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WENGER: I MAKE SUCCESS, I WON'T BUY IT


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In a rare interview he revealed: "When we decided to build the stadium, I wanted to anticipate the possibility of financial restrictions, so I concentrated on youth. I also felt the best way to create an identity with the way we play football, to get players integrated into our culture, with our beliefs, our values, was to get them as young as possible and to develop them together. I felt it would be an interesting experiment to see players grow together with these qualities, and with a love for the club." He pauses, smiles wryly, and adds, "It was an idealistic vision of the world of football."

This credo, which has never previously been expressed so clearly, has provided Arsenal fans with both delight and frustration. There is pride among supporters at the club's development of young players, and joy at the football they deliver, but there is also frustration at the lack of trophies. The investment in the Emirates was supposed to provide Arsenal with the financial muscle to compete with Chelsea and Manchester United in the transfer market. According to recently departed director Keith Edelman, it has. He said there was £70-million (R1-billion) available to Wenger. If there is, it sits in the bank, gathering interest. Another transfer window is about to close and Wenger, as usual, looks like roughly breaking even.
 
Last week he said he could spend £30-million (R430-million) on a player if he wanted to, but he does not need to. Results this season will demonstrate whether that is the case or not, but the reality is Wenger does not want to. This visionary is a stubborn one. The board would clearly give Wenger whatever he asks for, even if it stretched the finances, but the economics graduate will only ask for £30-million (R430-million) in extremis. Nor is he about to countenance a £135 000-a-week (R1,93-million) contract, even if Mathieu Flamini and Alexander Hleb have departed for better-paid employment elsewhere, and Emmanuel Adebayor was evidently tempted to follow.

Wenger believes his team are already good enough to win one of his two targets, the Premier League or Champions League, but feels they will not peak for five or six years.

"The challenge we face is to keep them together," he admits. "It is very important to meet their needs inside the club, the way we play, the way we behave, with success on the field and in financial rewards.

"If you can achieve that as a club, you can keep them together. I don't feel at our club you have to make any other sacrifice than financial, because all the other aspects are better at our club than anywhere else."

The financial sacrifice is, however, non-negotiable.

"I believe you need a wages structure," says Wenger, "if you want to be fair with everybody, or try to be as fair as possible. You could make the odd exception, but you need a logic in the way you pay your players and in the way you structure the whole wages bill. Personally, I don't think it is right to lose £100-million (R1,4-billion) and to play football. I feel that the skill of a manager is to do the maximum with the resources he has and try to be successful.

"If you do not balance the books, you go bankrupt and die. I could push the club into big debt. I go away with success and the guy who comes after me suffers for five years because he cannot buy a player any more and the club goes down. The guy who comes after me has good players he can work with, he has a healthy financial situation and he has a club in good shape. That is part of management as well."

Elite footballers, obviously, already earn more than any normal person can spend, but the same applies to stars in the financial world. In football, as in the City, the biggest pay packets are not about spending power.

"It is more a status thing than the actual money," says Wenger.

"The player compares himself to other players he thinks are on the same level, not because of the money, more for the respect for his own quality. That is where meeting their needs comes in. Money is only one fraction of the needs that a player has at a club. On that front you can sometimes accept a small disadvantage knowing that the rest is superior."

Wenger has done this himself, rejecting offers from clubs such as Real Madrid and Barcelona because he believes his working conditions at Arsenal could not be bettered elsewhere.

Only Sir Alex Ferguson's tenure at Old Trafford now exceeds Wenger's at Arsenal and, like the Scot, Wenger has steeped himself in, and deliberately abided by, the culture of the club.

"I feel if you come into a club as manager, you have first to work out their specific qualities," Wenger says.

"For me Arsenal is a club which tries to respect tradition, style, honesty, fair play. If you come in and behave like a gangster, you will not last long. The supporters will be the first ones not happy with that. A club needs values. If a club has no values, you go nowhere."

Wenger's own values come from his parents, Alphonse and Louise, who ran an auberge in the Alsace village of Duttlenheim when the young Arsene was growing up. "Everyone is an extension of their parents," he says.

"When you are very young, you do not feel that the influence of your parents or your education is decisive. The more you grow into your maturity, you realise you feel you are only comfortable with yourself if you are respecting the values you got when you were a kid. It takes you some time to discover that. You feel independent, but when you look back at your life, you find that what guides you is the values you got when very young. Then you accept it.

"A trait of my parents I recognise in me is the belief that you work very hard and you shut up. If you are good, someone will see it. You try to do as well as you can and, if you are honest and you work hard, you will be all right."

Wenger places great store by team spirit, it is one of the benefits he hopes to realise by building a club from the youth ranks. Maintaining it, however, requires a constant vigil.

"You check that every day that the team is bonded. You try always to make sure it is integrated. It is never guaranteed, and it is very fragile and vulnerable. It can be upset by exterior factors or interior factors and can disintegrate very easily. It is the skill of the manager to always assess it and to address the situation when needed. A team is made of a collection of individuals. Sometimes, a few individuals feel they do not need to put their energy into the team as much, and think more about themselves. That quickly has consequences for the team."

Once Wenger balanced his squad between what he described as "an English block and a French block". Now his squad features 17 nationalities, but there is one dominant accent. The French core grew to six leading players with the acquisition of Mikaël Silvestre. Is that a risk?

"It is natural the same culture gets together. If you yourself met some English people in Jamaica, you will speak to them, you will have dinner together. You cannot fight against that, because it is a lost fight. If you have a dinner together, you will choose the same kind of food. It is a glue, it is part of you. What you can fight for is to keep the communication going inside the team and make sure this does not go into a clique situation."

The decline of "the English block" has been endlessly commented upon and, when pressed, Wenger addresses the subject wearily. Yet, while it is true that high hopes are being expressed for the rising generation of Jack Wilshere and Henri Lansbury, not forgetting Theo Walcott, it is only four years ago he sang the praises of Ryan Garry, Justin Hoyte and Ryan Smith. All have since left the club.

"They were victims of the competition. It is not a question of nationalities. The Premier League today is a competition among the players of the whole world at the top clubs, it is a competition among the top players of the whole world. Of course, that is detrimental to some English players and it will be tough for Wilshere and Lansbury, but if they make it, they are world stars and you do not have many world stars in any academy, not now you can only recruit locally."

In assessing a player, Wenger says he looks for "intelligence, motivational level and talent". The first criterion would, to many cynics, rule out most English players, but Wenger insists they were not lacking in this area. He admitted they may seem under-educated compared to foreign players, not least because the English are inordinately impressed by anyone who speaks more than one language, but adds, "Don't worry, the big players in England are intelligent."

Now 58, he has said he recognised the pressures of the job could cut short his life, but it is a risk he will take to pursue "the only life I have wanted".

"Ten years ago I said to my wife (Annie), 'Five more years and that's all', and I am still here. So now I do not want to make those statements any more. I hope I will be strong enough to say one day 'that's it', but I am more focused on my immediate future than my longer future.

"I cannot imagine not working. Fishing in the morning is not so much what I like. It is a trap, this job, you are under high pressure, with big targets, but you cannot imagine not having it. That is not enough in itself, you must enjoy it. At the moment I enjoy it, I am healthy and successful, and I hope that lasts."

Do his family share his passion? "My wife (a former basketball Olympian) likes watching football, she watches all the games of Arsenal at home. She is not a fanatic, but she likes watching sports. No, she does not have much choice."

Loving every moment of every day: It's been 12 years since Arsene Wenger took over at Arsenal Football Club and he says he cannot imagine his life without the pressures associated with being a top-flight football manager.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    
Among the nicknames attached to Arsene Wenger when he arrived at Arsenal, with his stopwatch, studious air and what Tony Adams called "his boffin's glasses" was Le Professeur.

Little did Adams, Paul Merson and company know that, 12 years on, the French academic would be engaged in one of football's most audacious experiments, with their club as the guinea pig.

When Arsenal committed themselves to moving from Highbury early this decade, Wenger decided to embark on a bold, some would say suicidally naïve, venture.