What is the measure of a life? Is it tangible successes or achievements, personal or professional? Is it quality or quantity of output? Is it the legacy we leave behind? Is it happiness?
“If happiness is liking the life one lives, I can say I have been happy, and still am.”
Arsene Wenger
For the man from Alsace, what matters still are the “game and the people who love it, those moments of grace that football offers to those who love it and who give it their all.” This is a man passionate about the beautiful game, many times even at the expense of his loved ones with whom he regrets not spending enough time but never the game that took him away from them. And for the first time, he’s telling his story – of an intense, precocious boy dreaming about football, growing up in a village that he says still feels like home to him, of an equally intense and private young man with a dream, obsessive about a sport that he has sacrificed everything for, mostly gladly; a sport that has, in return, not always given him everything it could have but far more than most, and a quirk of fate where every team he has ever coached or played in donned the red and white.
When you look back on your time on this earth, what is it that you want to remember? What is it that you want to be remembered for?