Arsene Who? 30 years on from Wenger's Arsenal appointment that transformed English football
A gamble that drew blank stares
Thirty years ago, Arsenal were in a state of chaotic flux. Bruce Rioch had been sacked, with interims Stewart Houston and Pat Rice in charge, and there had even been talk of Johan Cruyff arriving. David Dein, the club's vice-chair, wanted to fill the information vacuum. Summoning the team, he reassured them a world-class manager would soon be appointed.
“His name is Arsène Wenger,” Dein beamed. A brief pause ensued before a player's voice called out: “Who the fuck is he?” His exclamation echoed conventional wisdom. “Arsene Who?” famously read The London Evening Standard's billboards prior to Wenger being confirmed as manager on 30 September 1996.
Ultimately Dein's decision was arguably the most seismic managerial appointment in modern English football history, not only providing proof that a foreign manager could succeed in this country but also ushering in an irreversible era of multiculturalism, giving birth to the globalised Premier League we know today.
A trailblazer for the continentals
Wenger described the Arsenal dressing room he inherited as “culturally English” and set about making his first signings, the characteristically unknown Frenchmen in Patrick Vieira and Rémi Garde; when he departed the job in 2018, every Premier League dressing room was a veritable United Nations. He was the trailblazer, preceding Gérard Houllier and Rafael Benítez at Liverpool and, ironically given their mutual animosity, José Mourinho at Chelsea, all beneficiaries of his success.
On the flip side, there would never have been Tottenham's ill-advised experiments with Christian Gross and Jacques Santini were it not for Wenger. Undoubtedly he was the right man at the right time: Chelsea were already embracing the continental drift, having appointed Ruud Gullit, and Wenger's arrival chimed with contemporary geopolitics. Tony Blair was about to become prime minister and a wave of European Union migration was coming; Polish plumbers and French footballers alike. Equally, Sky TV's money was making England the best-paid country for footballers.
The first non-British or non-Irish manager in the top flight had been Dr Jozef Venglos, appointed by Aston Villa in 1990, ticking all the boxes of English football's old prejudices: foreign, academic, whimsical, tactical. Gratifyingly for sceptics, he was an utter failure. Wenger seemed to fit the Venglos mould.
Le Professeur, the geography teacher and Clouseau
Nicknamed Le Professeur (because he wore glasses and spoke five languages), his captain, Tony Adams, thought him a “geography teacher”, while Ian Wright noted his clumsiness and dubbed him Clouseau, taking delight in pranking him about a bomb scare. “There is bum?” replied a bemused Wenger, oblivious to the hilarity among Wright's teammates.
“Arsène Wenger's been in Japan, he doesn't know anything about the English game,” said Sir Alex Ferguson, laying the foundations for a decade-long feud that would become, in Ferguson's words, “toxic”. Yet even the bastions of the English game acknowledge the magnitude of Wenger's contribution.
“Wenger changed the whole course of [English] football,” says Neil Warnock, not a natural soulmate. “He made people who'd been in the game a long time [realise] that you had to change with the times because of all the nutrition coming, the fitness guys who were coming, and that if you didn't move with the times, you got trodden on.”
Wenger might raise a quizzical Gallic eyebrow at Ferguson's later description of him as a “friend”. But 30 years on, few dispute the scale of Wenger's transformation of the English game.