Arsene Wenger
Arsene Wenger
Arsène Wenger, OBEɛʁ]; born 22 October 1949), is a French football manager and former player. He has been the manager of Arsenal since 1996, where he has since become the club's longest-serving manager and most successful in terms of major titles won. Football pundits give Wenger credit for his contribution to the revolutionising of football in England in the late 1990s through the introduction of changes in the training and diet of players...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionCoach
Date of Birth22 October 1949
CityStrasbourg, France
CountryFrance
When I first came to Arsenal, I realised the back four were all university graduates in the art of defending. As for Tony Adams, I consider him to be a doctor of defence. He is simply outstanding.
No matter how much money you earn, you can only eat three meals a day and sleep in one bed.
Their diet is basically boiled vegetables, fish and rice. No fat, no sugar. You notice when you live there that there are no fat people.
You cannot play for Arsenal and give up, no matter what the score is.
I've told him to cut off his ponytail. I think it makes him less aerodynamic.
It is one of my biggest regrets that Niall Quinn was not here during my time... I felt he was an intelligent player. It would have been a good combination with Thierry Henry. What I like with Quinn is if you look at the player who played next to him, he always scored 40 goals because he had a hand for his head and he just put the ball where you were. He was a team player. A top-class player makes other players look good and he had that player.
Sometimes you have to swallow the unswallowable
To achieve great things you have first to believe it.
I believe in work, in connections between the players, I think what makes football great is that it is a team sport. You can win in different ways, by being more of a team, or by having better individual players. It is the team ethic that interests me, always.
Gerard Houllier's thoughts on the matter international football echo mine. He thinks that what the national coaches are doing is like taking the car from his garage without even asking permission. They will then use the car for ten days and abandon it in a field without any petrol left in the tank. We then have to recover it, but it is broken down. Then a month later they will come to take your car again, and for good measure you're expected to be nice about it.
Young players need freedom of expression to develop as creative players... they should be encouraged to try skills without fear of failure.
English players are as easy to coach. The problem is that the Premier League has the best players in the world, and statistically not all of them can be born in England. But we don't have enough English players: we are working very hard on it.
For me, motivation is a person who has the capability to recruit the resources he needs to achieve a goal.
The biggest things in life have been achieved by people who, at the start, we would have judged crazy. And yet if they had not had these crazy ideas the world would have been more stupid.