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Arsene Wenger's L'Equipe Interview: A Complicated Dude in a Simple Game

Some highlights from Arsene Wenger's epic L'Equpie interview
Arsene Wenger is a complicated man. Photo by PETER KNEFFEL/EPA.

French sports daily L'Equipe's interview with Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger, published last week in its monthly Sports and Style magazine, caused enough of a stir on French Twitter that even us non-French speakers knew it was big. Over the weekend, Arseblog, an Arsenal fan blog, did us all a favor and translated the interview into English. It's pretty darn good!

Wenger has long been one of the most interesting and unique characters in world soccer, if not in the entire world of sports. English soccer's traditions are working class and beholden to a certain English masculinity, but Wenger has always seemed to stand appart: a thinking man working in an industry defined by feels and guts. In his career of cutting across the grain, he's been successful, too. His tenure at Arsenal is unmatched by his Premier League contemporaries—and so is his trophy cabinet.

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Below are some choice excerpts from the L'Equipe interview. You can read the whole thing, in English, here. But be sure to give your clicks to L'Equipe as well.

On being perceived as an "aristocrat":

I don't deny that I'm first and foremost an educator. However, I don't feel like an aristocrat at all. If you had lived with me, loading manure on carts, you would have understood. I try to be faithful to the values that I believe to be important in life and to pass them on to others. In thirty years as a manager, I've never had my players injected to make them better. I never gave them any product that would help enhance their performance. I'm proud of that. I've played against many teams that weren't in that frame of mind.

On fan expectations at Arsenal:

The expectation has risen. The philosophical definition of happiness is a match between what you want and what you have. And what you want changes as soon as you've got it. Always more. Always better. Hence the difficulty to satisfy. An Arsenal fan, when you finish fourth, will say, "Hey, we've been in the top four for twenty years. We want to win the league!". They don't care that Manchester City or Chelsea have spent 300 or 400 million euros. They just want to beat them. But if you finish fifteenth two years running, they will be happy if you finish fourth after that.

On how in sport, winning is often valued over the process:

For me, the beauty of sport is that everyone wants to win, but there will only be one winner. If you put 20 billionaires at the end of the twenty English clubs, there will only be one champion and nineteen disappointments. My grandfather used to say "I don't understand, at the 100 metres, one runs in 10.1 seconds and the other one in 10.2 seconds, both are very fast. What's the point?"

Today, we glorify the one that ran in 10.1 seconds, and say [nothing about] the one that ran 10.2 seconds. But both of them are very fast. That's dangerous for sports. We have reached an era in which we glorify the winner, without looking at the means or the method. And ten years later we realise the guy was a cheat. And during that time, the one that came second suffered. He didn't get recognition. And with all that's been said about them…they can be very unhappy.

On working with modern players:

To win you have to convince. Society has switched from verticality to horizontality. In the 60's a coach would say "lads we're going to do it this way" nobody contested it. Now you have to convince first. The player is rich. The characteristic of the rich man is the need to convince him. Because he has a status. A way of thinking. People nowadays are informed. Therefore they have an opinion. And they think their opinion is right. They don't necessarily share my opinion, so I have to convince them.

H/T Arseblog and L'Equipe