MS: You cannot be by nature an insecure person. One of the things you have done this summer, selling two of your players, Emmanuel Adebayor and Kolo Toure, to Manchester City, who are perceived as serious challengers to your place in the top four, strikes me as the action of a very confident man. Perhaps too much so.
AW: True, but in the end you come to the conclusion, can you stop Manchester City creating a big team? I don’t believe so, because if we do not sell Adebayor they will buy Samuel Eto’o or somebody else because they have the resources, they have so much money. My only question was whether we could afford to sell Adebayor; where he went was less important. To be scared of that would be the problem.
MS: You described yourself as an emotional person when responding to stress. Beyond football, are you emotional, do you watch films and find them moving?
AW: I am not extrovert. I do not like to show my emotions. In my job I learned very early on to dominate my emotions. You can cause a lot of damage if you express your feelings with the team. After a game you can do fantastic damage by going overboard and saying negative things you cannot repair. I learnt the final part of mastering your emotions in Japan. You have people there, a man loses his wife in the morning, he comes to work and does not speak about it. They do not wish to disturb others with their problems.
MS: Not always healthy though, is it?
AW: It is criminal for that person. Whenever there is trauma in the world, psychologists encourage people to talk about it, because it is important it comes out of you. I am sure I pay a price sometimes for holding it in.
MS: How is that manifested?
AW: I don’t know what it does to my health. I know it pays a price on my head, that is for sure.
MS: Are you including the times when you play down an incident or say you haven’t seen something bad involving one of your players, when we all know you have?
AW: Yes, because you are thinking, ‘Why has he done that?’ and you know you cannot explain it. But once you have this reputation for saying you did not see what happened, even when you genuinely did not see it, nobody believes you. But at other times, I saw it, and I said I didn’t see it to protect the player, because I could not find any rational explanation to defend him.
MS: You take on a lot for those players. You are very disciplined, you work very hard, you keep your emotions in check. How would you describe your relationship with the players: is it paternalistic or purely professional?
AW: Comprehensive. Professional. It is also a job where you have to have an optimistic view of human nature or you become paranoid. You always have to think that a guy wants to do well. I have known some very gifted coaches but they could not stand not being in control of what other people said and did. And it is a job where you cannot be suspicious. In every company, you have a boss who when he gets the job suddenly becomes suspicious of everybody. They finish mad. A coach is there to help, so he must be optimistic about human nature, he must think that if he helps in the correct way the players will respond.
MS: Do you think that was the problem with Jose Mourinho [former Chelsea manager], that he was suspicious of everybody’s motives?
AW: I don’t know him well enough, so I cannot judge him, but he was certainly suspicious of me.
MS: And Sir Alex Ferguson [Manchester United manager]?
AW: Now we have a respectful relationship, but that was not always the case. It has become a lot better since we have stopped competing with Manchester United at the top level.
MS: Do you become good friends with any other managers?
AW: No. And it has nothing to with the quality of the person. On the day, it is you or them, so there is always mistrust. You cannot be completely open about the players, for instance. Say you are the manager of Everton and I am playing against you on Saturday. I call you up the week before and we are talking. I cannot say, ‘this player is driving me mad at the moment’, because then you will know before we play that I have a problem with my players. There are managers I respect, and I respect what they do, but you cannot be completely friendly and open up.
MS: Is that why you do not go in for a drink after matches?
AW: Most of the time, yes. What can you say if you have won? And if you have lost all you want to do is get home and prepare for the next game.
MS: What about the people you work with, does there have to be a distance and different sort of barrier with them, too?
AW: There is distance because I am the boss, but there has to be trust or it could not work.
MS: How do you relate to players now? You are 59, a different generation, and they live such different lifestyles. Even when you were a young player at Strasbourg you came to Cambridge and took a three-week English course one summer rather than go on holiday. You were different to your team-mates, more studious, even then. What have you got in common with the dressing-room?
AW: I came to England because even then I could not imagine leading my life only in France. I wanted to lead an international life and I thought I would have to know English. I had a bi-country education: Germany and France. I was French but with an influence from Germany, even in the way I see football, I feel it. I was born just after the war, I was brought up to hate Germany, but that excited my curiosity because when I went over the border I saw that German people were no different, they just wanted to be happy too, and I thought this was completely stupid to hate them. So that is what made me want to live all over the world.
MS: But from an early age you seem to have had a very different world view to the stereotypical footballer.
AW: I went to Hungary on holiday for a month, too, because I wanted to understand how the Communist system worked. I travelled everywhere. I came back home convinced it would never work.
MS: Do you think any player in your dressing-room would be thinking like that now?
AW: The common denominator of successful teams is that the players are intelligent. That does not always mean educated. They can analyse a problem and find a solution. The common denominator in a top level person is that they can objectively assess their performance. You speak to a player after the game and ask him to rate his performance, if he analyses well, you know he is the sort who will drive home thinking, ‘I did this wrong, I did that wrong’. His assessment will be correct and, next time, he will rectify. That player has a chance. The one who has a crap game and says he was fantastic, you worry for him. This is true beyond football.
MS: Considering this constant process of assessment, when do you switch off, when do you find the world away from football – or does it not exist for you? Does football dominate all of the time?
AW: Yes. When you are 30 years in this job you have to be, somewhere, crazy, because you cannot say it has not had a psychological impact. You live it, you think it, it is impossible to escape.
MS: So there is madness in your obsession?
AW: Yes.
MS: Is that true of anyone who is truly exceptional at sport?
AW: Yes. I worked with Dennis Bergkamp for 10 years and I have not seen a man more obsessed with every little technical thing. He was unbelievable, on and off the field. Thierry Henry the same. You could call Thierry at home, 10 o’clock every night, and he was at home. At 23 years of age. And talk to Thierry about football: you cannot beat him.
MS: Do you ever do that? The 10 o’clock phone call, as a test?
AW: Most of the time, no, because you cannot control people in London - and you have to be optimistic.
MS: Do you ever wish you could be free of this obsession, though? Do you feel it is a hindrance? Does your wife, or your daughter not say, ‘Arsene, I wish you would just chill out’?
AW: Look, Sir Bobby Robson just died. Did you see the last game he watched? Just a charity game, but still he had that spark in his eye when he was at a football game. He could have sat at home, yet he chose to go there. He had two, three days to live and that is where he wanted to be. Yet what would he have done at home, sit there and think about dying, maybe be terrified? The way to get out was to go to his passion.
MS: Do you fear life after football?
AW: Of course.
MS: What will happen to the passions and drives and desires you have if you are no longer at the top of your game as a manager?
AW: I cannot forever be at the top as a manager because you need physical strength, some bestial strength to do this job. You need that to fight and to win. That goes slowly throughout your life but you compensate with experience, you anticipate problems, you understand more, you are more comprehensive with players, but I still think I will be in football, maybe as a chairman or some other job.
MS: You don’t think there is something else you would like to discover?
AW: Art would be interesting for me, I think.
MS: What painters do you like?
AW: At the moment I am more into abstraction.
MS: Do you go to galleries?
AW: I go because I have friend who is president of the art galleries in Nice and when I have time I go there. So I am not into it yet, but it could be of interest.
MS: Have you been to the Tate Modern?
AW: Yes, but before I was here as a manager. Not since.
MS: That’s not the Tate Modern. That’s Tate Britain. Tate Modern is where the main abstract stuff is now, you’d like it. What about films? What films do you like?
AW: I have seen many, mostly from the 1970s, Fellini, Fassbinder, that period. The last one I really liked was The Deer Hunter. It is a classic. In the last ten years I have not seen many movies.
MS: So what do you watch when you get home?
AW: Football. Politics. Debates about society. Then I can switch off when I want, I do not have to follow a series. The political debates around the American elections were fantastic, like in France. For me, it was Arsenal versus Manchester United.
MS: That is something you could be, a political advisor. You could go into politics.
AW: I could have gone into politics, yes. There are parallels. The value of experience is that you can better dominate your nature and, on television, the politician who loses the debate is the one who gets nervous. As soon as you become aggressive on television you have lost. It is a basic rule.
MS: That is probably true in sport as well.
AW: Yes. That is what everybody says about Kevin Keegan at Newcastle United, that he lost the league because he got aggressive with Ferguson. It is not true, they lost the championship because they had no defence, but that is what people think. That night, people got the message. They thought: ‘For f***’s sake, he’s lost the plot.’
MS: Who is the greatest political debater you have seen?
AW: Nicolas Sarkozy [president of France] is good. Obama has a lot of charisma, but not a lot of practice in politics. He is a guy who can change the world but he does not have 20 years of politics behind him, so not to make mistakes. Sarkozy is 54 and you can read speeches he made at 24. That is a massive difference.
MS: Did you stay up all night to watch the American election?
AW: Yes. I have friends in the States, the minute Obama got elected they got text messages thanking them for their help. It was such a well organised campaign.
MS: Earlier on, you drew comparisons with politicians when you talked about dominating your emotions, dominating your fear, dominating your nerves. It seems essential that you do this.
AW: If you think about your education, it is about fear. It is fear of not being successful, of disappointing people, of disappointing yourself. Press conferences are all about fear. ‘What will happen if you lose? What will happen if you do not win? Why do you not buy players?’ It is all guided by fear.
MS: So how do you rise above it, particularly when if things are not going well, you are bound to be asking some of those questions yourself?
AW: That is the problem. When you allow that to infiltrate your brain so deeply on a daily basis you then become guided by this fear without noticing it and you fall below the line, your life drags you down. If you do not make the effort to rise above it you are down there being punched right and left, so much that you do not even notice anymore. Once you are in that state, it becomes very different to say to your team, ‘my friends, I believe you are good’. Life is full of examples of the influence of belief, of mindset. You go out in the morning and see a sign of good luck or bad luck, and that affects your mood for the rest of the day. You walk under a ladder by mistake and start thinking differently.
MS: That is how the placebo effect works, you take a pill that does nothing, but you believe it to be helpful and it works. But who is lifting you up, who do you turn to if you have a problem?
AW: There is always somebody, but I am not talking about real difficulties that exist. I am saying we spend a big part of our life being down there without noticing it, and without reason. That is something that is really important because the time in your life is limited, you do not know how long you will be here and it is stupid to spend that time down there. If you are conscious of it, then it is not difficult to lift yourself up. And being a football manager is a job in which everyone wants to push you down. So self awareness is important.
MS: Does that get to you, the negativity?
AW: I am a normal human being with weaknesses. This job can be like quicksand when you lose and it is hard to always be positive when you are losing games.
MS: To maintain this attitude, then, do you say things publicly sometimes that you find hard to endorse in your mind?
AW: Many times.
MS: I am thinking of a couple of years ago when you said you were going to win the league, when you were six points behind in April and about to play at Manchester United, having already lost 4-0 to them in the FA Cup. We were all thinking, ‘he can’t really believe that’.
AW: I agree, the objective judgement from outside was more realistic then. On the other hand, no great thing has ever been accomplished without somebody’s crazy belief.
MS: Yes, there have been experiments in which irrational optimism has proved a better predictor of outcomes for a person. A certain degree of it can be helpful.
AW: 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.
MS: One final football issue. There seems to have been a change in stance from the board. They seem to have backed away from statements about what a lot of money you have to spend. Did you ask them to do that?
AW: I think they grew to understand that it put me under tremendous pressure, and was not helpful. To be fair, I think they were under pressure when they made those statements, too. We have an economic model that is easily explained. Now we have sold players there is money available to buy.
MS: So you think Arsenal can achieve their aims with the current financial structure, without inviting people like Alisher Usmanov in from outside?
AW: Yes, we have an economic model that is viable as long as we stay at the top. In six or seven years time, it will be very easy financially, but it is not my job to be involved in that. A company works best when everybody does the job he is paid to do.
MS: So you are not pressuring the board to accept outside money?
AW: I agreed on a structure to the club four or five years ago, I believed it could work and we are at the period now when we will see whether I was right or not. That is why this season is so interesting.
Excellent interview!
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