Instead, there is a surprisingly honest self-portrait of an obsessive, driven man, who decided that the game really could be beautiful, and was prepared to sacrifice himself to that belief. As expected, I enjoyed reading about his vision for the game, past present and future, his philosophy, his thoughts on the social responsibility of sport. In fact, now more than ever, I’d love to sit down and have a chat with Le Prof, without the formality and expectations of narrative.

My Life In Red and White feels like a wasted opportunity, a weak penalty aimed straight down the middle. He offers studious reflections on the game and his groundbreaking approach to motivation, mindset, fitness and football that was often beautiful to watch.We get our first glimpse of Wenger’s legendarily all-consuming relationship with football when he reviews his coaching roles at RC Strasbourg and AS Nancy. Much of the chapter is devoted to a description of these changes and their effects of day-to-day life at the club. Photograph: Arsenal Football Club/Stuart MacFarlane View image in fullscreen Wenger celebrates Arsenal winning the Premier League at White Hart Lane, London, in 2004. 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. Although he talks in the abstract about what makes a good player and coach, specifics are thin on the ground .

It is these connections, the “crossing paths” and mutual support that are evident throughout his early years in football, whether at AS Mutzig, Mulhouse, or Racing Strasbourg, the club where he juggled playing and coaching roles and that would serve as his first “laboratory” (bringing a psychiatrist into the club for the first time, among other things like “invisible training”—dietary regimes, massage, mental preparation, sleep, quality of life, the people the players surround themselves with), and later at Monaco, Nagoya and Arsenal. I must admit that I was hoping for greater insights into the mechanics of his thought process around player selection, choosing or not choosing tactical variations, creative team chemistry etc. Even if he is too polite to air his dirtiest laundry, he could at least offer some insight into the details of his thinking. He speaks with great admiration for those players who made the transition, and who ‘respected the players, the game, the beauty of the game [and] who did not just count on their opponent’s weakness.Wenger has never been averse to introspection, and he is not in these pages, but he is clearly uncomfortable straying too far from the familiar shores of football. Wenger portrays this progression as a natural one; he styles himself as thinking more like a coach than a player even when he was still playing. The paragraph on Cole includes the sentence “It is one of the great regrets of my life that I lost him to Chelsea, thanks to a misunderstanding in the negotiations with his agent”. All international items are dispatched using either a international courier or Royal Mail International Signed For.

At Monaco, Wenger ushered in a period of commendable success, winning the Ligue 1 title in his debut season [1987-88] and taking the club to a Champions League semi-final in 1993-94.He tells us that he sees FIFA’s roles as: organising competitions; being custodian the Laws of the game; and education, and that he sees his role principally as educational.