Wenger's Invincibles took the boring out of Arsenal , and though brilliance has made way for something more inglorious in recent years the game has been better off because of him

On the day it all began, with a game at Blackburn Rovers in October 1996, Arsène Wenger's first win ended with a mutiny among his own players. Wenger sat at the front of the coach, filled with satisfaction for the journey back to London. At the back, the players were taking in the news that life at Arsenal was never going to be the same again. Tony Adams, Ian Wright and a few others decided enough was enough. "We want our chocolate back," they started chanting.

Wenger never did let them have their Mars bars. The jars of jelly babies and cola bottles that used to be on a table in the dressing-room – "an orgy of sweets," Rémi Garde, Wenger's first signing, described it – went at the same time and it feels like a different world now since those days when the club's most prolific drinkers regularly used to knock back 30 pints every weekend.

But then, a lot has changed since "Arsène Who?" was emblazoned across the London Evening Standard's billboards (as well as an article in the newspaper on how to pronounce his name) and the Gooner fanzine carried a letter from one of its French subscribers, explaining to its readers what they should expect if they did not know much about the new man.

Gabriel Vistotsky's words, in the temporarily renamed Le Gooner, look strikingly prescient now. "Arsène Wenger is among the best coaches in the business, high above either George Graham or Bruce Rioch. It is a risky appointment but if he succeeds Arsenal (and English football in general) will be better off because of him." Even so, looking through that "Walking in a Wengerland" edition it is clear nobody is getting carried away. As the editorial states: "No matter how many videos he has watched, or telephone conversations he has had with Stewart Houston, will have prepared him for the combined talents of David Hillier, Eddie McGoldrick and Steve Morrow."

What has happened since then can be fitted into two parts. First, the glory years, as Wenger set about dismantling the image of boring, boring Arsenal, revolutionising the club with his sophisticated touch. "Lots of football managers have honeymoon periods," the writer, actor and Arsenal fan Tom Watt, says. "By the end of Wenger's, he had won the Double. His success was astonishing and instant." The Double was repeated in 2002. Two more FA Cups followed in the next three years. Plus, that historic season of the Invincibles in 2003-04, now recognised in a series of framed letters upstairs at Arsenal's training ground.

"WWWWDDWWWDWWWDDWDWWDWWWWWWWWWDWDWDDDWW". Not a single "L" in sight.

The second part comes in the period, post-2005, when the old magic has not quite been there, and Wenger's brilliance has made way for something more inglorious at times. They have been mixed, often difficult, times, resulting in José Mourinho's callous broadside about "a specialist of failure," and it has not been easy, in the worst moments, seeing Wenger under attack, as the crowd has turned and it has felt like the first T on the "In Arsène We Trust" banner might be removed.

But it has been an epic, anachronistic run. A manager can have periods of good and bad form, just like the players, but as a feat of longevity Wenger's 1,000th game as Arsenal's manager – to be clocked up, just like his 500th, at Chelsea on Saturday– can be added to the already thick portfolio of evidence that he is one of the greats of his business.

At one point after Sir Alex Ferguson's retirement last summer, Wenger had been in charge for longer than the other 19 Premier League managers put together. His team have qualified for the Champions League in each of the last 16 years, and made it out of the group stages on 14 successive occasions. Yes, it will probably be a permanent frustration they have never actually won the damn thing. Yet don't overlook the fact that, over the last 10 years, a Premier League table of transfer business would put Arsenal fourth from bottom, with an average net yearly spend of £1.6m. Only Newcastle, Crystal Palace and Everton have spent less. Chelsea's average is £52.5m, Manchester City's £46.1m and Manchester United's £18.6m.

More than anything, Wenger has always wanted to do things the right way. That might not always have been apparent when the red cards fluttered like confetti and his famously selective eyesight became one of the sport's running jokes, but Wenger's commitment has always been about playing with style and panache, wanting the ball, and knowing the right thing to do with it.

He was a trailblazer, too. "Back then, to see a foreign coach winning the Premiership was completely unheard of," he said of his first Double. "There was this prejudice against coaches from abroad. It was said that a foreigner couldn't possibly win the English championship."

John Hartson played in Wenger's first game. "First impressions? He looked more like a doctor than a football manager. But he was a real gentleman. You know something, I never heard him swear. Not once. He would lose his temper sometimes. He would get red in the face and throw his arms around, but I never heard him swear.

"He also completely changed the way we thought. The culture at Arsenal was always that we could not wait to get back in the dressing room, get stripped and down the pub. Under Arsène, you were more likely to find us in a circle, with the manager sitting in the middle, and all of us doing stretches around him. You ask Tony, Lee Dixon, Steve Bould and Ian Wright, and they will all say he put another two or three years on their careers."

Wenger had taken over a team famed for winning 1-0 and it might surprise a few people that he has won a greater percentage of games by that score (10.5%) than Graham (10.2%).

"People used to say: 'Oh, but Wenger inherited that famous defence,'" Watt says of the Dixon, Adams, Bould and Nigel Winterburn quartet. "People would try to pooh-pooh his achievements. But he completely built the Invincibles back four. A right-winger converted into a right-back, a lad from Africa nobody has ever heard of, Tottenham's captain and a boy from the youth system. Ashley Cole came through the ranks, Sol Campbell was a free transfer and Kolo Touré was only a small fee (£150,000). Lauren was the only one who really cost any money (£7.2m). And they were magnificent. That was classic Wenger."

There is a reason Ferguson took against his new rival, and it probably had nothing to do with the fact Wenger shunned all that clinking of post-match wine glasses. Ferguson, put bluntly, felt threatened.

"The game I really remember in Wenger's first full season was a 3-2 win over Manchester United. We were 2-0 up, then they came back to 2-2 and David Platt won it with a header," Watt recalls. "By then, we'd brought in Patrick Vieira and Nicolas Anelka and I was already thinking: 'Happy days.' We had an away game at Derby County on the final day of the previous season, the last game at the Baseball Ground, and Tony Adams was sent off early on. But Anelka absolutely ran riot. We won 3-1, and that summer I can't remember ever as much looking forward to the start of the new season."

The problem here, maybe, is that all these memories are from at least a decade ago. Wenger has certainly made plenty of mistakes since that last FA Cup in 2005. "A genius, albeit a flawed one," Adams describes him. He can be stubborn beyond belief, infuriatingly so, refusing to bend for anyone, and there will always be that sense he should have been bolder in the transfer market. But he will never budge. Not at 64. "We do not buy superstars," Wenger said. "We make them." Mesut Özil was the exception to the rule.

So what next? There is no hint of a manager winding down. One day, he will have to cut himself free and it will not be easy when football, plainly, is the thing that makes the most sense in his life. Life without football can be blank and scary for a 24-7 obsessive of the Wenger mould and it is not easy to imagine him making a clean break.

Only guesswork, though. The truth is few people know him beyond what we see in public. Only a small privileged circle knows what he gets up to, where he eats, what music he likes, how he votes, what he reads. Most of us could not even recall his wife's name. He makes sure it is that way. In 17 and a half years, he has rarely, if ever, name-checked any of the journalists who trawl around after him. On all those European trips, he has never appeared at the bar. He almost never does one-on-one interviews.

Even so, it is never dull following Wenger from this side of the fence. Wenger's general strength in life is that he respects everyone, even the guy asking the daft question. He can be incredibly sour after a defeat, almost never praising the opponent, and he is not immune to the occasional meltdown.

This is the man who apparently once stood, arms outstretched, in front of Ferguson, in the Old Trafford tunnel, and shouted: 'What do you want to do about it?' So it stands to reason that he will occasionally lose his temper in front of the press. The mind goes back to a game at Bolton Wanderers one year, at the height of his tensions with Ferguson. Arsenal had lost and Wenger had taken the defeat personally. He always did. Wenger was trembling with anger as he announced diplomatic relations with the Manchester United manager were finished, officially.

More recently, there was an afternoon at London Colney when something pricked his temper again and he went all Travis Bickle on one unsuspecting reporter. "Are you looking at me?" he asked. "Why do you look at me?" Well over six feet, Wenger can be surprisingly scary in those moments.

Mostly, however, he is a great ambassador for Arsenal and there is one thing that is always apparent: his fixation for football. He wants to talk about the sport, rather than all the fluff that goes around it, and that is when he is at his happiest. Some football people become tired and cynical, just as someone who works in a chocolate factory might eventually want something different to taste. Not Wenger. His face still lights up when he discusses an outstanding goal or moment of skill.

He also has an understated sense of humour, with an ability to laugh at himself. Adams tells one story about the manager joining in a five-a-side match. "He slipped, crashed to the ground and a ball, wellied by someone, ended up smacking him right on the nut. Slap bang on the side of the head! But he took it well."

Xavier Rivoire's biography of Wenger has another story about him serving himself some cake one day in the canteen, then turning round to talk to somebody, and not realising it had fallen off his plate. Wenger was so distracted he returned to his table, sat down and stabbed his fork into thin air. Again, he did not mind being the subject of everyone's laughter. "Terribly clumsy," is Adams' verdict.

The most important part is that Wenger turns out teams that play football as it is meant to be. A personal memory is of a game at Elland Road in November 2003, in the midst of that record 49-game unbeaten run. Leeds were blitzed with four goals inside the opening 50 minutes. Two from Thierry Henry, one each from Robert Pirès and Gilberto Silva. It was an attacking masterclass and their opponents were flattered, greatly, to get away with 4-1. "Football from another planet," David Dein, the man who brought Wenger to Arsenal, used to say.

At Blackburn, on that first afternoon, the newspapers did not seem entirely convinced. Wright scored the goals in a 2-0 win but the Observer's match report noted that Wenger "ought to be concerned with the regularity with which his new charges surrendered possession".

These days, if Arsenal are to fail, that is virtually never the problem. Kevin Whitcher, editor of the Gooner, sums it up well. "The manager's legacy is some wonderful football, numerous trophies, and the move to a stadium that has set the club up financially for the challenges of the future. Recent seasons have been less fruitful but there is no question – his contribution to Arsenal's history will be remembered fondly by all who witnessed his most successful sides."