He also recognises that “what the English must not do is just play the European way”. Muffled alarm bells, though, for this adjunct: “But I can feel something is changing at Chelsea and in the whole English game.” Ardiles had that feeling, too. Despite its unique place in British life, football’s experience should not be regarded as irrelevant to other sports. After all, Premier League clubs have what the rest have long craved for and will soon acquire thanks to the lottery’s munificence: money. No doubt, with their new ability to pay, enticing coaches from abroad will be one way that sports spend this windfall. It is estimated that 80 per cent of our coaches are volunteers, and Geoff Cooke, the former England rugby union coach who is now director of the National Coaching Foundation, is not surprisingly critical of the British tendency “to laud the amateur-volunteer ethos”. This means, he says, “our coaches don’t have the degree of opportunity to produce results because they have to scratch around doing other jobs”. But Cooke is just as adamant that using the extra money that sport can expect simply to hire expensive coaches from abroad is not the answer. “There is an obvious danger in the knee-jerk reaction, ‘Now we’ve got money to spend, let’s invest it in a foreign coach’,” he says. “Quite apart from anything else, they may struggle to understand our culture.” Indeed. One wonders, for example, where the good Dr Venglos imagined the Villa Park faithful were off to when they chanted, “Here we go, here we go, here we go”, and whether, thus distracted, he failed to notice his sweeper poorly positioned. And as Cooke has pointed out, understanding our culture is not as easy as you may like to think. Has anyone told Wenger, for example, that when his chairman says that he has absolute confidence in him, he better start packing his bags?

Arsène Wenger watches on as Borussia Mönchengladbach host Arsenal in the Uefa Cup in the 1996-97 season. Photograph: Action Images/Tony O’Brien

A new age of reason in English football?

Wenger has won over a lot of people in the past 17 years, but a few observers were already on his side in 1996. Glenn Hoddle, who was six months into his career as England manager when Wenger was unveiled at Highbury, worked under Wenger at Monaco and credits him for his own desire to manage.

Hoddle backed Wenger from the start: “He is very impressive. At Monaco he knew exactly what he wanted, what was the best thing for each individual to work at within the framework of the team and how to balance the team. He brought in five players and knew exactly what was needed. He got everything to gel. It was very refreshing and we won the title in my first season.”

“He has an English mind, but also a German mind, which is very disciplined. He prepares a guideline on how the club should function on the playing side and how individuals should work, and, if anyone steps out of line, he has a ruthless side to him. That’s when the German side comes out.”

Hoddle was not the only one to see Wenger’s potential. Here is David Lacey writing in the Guardian in the autumn of 1996 about how English football could benefit from feeding from the European coaching scene:

Wenger can make pitch for new breed

By David Lacey

When an incoming Arsenal manager is a Frenchman, and has to tie up loose ends in Japan before he can formally take over, then obviously the job is not quite what it was when George Allison, the plummy-voiced journalist and broadcaster, succeeded to the post on the death of Herbert Chapman. The arrival of Arsène Wenger at Highbury comes at a time when management in the Premier League is in a state of change. Losing managers will still be sacked but, this unalterable fact apart, many of those in charge of teams now bear little resemblance to the men running things in the Sixties, Seventies or even the Eighties. Ron Atkinson, under pressure at Coventry, is the last of a sun-tanned breed. The managerial type represented by Tony Waddington and Harry Haslam, experts in the art of making do, is practically extinct although Joe Kinnear comes close at Wimbledon. This week one Premier League manager, who has experienced both ends of the financial spectrum in league football, offered the opinion that his contemporaries had a totally different attitude when it came to signing players.

They no longer weighed up the pros and cons of a prospective buy, he argued. A player simply becomes available and the price is paid. There is no time now for a latter-day Bill Nicholson to study someone for the best part of a season before deciding not to buy him. The Tottenham Double team of 1961 came together over a period of 10 years. Now, for fans, directors and critics, 10 months is too long to wait. Wenger is a technocrat with impressive foreign credentials. Arsenal have never had anyone quite like him in charge before. In the age of the secretary-manager Chapman was an impresario with an eye for publicity. Allison, a club director, left team matters to Joe Shaw and Tom Whittaker, the trainer who eventually became manager. Billy Wright, appointed on the strength of 105 England caps, was never cut out for management and hid from the players after he had put up the team sheet. Bertie Mee, a promoted physiotherapist in the Whittaker tradition, was a good organiser who knew how to delegate. Terry Neill, Don Howe and George Graham were coaches who kept faith with the spirit and style of the Arsenal teams for whom they had played. Is it too much to hope that Wenger will usher in a new age of reason in English football as a whole and not merely at Highbury? Eventually he will be judged on results like any other manager but he should not stand or fall, for example, on the word of Ian Wright. If Wenger makes a go of things, then more foreign coaches will surely follow him here. Speaking another language does not necessarily make a man a potential genius as a manager but English football has missed out by not being part of the European coaching circuit. The domestic game needs to share the spread of ideas as well as offering opinions of its own. This applies not only to tactics and playing systems but the whole approach to the way footballers eat, drink, sleep and generally live. In this respect Wenger could hardly have chosen a better club with which to set an Augean example. Cutting out the post-match drinking would be a start. Bobby Robson, now at Barcelona, has observed that the first thing English players do when they move abroad is lose several pounds of lager lard. Football management in this country is in greater need than ever of proper qualifications and a more reasoned approach in the boardroom. With Bruce Rioch’s dismissal Arsenal set the poorest of examples. Allison was a radio commentator in the days of “back to square one”. Now, in the age of the TV Jumbotron, it is time English football management joined the rest of Europe on square two.

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