9. Arsene Who?

If the past is a foreign country, then so is the future. Arsene Wenger was one of the few people in English football who appreciated this when he agreed to become Arsenal manager in 1996. No foreign coach had been successful in England but Wenger arrived with a couple of cheat codes: his expertise in physiology and French football. He was about to do things very differently.

Wenger came into a culture that was insular and confused, with simultaneous superiority and inferiority complexes. There were scarcely any foreign players in England in the 1970s and 1980s, in contrast to the other major European leagues, and the ban on English clubs playing in Europe from 1985 to 1990 compounded the sense of isolation rather than globalisation. On the first weekend of the Premier League in 1992-93, there were only 13 foreign players. (Pub quiz, hotshot.)

Things had started to change by the start of the 1996-97 season. The Premier League had attracted players as good as Gianluca Vialli, Ruud Gullit, Dennis Bergkamp and Faustino Asprilla, even if some were in the twilight of their careers. But foreign managers at any stage of their career were not welcome in England. Only two had managed in the top flight, both unequivocal failures: the superb Josef Venglos, who led Czechoslovakia to the quarter-finals of Italia 90, lasted only a season at Aston Villa and Ossie Ardiles’ Spurs were a laughing stock for their freestyle approach to defending. Gullit was appointed Chelsea’s player-manager in the summer of 1996, and soon after it became an open secret that Wenger would replace Bruce Rioch at Arsenal.

Wenger had considerable pedigree: he had won a league title with Monaco, with a side including Glenn Hoddle, and reached the semi-finals of the Champions League in 1993-94. But in England, only avid readers of World Soccer would have known much about him. In 1996 few people knew how to use the internet; those who did had little idea what to use it for. “ARSENE WHO?” was the headline in the Daily Star.