Over seventy years old, in any sense belongs to the elderly. Is it possible for people over seventy years old to be reborn after suffering the biggest setback in their careers?
This is the story of Wenger over the past three years.
This rebirth occurred a month after he suffered a crush. In his autobiography, Wenger recalls the darkness of that period, saying that he is not guarded. Rarely, his good friend David Dane is also his close neighbor. Every day he can go to the home of the former Arsenal vice-president, either to rub his meals or just to find companionship.
That last home feeling, Wenger describes in his biographical film as "attending his own funeral." In this case, Van Basten has a similar expression before: he retired from the army at the age of 30 due to injury, and during the retirement ceremony, it was like "attending his own funeral".
Fortunately, the period of loss of such idleness is not long, wenger flew to Russia in the summer of 2018 as a special guest of beIN Sports, commenting on the 2018 World Cup in Russia.
Who would have thought that in the years that followed, his main mission would be to overthrow the quadrennial soccer competition model of the World Cup.
There have been many different accounts about Wenger as a guest of the football game review. He was a longtime guest on the competitions of the French television agency, and his comments were high in the early days, and then mixed reviews, and at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, his comments were considered bland. But Wenger was happy, he was a restless man, and during the World Series, he participated as an observer and made him enjoy it.
The same is true of Russia, where he and David Dane flew through the different arenas in a private jet during the World Cup. Dane was once the controlling shareholder of Arsenal, and in 1996 he appointed Wenger, who was then coaching in Japan, the highest achievement of Dane's presidency, and the first acquaintance was in 1994 when Wenger came from France to watch an Arsenal match, smoked at halftime, and first met Mrs. Dane - Wenger later quit smoking.
Dane was a noble man in Wenger's life. This summer in Russia, the two would meet with FIFA executives on different occasions, and it was Dane's clever move to find a new job for his old friend - Wenger never lacked a career offer, and during the World Cup in Russia, there were four job opportunities calling for him: the technical director of Paris Saint-Germain, the head coach of AC Milan, the head coach of the Japanese national team, and the challenge in a new field - FIFA's head of global football development.
Dane is very concerned about the lonely old buddies: "I never wanted him to go to the club to coach because this kind of work is too stressful and expensive, and to be honest, I am worried about his health. My advice is: 'Do you really need that stress, that constant anxiety 24 hours a day?' 'Can we think of something else?' "
Wenger heeded the advice of his old friend, and in the next three years, he completed the transformation of his professional image from a "professor" in coaching clothes to a professional man in a suit. The working environment has also changed from his "40 years of happy football lawn atmosphere" to an office office. After the age of 70, Wenger, a professional challenge, went from a single club well-being to a mission to promote and develop the sport globally. The familiar "professor" of North London became a source of inspiration for FIFA's innovation.
These innovations, these new attempts, may not all be widely embraced.
He spends a lot of time traveling, london, Paris and his hometown of Strasbourg, the most convenient place to find Wenger, or the FIFA headquarters in Zurich. His office is on the second floor of the headquarters building, which sits on a hillside on the outskirts of Zurich. Some travelers are going to visit FIFA headquarters, and taxi drivers always say, "Oh, the new headquarters, close to Zurich Zoo." "The all-glass curtain wall building, or a FIFA legacy of the Blatter era, has a fitness center, an international geography-themed parking lot, and a five-story basement with deep nuclear bombing resistance – all sorts of materials about world football are stored in the basement. Wenger's office, the large floor-to-ceiling window facing a 11-a-side 4G stadium, every Friday, FIFA staff and surrounding amateur teams will play, will be presented in front of the Arsene Wenger office window.
All of this is too different from London's Kearney.
Wenger never imagined that he would be in another role, an executive in a large, hyper-international organization. But freed from the pressure of North London, he embraced the rebirth. At the end of November 2021, at the Finsbury Park Cinema in North London, there was the premiere of "Alsenna Wenger: The Undefeated Master", a documentary work co-produced by journalist Gabriel Clarke and director Christian Jean Pierre, and the premiere of Wenger made people see the vitality of his rebirth.
The documentary tells the story of Wenger's appointment to Arsenal in the autumn of 1996, to the team that created the 2004 Premier League season unbeaten and won the title, and after 22 years in office, he was sacked by Arsenal. The documentary is not directly related to Arsenal Club, but too many new and old friends, from Arteta to Dane, Vieira, Wright and others, attended the premiere.
The reborn Wenger is particularly profound in the observations of some people around him. Like Arsenal's former goalkeeper Lehmann, who joined from Stuttgart in 2003 and is the backbone of the "undefeated division", Wenger was the goalkeeper coach of a team in arsenal in his final season at Arsenal, and he admitted that moving into the new stadium in 2006, Arsenal was under huge financial pressure to require the club to reach the Champions League every season, which would ensure a share of the prize money and media broadcasts. Bank lenders even explicitly require clubs to renew their contract with Wenger in order to ensure "lending security". Lehmann recalled: "Once we lost a game and he [Wenger] said to everyone in the dressing room: 'Listen, kids, we have to pay off the pitch loan, I'm sure you can get into the Champions League, it's very, very important.' That was the only time he revealed to everyone the correlation between the team's results and the cost of the stadium, after which we beat Manchester United away and then the results went up and finally qualified for the Champions League for the following season. "
In his last 15 years in charge, a lot has changed in team training and influence on assistant coaches. "When I was a player, he would always lead the team to training, he would always be there — he would always stop training, ask the players in all kinds of details, and sometimes he would shout a few voices to remind everyone to pay attention," Lehmann recalled, "When I became an assistant coach, he said to me: 'Youngs, I let you be an assistant, but not to make you silent on the sidelines, I am not a loud person, I am more of an observer, so you have to take on more responsibilities as a coach.'" "
Jack Wilsher is an Arsenal ex-player who grew up fully in the Arsene Wenger era, he was only 4 years old when Wenger took office, and it was under Wenger's guidance that he rose from the club's youth system and later became a team player. "He stuck to his ideas and values, even though there were a lot of skepticism at the time," Wilsher said, "and that's what I admire most about him, he always stuck to his principles and believed in the growth path he set." That's what makes him successful, and it's what sets him apart. "
This layer of association, on April 20, 2018, was drawn to an end, at 9 a.m. that day, at The Kearney Training Base, Wenger officially informed his assistant coaching team, as well as the overall team members, that he would leave at the end of the season. Wilsher recalls: "It was a moment that touched everyone's feelings. At first, everyone was just shocked, and then all kinds of emotions came to mind. ”
On that day, the famous writer and Arsenal fan Hornby received a mobile phone news feed in his kitchen. An era, an era of many, many people, is over.
This was not wenger's own choice to leave, but the departure imposed on him by the club's owners. It was also the most painful wound in Wenger's heart. Over the years, many highly respected and honored positions in the football world have been invited to him many times, Real Madrid Manchester United Juve Paris Saint-Germain, as well as the French national team, England team and so on. Wenger opted for perseverance at Arsenal.
But loyalty is not necessarily mutual.
"Most arsenal players should feel fortunate that they can play in a very relaxed, very inclusive environment," Lehmann recalled, "but I feel that some of the players are so used to it that, you even feel that they are not putting all their efforts into it." This is extremely disappointing. Without Wenger, many players would not have joined Arsenal at all, and they might not have even been in obscurity. ”
The final theme of the main stadium is the French expression of "Thank you Alsena" – "Merci Arsène", with banners flying high inside and outside the Emirates Stadium. A gold Premier League trophy, presented as a gift to Wenger, said goodbye to the fans with a microphone in hand. At that moment, and even in that game, Wenger was as calm and easy as ever. "I had a good control of my emotions at the time," Wenger recalls in the documentary, "but the end of a love story, of course, was sad." That's the end of your life, at least the end of a life. It's like a funeral. ”
Fortunately, it was just a goodbye to a period of time, Wenger's story is not over, and the resurrection is just around the corner.
After the 2018 World Cup, Wenger took a rare summer vacation, this time in the mountains of corsica in the Mediterranean. He used this time to consider FIFA's offer. Wenger is well aware of FIFA's history and the challenges it faces, especially in the post-Blatter era. Dane gave him a lot of advice. "During the World Cup in Russia, we unexpectedly had a lot of interesting conversations with FIFA, UEFA, the governing body of international football," Dane said, "and I felt that he was going to end his football career, and maybe at the top, an institution like FIFA is the most suitable." Because he can use a global vision to take care of the development of football in 211 member units. That was his stage. ”
The stage is really attractive to him, wenger has always had a desire to give back to developing football regions such as Africa, Asia and Latin America, and as a professional coach, he has drawn a lot of football nutrition from these regions. And he has always hoped to reform the dense football schedule of globalization and help the progress of football globalization through the popularization of more modern technologies. Arsenal star Wengerburn also feels that this kind of position is simply set for "a person with the most complete knowledge of football and enlightened concepts" like Wenger.
Two weeks after accepting the FIFA position, Wenger went to Belfast to attend the FIFA Rules Committee meeting, and he entered the role so quickly and unexpectedly that Wenger clearly proposed that the Premier League is in love and should be more allowed for the referee to go to the sidelines to watch the VAR replay, which is the first step for Wenger to intervene in the change of football rules.
He still maintains his good schedule, getting up at 5:30 a.m. every day, taking an ice bath to speed up his metabolism, and then running 8 to 10 kilometers a day. Unlike before, the running equipment will now be a running jacket embroidered with a FIFA icon in blue. Every morning he would have a cup of coffee with the FIFA technical team and look back at the games he had watched the night before. He works closely with Massimo Bussaka, FIFA's head of refereeing, and the two meet in the office almost every day as long as they are in Zurich. Wenger's office, a desk, a reception couch, and a coaching tactics board on the wall, are simple and straightforward. He meets weekly on Zoom with bald referee Colina, an Italian referee based in Rome who remains chairman of FIFA's refereeing committee.
He spent a lot of time and energy nurturing an online academy aimed at strengthening the training of coaches and players. Of course, he also has to spend a lot of time and energy to adjust the schedule of international football, and the core challenge is the reform initiative of the biennial World Cup. Wenger took the lead in promoting the reform, explaining with great patience why the two-year World Cup would reduce player pressure, international travel distances and costs, even if the initiative sounded at first glance contrary to the actual effect that Wenger emphasized.
"FIFA is not the leader of FIFA, FIFA belongs to all those who love football," Wenger interpreted, "I believe fifa needs to take on the mission of education, and I am the person in charge of this, we want to reach people all over the world." As it is, football is only well organized in Europe, but not in the rest of the world. All people in the world who love football deserve a fair chance, which is FIFA's mission. “
All of his FIFA projects are based on technological innovation and application, but Wenger, who is more energetic and enterprising than ever before, has triggered a lot of hostility in the biennial World Cup initiative - Europe and South America have joined forces to oppose this World Cup reform, and all The Premier League clubs are denouncing this reform initiative. Winterbourne understands Wenger's inner drive: "He wants to create a new environment, but any reformer will be questioned, and in the face of the unknown, the vast majority of people are skeptical and resistant." ”
Lehmann and Wenger have always been in touch: "I often think that the FIFA position, maybe just his transitional position, because his love and passion are on the pitch. But now it seems that he is very comfortable with this new role and enjoys these new challenges. This role gives him more freedom and more opportunities for international travel. He didn't look the same, but his mind was clearly more relaxed. 22 years in Arsenal's role is bound to be exhausting. ”
When his latest documentary was released, Arsenal's current manager Artetta also came to the scene and publicly expressed his hope that Wenger would return to the club. But no one is sure what identity, what role, and when. Wenger will definitely return to Arsenal, it will be a homecoming, but he is essentially gone, he has begun a new life course.