My Life in Red and White: The Sunday Times Number One Bestselling Autobiography

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The next game-changer is neuroscience. Why? Because we are at the end of the improvement of physical speed. The next step will be to improve the speed of decision-making. The speed of execution, the speed of coordination and that’s where neuroscience will come in. In the last 10 years, the power and speed of individual players has improved, but now you have sprinters everywhere. The next step certainly will be to improve the speed of our brains. More than that, Wenger wants to make clear that, when the dust settled, there was always respect. “Every manager goes through good and bad periods. They are human beings,” he says. “It’s difficult to measure the quality of our job. For example, last season, Liverpool won the championship and [Jürgen] Klopp got praised for that. And rightly so. But you must say the guy at Sheffield United [Chris Wilder, whose team finished ninth] has done a great job as well. Who has done a better job? You don’t know.”

Passages relating to the 2003/04 season where Arsenal’s Invincibles won the League unbeaten provide great insights, particularly of the mental toll exerted on him. The anguish of losing the 2006 Champions League - to Barcelona - is recalled in one of the book’s best passages. Arsene Wenger on a recent Late Late Show interview One commented: "Every ounce of my being is praying he launches into Gazidis, but I know my man's too classy for that."I do hope that history is sympathetic to Wenger. Many of his contemporaries, were not. He was very successful. He did bring great times to the club. He does make contentious claims in his book that the rivalry with the other lot, who play in white and blue does not hold the same 'tensions'. He also claims that it is 'harder to win the Premier League than the Champion's League'. On both points I am not sure. Unfortunately, his own fans that we gooners once were, would, I am sure, argue vociferously that the rivalry will be as fierce and tension filled as always and that if the second point was correct, why did we not win the Champion's League? Arsene Wenger – My Life In Red And White review : Reviewed: Arsene Wenger – My Life In Red And White

I was at the training ground to interview Wenger the afternoon before the last game of the Invincibles season, and while I was waiting for him in his office, a Frenchman I didn’t recognise came in and slammed his hand down hard on the manager’s desk. “Stupid English regulations,” he said. I expressed sympathy. “We are trying to sign a player, an incredible player. Yaya Touré. He has much more power than his brother. But they won’t let us.” It was a story that provided me with great currency among fellow fans, especially a few years later, when Touré was tearing up the midfields and defences of every other Premier League team. It is the absence of revealing stories here that will most disappoint Wenger’s many admirers. When asked at a press conference, shortly before he left Arsenal, whether he was writing a book, he replied: “Not at the moment. Because I don’t like to talk and not tell the truth. As long as you are in work, you cannot really tell what is going on.” One should point out that he is still in work, at Fifa, perhaps the most political of all sporting bodies. What we have instead is a lot of quiet, thoughtful musings on the qualities necessary for management, coaching and playing, with lots of abstract nouns: “The action [today’s manager] needs to take should be based on a three-pronged approach: giving people responsibilities, personalising and openness, through clear and constant communication, based on today’s science.” Roy Keane probably wouldn’t have written that sentence. FANS have been given their first look at Arsene Wenger's new book - with the Arsenal legend set to reveal the full inside story of his rise and fall at the Gunners. Wenger, 70, famously led the club to the best period in their history, including the 2003-04 Premier League-winning Invincibles.

Such lego sentences. And beyond that, what did you like about Viera? How did he make you feel? How did he feel? Tell us! Or better yet share anecdotes to show us. How did he fit into your philosohy? What surprised you about him? What did you learn from him? Coaxing that level of introspection and detail would've made for a better read. There are a million questions that Arsenal fans would want Wenger to answer. The answers, unfortunately, are either missing altogether from My Life in Red and White, or expressed in a way that is long familiar to us: the English players stopped drinking and eating Mars bars; he used to have his ups and downs with Ferguson but they get on fine now. Meanwhile Mourinho, who cast a long shadow over some of Wenger’s most difficult years, appears once in the book, in a table provided at the end showing his head-to-head record against rival managers. (Wenger beat Steve McClaren 83.3% of the time; he beat Mourinho 10% of the time.) As too was the notion of philosophy. That Wenger was a visionary, revolutionary of the game is unquestionable. His first years in particular at Arsenal and in English football changed the course of both, and the book explores some of his key thoughts and ideas that underpinned his management, including his expectations of players, the psychology of the game and player management. Whether it is not covered out of an enduring love and loyalty to the club or due to the frequent legal complexities that come with these decisions is ultimately to be seen. It covers the years of controversy that led up to his resignation in 2018 and his current seat as chief of global football development for Fifa.