In years to come, English football will realise that it did not deserve Arsene Wenger. The Arsenal manager has his faults, but there are few men in English football can match his will to win, integrity, consistency of outlook and sheer intellectual ability. To have seen Wenger worn down by the relentless Premier League news cycle, mocked and derided by fans with days remaining on their free Photoshop trial has been rather sad.
Wenger gave an utterly fascinating interview to L'Equipe last year, wich has been translated into English for Arseblog. Here is how Wenger answered a question as to how he sees himself:
I am only a guide. I enable others to express what they have within them. I didn’t create anything. I am a facilitator of what is beautiful in man. I define myself as an optimist. My never ending struggle in this business is to release what is beautiful in man. I can be described as naïve in that sense. But it allows me to believe, and I am often proven right.
You can't imagine another Premier League manager giving such an interview. Sam Allardyce, for example, strikes you as a man who is thoroughly unconvinced that there is anything beautiful in man, and if there is, it's probably a recently eaten kebab.
Wenger has today given a fantastic interview to France Football in which he has given his reaction to Britain's leaving of the European Union, and has explained the negative consequences the vote will have for the Premier League:
Yes, certainly. The players will see their wages come down a bit and the competition with Germany, of example, will be stronger. But that was one of the risks of the job and that worries me less. England still has a good amount of financial resources. There is a margin in terms of the money that will come in again this year.
But, in my opinion, it is overwhelmingly in the long-term that there are questions to be answered. The way in which England will leave the European Union will dictate the future of the Premier League. If the league becomes less attractive, the broadcasters will offer less money for the rights, club revenues will decrease and the Premier League will suffer the consequences. There lies the problem.
Wenger believes that it is "it is quite futile to want to rattle the mirage of isolationism" in a globalised world, probing the nonsense of London thriving on billions of pounds of foreign investment rejecting immigration. In addition to hurting England's hopes of attracting the best talent from across Europe with a weaker currency, Wenger also believes that isolation from Europe will hurt the general quality of English football, citing the example of the ban from European competition following the Heysel disaster:
Certainly. There is a great example: when England left the European Championships for five years (1985), she worked hard to come back to the level of the others. I think that England needs Europe, it is indispensable. And Europe needs England.
Wenger also posited the idea that the chaos surrounding the vote may have affected the English players against Iceland:
Don’t forget that it is the English who created this port. It is for that reason today that everyone is a bit groggy. I ask myself if the England players (who lost to Iceland) were themselves not left a little groggy by the whole thing.
We aren't so sure about the last point: we doubt the underperformance of Raheem Sterling had anything to do with the drop in the currency. Otherwise, fascinating stuff as usual from Wenger.
Read the full interview here.
