Wenger blinded by cloak of invincibility
As with many visionary people, there was also a blindness in Arsene Wenger, an obtuseness countervailed against his clarity of thought and imagination. Arsene Wenger: Invincible is a contemplative portrait from Gabriel Clarke that captures Arsene the wise man, but also Arsene the fool. It raises a broader question about success and failure: was his long and agonising decline already baked into his moment of greatest triumph? Was it, indeed, inevitable?
The feature-length documentary takes as its structure the obvious three acts of Wenger’s Arsenal career. There must be remote, uncontacted tribes in the Amazon, perhaps aliens millions of light years away, who already know the first bit: Arsene Who, he came from Japan, he invented pasta you know, anchoring Cool Britannia-era shot of Oasis, boxy suit, professorial, two Doubles, a new lease of life for Donkey Adams blah blah blah. This is, correctly, rattled through by your Wrightys and your Lee Dixons, the latter sporting here a most ill-advised newsboy hat, perhaps purloined from the former. The eye-catching quote comes from Martin Keown: “We didn’t know if it was the stretching, the vitamins we were taking, the new diet, but we felt like supermen.”
So that section is over in a jiffy, and the meat of the film is the story of the 2003-2004 unbeaten season, with contributions from all the key figures up to and including Thierry Henry and Sir Alex Ferguson. Wenger says that Invincibility “fulfilled the dream of my life. The fact that I could convince this group to achieve something they would not think could be possible. I had done my job in a perfect way for one year”. It was, of course, a great achievement. And yet, as he also notes: “Sometimes I wonder, was something broken after that?”
For then begins the third act, and we absolutely, definitely will not see the like: from May 15, 2004, when they beat Leicester 2-1 to complete the season unbeaten, to Wenger’s last home game as manager on May 6, 2018, 14 whole years of decline, of frustration, of, ultimately, failure. Fourteen years! Nuno did not get 14 league matches. It is inconceivable that any big-club manager will get to get it so wrong, for so long, ever again.
His reactions to this are fascinating. Obviously there is the partly justified self-justification: the new stadium restricted the operating budget, the disrupted ecosystem brought about by Roman Abramovich, boardroom shenanigans, and something harder to quantify about the move from Highbury, a loss of something grounding and inspiring to Wenger, the players and the club as a whole.
All fair points. But the game moved on tactically and financially, and Wenger and Arsenal did not. He says: “I am a romantic. A pragmatic romantic. We are in entertainment: the groundwork is to win but that is not enough. The collective expression of a team, to transform it into art”, and later: “Stubbornness can be a strength and a weakness. Had I lost the quality of my judgment? I don’t know. But the dedication, my desire to do well was exactly the same.”
Was Invincibility, in fact, the fatal weakness? It certainly contributed to making Wenger eight-figures-a-year untouchable, and that was not good for either Arsenal or, perhaps, Arsene. This film, for me, illuminates one of the contradictions about Wenger: because he was ascetic and foreign and polyglot, it was assumed that he was a well-rounded person but, as he himself explains, there was also something deeply lacking in him. “I have the addiction gene,” he says.
“You don’t develop certain aspects of your personality you could have done in your life.” He also observes: “Competition at all costs destroys a part of your personality” and notes that his father never told him “well done”. His ability to see things others could not propelled him to the top, and his tunnel vision did too. But once his Invincibility was punctured, as it would always have to be, the blind spots clouded the entire field of perception. He now works for Fifa and Saudi Arabia.
Was his long and agonising decline already baked into moment of greatest triumph? Was it inevitable?
“Arsene Wenger: Invincible” is in cinemas on Thursday; and on Dvd/digital download from Nov 22