The question prompts a few seconds of considered silence before Claude Puel, so at ease discussing his subject of choice, delivers an assessment of how Arsène Wenger is best remembered at Monaco. “He left an impression,” says the club’s former stalwart player and head coach. “He was respected and admired. No other manager can match the seven years he spent in charge there, a longevity that showed he realised the importance of building up the whole club and not just offering the team a quick fix.” And then comes the caveat. “But, of course, what happened did scar him.” Monaco may have been the making of Wenger but his experiences in the principality also left him wounded.
The Champions League has conjured another reunion in the knockout phase. Arsenal, Wenger’s to shape for almost 19 years and a club on whom he has now left an indelible mark, welcome the Monégasques to the Emirates Stadium on Wednesday for a fixture which may have the 65-year-old wistfully recalling where it all began. Monaco was not his first managerial appointment but it was his first chance at the helm of a contender. Many of the strategies later lauded at Arsenal had been road-tested at the club’s then ramshackle training complex, La Turbie, or at Stade Louis II. This was where he first claimed major honours. Yet Monaco was also where Wenger was exposed to football’s more sinister side, where underhand tactics rendered even his most exhaustive efforts redundant and where, ultimately, he was sacked. Some things cannot be controlled with discipline, diet or even diligence.
Wenger’s story at Monaco requires context. He had first made his mark with Nancy-Lorraine, an unfancied team he had led to a respectable 12th place in his first season and then steered through a relegation play-off to retain top-flight status the following year. Nancy was an apprenticeship, a stage upon which to implement innovative training sessions at their Forêt de Haye complex, all of which he annotated diligently, but it also delivered a painful lesson in losing. His team were forever punching above their weight with life about survival. Defeats were a matter of course and that mindset did not sit easily with the Alsatian.
He once stopped the team coach so he could vomit in disgust after a reverse at Lens. When the side lost their last match before the winter break in his third season in charge he simply cancelled Christmas, barring visits from family and friends and stewing on his own for a fortnight.
Yet even through those toils his potential had been spotted. The Monaco president, Jean-Louis Campora, had initially approached Neuchâtel Xamax’s Gilbert Gress, the manager who had hired Wenger at Strasbourg as a player-coach with the reserve and youth teams in 1978, to replace Lucien Muller. When the older man declined the president opted for his protege.
Negotiations with Nancy extended to 15 months of haggling over compensation. In the end, Wenger, at 38, completed the move only once his contract at Nancy had expired. His team had succumbed to relegation that third year – the only demotion of his career – but his reputation had not overly suffered. Indeed, with Campora’s backing, he had started to build a powerful team from afar.
In came Glenn Hoddle – plucked from Gérard Houllier’s grasp at Paris Saint-Germain after the Englishman had left Tottenham – Patrick Battiston and Mark Hateley, players of weighty experience purchased to claim silverware. A seasoned squad welcomed the young pretender to the principality with a certain suspicion.
“We were a team expected to challenge for honours and compete in European competition and yet he had just gone down with Nancy,” says Puel, a one-club man as a player who featured in 601 games for Monaco over 17 years and is now Ligue 1’s most experienced manager with Nice, the fourth top-flight club he has overseen. “But Campora had spied something in him and, very quickly, so did all of us. The respect was there from the beginning.
“He was tall and imposing, which helped, but he could command a room without raising his voice. He always had that natural authority. He spoke clearly and concisely before games and at half-time was clear in his philosophy and what he wanted and expected of us all. He was the first manager I worked under who did specific tactical training, painstakingly going over video footage in preparation. He worked around the clock, constantly preparing the next session or reviewing the drills he’d put us through that day.”
There would be 45-minute tactical “lectures” before each game, outlining opponents’ strengths and weaknesses, and a reliance upon a data collection program called Top Scorer, a precursor to the modern-day ProZone. Every player’s decision on the pitch was analysed: such statistical analysis is a matter of course now but in the late 1980s it was something of an innovation.
His sparsely furnished three-room apartment in Villefranche-sur-Mer went neglected as the football obsessive camped out at La Turbie, where he shared the coaches’ room in one of the pre-fabs flanking the practice pitches, or at his office at Louis II, a cubbyhole of a room cluttered with VHS tapes featuring players to be scouted or teams to be confronted. In came the subtle changes to the set-up which, after Arsenal, feel almost trademark: mealtimes spent seated alongside the players in the canteen where the previous regime had convened at their own table with their own chef and lavish menu; fines for tardiness; still water always at room temperature to speed digestion; red meats suddenly replaced with chicken. Over time in came new physios, sprint coaches, weight experts, a team doctor, dieticians. Anyone who queried the methodology was offered a detailed explanation and generally saw the light.
The France international Manuel Amoros, whom Wenger had inherited, was impressed at the young manager’s willingness to listen to his senior players: “He was curious about what we thought because he knew he still had a lot to learn.” Puel, who had initially been out of favour only to adapt his game and regain a first-team place in defensive midfield, said: “He was honest and frank when he spoke with us individually. He made us all think afresh about our own games. Some of it we called ‘invisible training’, particularly the tweaks to the diet or recovery work, improvements we hardly noticed but were definitely there. It was a new type of professionalism for us. He wasn’t a revolutionary. It was more about evolution, little changes over time. It’s hard to arrive at a big club and overhaul things overnight.”
There was an immediate impact on the pitch where Monaco claimed their first Ligue 1 title in five years in his first season. There would be a French Cup in 1991, too, with the eagerness to fast-track youngsters into the senior set-up – Emmanuel Petit debuted at 17, Lilian Thuram at 18 – and to tap into the talent in France’s former African colonies paying off handsomely. The Liberian George Weah arrived from Tonnerre Yaoundé in Cameroon and would go on to dedicate his 1995 Fifa world player of the year award to Wenger. He employed a similar approach to life at Arsenal, of course, but it was Monaco who benefited first from the strategies. Not that they guaranteed success. Instead, where Monaco should have thrived, they were increasingly eclipsed by rivals from further round the Côte d’Azur.
Marseille must haunt Wenger’s memories even now. The teams were French football’s heavyweights of the era, powerhouses of the domestic game going head to head for the title virtually every year and, after that initial success, it was Wenger’s Monaco who invariably shivered in the shadow of Les Phocéens. Marseille played in front of gates in excess of 30,000 and delighted in poaching players from Stade Louis II – Amoros, Gil Rui Barros, Franck Sauzée. Their brash, confrontational president, Bernard Tapie, the dominant figure in French football at the time, was an overbearing personality forever bemoaning the tax loophole which granted Monaco financial clout their own paltry gates hardly justified.
The antipathy between Tapie and Wenger was omnipresent and unnerving, a sideshow whenever the teams collided. The loathing extended well beyond anything the manager has endured with Sir Alex Ferguson or José Mourinho in the years since. They, at least, are fellow coaches. “It was war to the death between them,” said Jean Petit, Monaco’s assistant manager. Wenger once had to be restrained in the tunnel at Stade Vélodrome after becoming embroiled in a slanging match with the home club’s president, but it was Marseille who held sway.
There were four successive domestic titles, the first two with Monaco traipsing in third, then those in 1991 and 1992 with Wenger’s team as runners-up. His team became the nearly men: beaten 4-3 in the final of the Coupe de France in 1989 by Marseille; thumped by Werder Bremen in the 1992 Cup Winners’ Cup final when the team, and their manager, had been so affected by the Armand Cesari stadium disaster before the showpiece in Lisbon. More than 2,300 fans were injured and 18 killed when two temporary stands collapsed before Bastia’s Coupe de France semi-final with Marseille in Corsica, but members of Monaco’s staff had friends and family at the game. Wenger had petitioned to no avail for the European final to be postponed. His team were listless and distracted in succumbing to the Germans.
Yet the real rancour with Tapie’s club was really exposed only by Jean-Jacques Eydelie. The Marseille midfielder was proved to have contacted three Valenciennes players – Jorge Burruchaga, Christophe Robert and Jacques Glassman, the latter acting as whistleblower – on behalf of his club’s board before a Ligue 1 game between the sides six days before the 1993 Champions League final in Munich, inducing the trio to “go easy” on Marseille so the visitors could claim the championship that night and concentrate more fully on the contest with Milan that lay ahead.
The bribe resulted in Marseille being stripped of their domestic title, relegated to Ligue 2 for two seasons and banned from defending the Champions League, albeit they were permitted to keep that title. Tapie would serve six months of a two-year prison sentence for complicity of corruption and subornation of witnesses.
Monaco finished third that season, behind PSG on goal difference, but qualified for the Champions League after the club from the capital declined to take up what was in effect Marseille’s slot because their sponsors, Canal Plus, feared the reactions of their subscribers in Provence. Yet Wenger recognised l’affaire OM as part of a wider issue that had potentially affected far more than that season’s title race.
Those fears were given greater credence when Eydelie’s autobiography, published in 2006, detailed various illegal approaches allegedly made to opponents at OM’s behest. The manager was concerned his own Monaco players had been approached over the years.
“We spoke about it once, in the close season once it had all come out,” says Puel. “It all came as such a surprise to me but bizarre things had been happening. It was as frustrating for him as it was for me. I never thought that kind of thing could happen in our game. Look back now and you can’t help but think we might have claimed at least two more league titles at Marseille’s expense. He believes that too. It scarred Arsène. It scarred all of us. You have your own pure view of football, of what it means and how you fight for your team-mates and defend your colours. History has shown things were different then.”
Wenger believed he had credible verbal evidence from one of his players detailing offers of bribes to underperform and his assistant Petit was prepared to testify as a witness of the testimony in court, but the whole affair had knocked the stuffing out of the French domestic game.
The appetite to drag more clubs through the mire was not there. “I wanted to warn people, make it public but I couldn’t prove anything definitively,” said Wenger in 2006. “At that time corruption and doping were big things and there was nothing worse than knowing the cards were stacked against us from the beginning.”
That Campora did not back his pursuit of justice damaged a relationship that was already turning stale. The manager had grown frustrated that his plans to develop La Turbie were not being executed, as they would be so spectacularly at London Colney a few years later. A lack of tangible success, even after the Marseille fall-out, was interpreted by the board as a need for change, the manager having apparently lost his mystique, though a parting of the ways would be sanctioned only on their terms. When Franz Beckenbauer approached Monaco in the summer of 1994 seeking to take their manager to Bayern Munich the advance was rejected by the board. A stodgy start to the ensuing season led to Wenger being sacked regardless.
“He was rightly disappointed with the way it all ended, particularly given how much he would have liked to have gone to Bayern,” says Puel. “That was an extraordinary opportunity for someone who spoke German and had grown up loving the Bundesliga. It would have been perfect.
“But he was denied that chance and then sacked a few months later. That hurt him. But time has passed.
“He should be cherished at that club for everything he did and the imprint he made there. I will always think of him as ‘my coach’ and that was where he made his name.”
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion