Arsene Wenger is known for many things – his Japanese philosophy, his then-revolutionary training methods, and The Invincibles – but he equally represents the idea of football as art, and its principled pursuit.
About 20 kilometres southwest of Strasbourg, in France, there is a small town by the name of Duttlenheim. In 2015, when its most famous son completed a historic 20 years at the helm of one of England’s top clubs, its population census counted 2912 inhabitants.
Arsene Wenger grew up there, his parents owning an automobile spare parts business and a local bistro. Alphonse, his father, also the manager of the local team, introduced a six-year-old Wenger to the game, and in that extremely religious region of Alsace, Wenger and his friends often required permission to miss vespers (sunset prayer services) from the town’s Catholic priest to be able to play football.
If you Google Duttlenheim now, not much shows up. The Wengers’ bistro La Croix D’or, the Golden Cross, is now under new management and renamed, and one imagines that if any traces of Le Professeur ever lingered, they are now long gone. Yet, it was at this bistro where a young Wenger spent hours observing the football-loving patrons, unconsciously setting the first brick, fresh from the kiln, of what was to come. Then, in shades of foreshadowing, a 16-year-old Wenger broke into FC Duttlenheim’s first team and took over the responsibility of “managing” a side without a coach that only had a person who supervised training sessions.