to too many mistakes. You make big decisions and I believe you have to act like it’s your own money. Like you’re the owner of the club and you can identify completely with the club, because if you don’t do that I think you cannot go far.’
To be at a club for as long as Arsène you of course have to cope with changes in the game and with things like the age difference that inevitably opens up when you’re a sixty-six-year-old manager dealing with young players, some of whom are teenagers. He has needed to keep himself fresh, enthusiastic and motivated, as well as retaining the authority that any manager needs. So how has he gone about it?
‘It’s linked to the fact that you want to win the next game and you want to do well,’ he insists. ‘I believe you cannot stand still, you have to move forward. Look at Alex Ferguson – he was not scared to innovate, he did not stand still. I believe that if you want to stay a long time in this job you have to adapt to evolution. Today I’m more a head of a team of assistants. I manage the players, but I manage my own team as well. You have a big medical team, you have a big video team, you have a big scouting team, you have inside fitness coaches, outside fitness coaches. You know, when I first started and coached I was alone with the team and I was thirty-three years old. I was alone with them – and that’s what I liked, that’s what I’ve always liked. I like to go out every day. I don’t like the office. I don’t like paperwork too much. I like football to be more outside than inside.
‘When it comes to the age gap with players, I try to speak about what matters to them. I cannot give them the last song of the latest rapper in the country, but what I can tell them is how they can be successful. That matters to them. With the difference in age I cannot act like I’m twenty, but what hasn’t changed is that the boys try to find a way to be successful, and if I can connect with them in that way I have a chance. I have people who are more in touch with them, who give me the problems they have and then I can intervene at the right moment. But also if you are a young boy sometimes an older guy can give you reassurance on what matters to you. I try to do that – I say I can help them because I’ve done it before, and so they trust me. I believe what is for sure is that if you stay for a long time at a club, people have to believe that you’re honest. That gets you through the generation gap, that’s what I think is most important, because players don’t expect you to be young when you’re sixty-six. But they expect that when you say something, it’s true. If they believe you are honest you have a chance.
‘With authority, I think that some people have that naturally, and secondly as managers, we have the ultimate power – to play them or not to play them! On top of that, the player knows that if he wants to extend his contract he has to go through me. He cannot go to the chairman. That is massive. The player knows there’s one boss and as long as you have that in a club, you have the strength.
‘The more people you have inside the football club the more opinions you have. You have to have a good team spirit in the club, but everyone should just do their job. Do your job, and no more. Do not do the job of your manager. And sometimes when people stay a long time at the club, they have that tendency to have an opinion on everything. Do your job, don’t intervene in what is not your responsibility and respect everybody else in his job. So we have to find a compromise between a family feeling and a respect that you don’t do what is not your responsibility.’
So in those twenty years at Arsenal what have been the biggest changes for him?
‘When I started the eye of the manager was the only data that was important, but today the manager is inundated with different types of information,’ he says. ‘He has to choose the four or five bits of information that are valid, that can help him to be successful. I believe the trend will be that the technical quality of the manager will go down and down, because he will be surrounded by so many analysts who tell him basically, “That’s the conclusion the computer came to, that’s the team you should play next Saturday.” So we might go from a real football person to more a kind of head of a technical team.
‘The power of the agent is another thing that has changed in the last twenty years. I’ve fought all my life for footballers to make money, but when you pay them before they produce it can kill the hunger. I’m scared that we now have players under seventeen, under eighteen, who make £1 million a year. When Ian Wright was earning that he’d scored goals, he’d put his body on the line. Now before they start they are millionaires – a young player who has not even played!
‘What I do think will happen is that you will have more and more players coming out of the lower leagues who have had to fight their way through. Compare that with a player who has been educated here, who has had Champions League for seventeen years, who has not known anything else. So it’s not a dream, it’s normal for him, but if you play for a team in the lower leagues and watch Real Madrid or Barcelona on Wednesday nights you think, “I’d love to play in games like that.” I’ve said to our scouts to do the lower leagues because the good players are there now. Don’t forget we have many foreign players in the Premier League, but good English players have to go down to develop.’
Arsène’s own hunger for the game and for management is very obvious when he talks about football. Like any manager he loves winning and absolutely hates to lose. The thought of retirement seemed a long way off when we talked, even though he knows it’s inevitable one day.
‘It’s been my life, and honestly, I’m quite scared of the day,’ he admits. ‘Because the longer I wait, the more difficult it will be and the more difficult it will be to lose the addiction. After Alex retired and we played them over there he sent a message to me to come up and have a drink with him. I asked, “Do you miss it?” He said, “Not at all.” I didn’t understand that. It’s an emptiness in your life, especially when you’ve lived your whole life waiting for the next game and trying to win it. Our pleasure comes from that – and our suicidal attitude as well!
‘As people, part of us loves to win and part of us hates to lose. The percentage to hate to lose in me is bigger. Managers hate to lose, and if you don’t hate to lose you don’t stay for long in this job. If a match goes really well I might go out with friends or family for dinner or a drink. If it doesn’t I’ll go straight home to watch another football game and see another manager suffer. If we lose it ruins my weekend, but I’ve learned over the years to deal with my disappointments and come back. What helps is when you come in, speak to your assistants, and then sometimes do a training session and start afresh. You could stay at home for three days without going out if you wanted to, but at some stage life must go on.
‘The next game gives you hope again.’
All managers will be able to empathise with Arsène when he talks about losing. The despair of defeat for a manager is far greater than the joy of winning a match. When you win it’s a relief and a time to briefly enjoy the victory that night, but even by the time you get in your car for the drive home your thoughts start to stray to the next match and what you have to try to do in order to win it. When you lose, that horrible feeling stays with you for a long time and it’s hard to shake off. You’ll replay the game over and over in your mind, thinking about what went wrong and what could have gone right. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been in the game, what you’ve won and achieved or how much experience you have. All managers experience very similar emotions.
The most experienced English manager in terms of the Premier League is Harry Redknapp, with more than 630 matches under his belt. Harry first became a manager in 1983 at Bournemouth, and in more than thirty years in the job has been in charge at West Ham, Portsmouth, Southampton, Tottenham and Queens Park Rangers. He’s one of the best-known managers in the country, with bags of experience. He’s always had an eye for a player and has always tried to fill his sides with footballers who have flair and are not afraid to express themselves on the pitch. He also rightly earned a reputation as one of the game’s best man-managers and during his career was ready to take a gamble on some players who other clubs had given up on as they’d proved to be too much of a handful.
‘The first thing I always look for in a player is that ability,’ he insists. ‘And then you think, “Yeah, I can get the best out of him.” Those mavericks, if you can get them playing then you know you’ve got a fantastic player