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

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They also shared living accommodation and the book includes a curious story (of which Wenger is apparently very fond) of a social evening the Primorac and Wenger families had enjoyed together, when Boro and Alphonse (Arsene’s father) spent most of the time deep in conversation.

Although he talks in the abstract about what makes a good player and coach, specifics are thin on the ground . You may, for instance, want to find out the ‘truth’ behind Wenger’s departure from the club, or the rationale behind a number of transfers. My Life in Red and White is a disappointment to those of us who anticipated the sort of book at which Wenger once hinted. Registered address Unit 7, Airfield Industrial Estate, Airfield Way, Christchurch, Dorset, BH23 3PE.During his 22-year reign at Arsenal Football Club, manager Arsène Wenger often gave the impression of a man holding back. I want to talk about his art, his philosophy, about the man who has no right claiming as much as love and respect in my heart and space in my life when we’ve never met and might never meet. There was another championship and FA Cup double in 2002, then another FA Cup, and then the famous Invincible season of 2003-04. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH).

I rather enjoyed the first few chapters as I knew little about his early years, but the chapters about his time at Arsenal contained little that was new to me. We didn’t follow up on his initial eagerness to sign and this eagerness dissipated after the Bayern debacle . The most interesting thing I learned from My Life in Red and White is that four of the seven best English table tennis players are from the same street in Reading.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. Lots of interesting connections in his time at French football that I (and probably many like me) didn’t know: for example, working with Michel Platini’s father in Nancy (but of course years after Platini himself has left Nancy), the formative years of Monaco (and how Monaco has changed as a club over the years), Petit’s time in Monaco. While Wenger’s childhood is covered an appropriate surface level, his playing career remains fuzzy and unclear – you have to check the chart at the back to realise he played less than 100 games throughout his career. Arsene was a great football manager, but only a football manager after all (polymath and polyglot though he was), and based on his interviews etc. He admits that all art “contains an element of pain and requires a taste for effort”—it was his choice to give his life in service to football—but it was a completely unbalanced existence, and he was also lucky that the timing was right for his ideas to come to fruition, that certain things lay at the feet of fate.

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 . Wenger outlines that he was a difficult character to manage but it remains annoyingly unexplained how we managed to let him go and end up with Mykhi instead. A couple working as chauffeurs have been accused of stealing millions from the founder of Tin House Books. Dein was a real irritant to many on a fairly conservative board but he was a brilliant networker ( if you are familiar with the behavioural psychologist Belbin he is an archetypal resource investigator ) .The book is a real missed opportunity, a deeply disappointing effort and its hard not to see it as a cynical cash-in. He follows up with a list of notable players that he brought in over the years – Ljungberg, Gilberto, Arshavin, Ramsey, Gallas, Sagna, Vermaelen, Walcott, Mertesacker, Fabianski, Clichy, Gibbs, Coquelin, Szczesny, Cygan, Senderos and Kanu. In his later years at the club, Arsenal failed to mount a title challenge and went through a nine-year period without winning any silverware.