Arsène Wenger and Jürgen Klopp pitch up on the page

My Life In Red and White: My Autobiography by Arsène Wenger, translated by Daniel Hahn and Andrea Reece (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) 
Klopp: My Liverpool Romance by Anthony Quinn (Faber & Faber)

They were wild days. The photographic collage within Arsène Wenger’s life story contains a striking and vaguely religious image of the gaunt Arsenal manager standing with his hands spread in disbelief after he has been banished by the referee to the stand in Old Trafford, surrounded by baying and delighted Manchester United fans.

The photograph dates to 2009, so the panoply of camera phones held aloft is a conspicuously absent detail. The moment is a vivid still of just how thoroughly Wenger ransacked the imagination of everyone involved with United – particularly Alex Ferguson. For a time, theirs was the bitterest feud in all of sport: they loathed one another and couldn’t hide it.

Wenger had come parachuting into English football in the summer of 1996 from nowhere – well, from the Japanese league. He was a puzzle; quiet-spoken and vaguely professorial and, weirdest of all, French. The London tabloids tried to roast him, the players were unconvinced.

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His first tactical move, before he even officially started the job, was to substitute Tony Adams at half time; Arsenal lost. But in his first full season at Highbury, he won the league and FA Cup double and was cast as the guardian angel of North London – and the adversary Ferguson needed even as Liverpool’s dominance receded.

Wenger’s story is laid out here in chronological order, beginning with a thoughtful and lucid account of his loving and austere upbringing in Alsace. But it will take great fortitude for any football fan not to dive into the years when he butted heads with Ferguson in the rain and frost of those heavyweight seasons for the inside gossip.

Alas, what Wenger truly felt towards Ferguson in those raging seasons between 1996 and 2004 (when both clubs dominated the league title) will remain a private matter. He shares nothing of the post-match meetings or conversations and explains away the public antipathy and those televised scenes, when they are frothing and glaring daggers down the touchline, with this assessment:

“Alex Ferguson was ready to die for his club, and I for mine. It was him or me. And this extreme rivalry can be explained by our competitiveness. Alex Ferguson was passionate about football, he was very capable and had crushing authority over English football because of his personality and the power of the club.”

But what about all those images – google it – of the pair screaming at one another as some harassed linesman tries his best to maintain law and order?

“Of course there were many clashes, angry scenes between us, but this was not a game, it wasn’t for show: it was our lives, our passion, our utter dedication to football.”

Deep-dive

It’s a shame for the casual fan but, of course, it makes perfect sense that Wenger should be reluctant to engage in a deep-dive into the psychology of Ferguson (note the absence of the “Sir” in his references). The Scotsman gets mentioned on four pages. This is Wenger’s story. Ferguson had his – at least twice.

Wenger’s true energies are devoted to the London club where he served for 22 seasons. It is a love affair: with the culture of Arsenal, with the ghost of Highbury stadium (Wenger considered buying one of the apartments converted from the old stands but found the idea “too sad”), with the players he coached and invariably had to sell for top dollar, and with football.

The bare league title count leans heavily in Ferguson’s favour – 13 to 3. But Wenger, with more modest resources, outlines the extraordinary consistency of the mostly beautiful football teams he produced: second place six times, third five times, fourth six times and 19 consecutive years qualifying for Champions League football. Plus the veneer of continental sophistication and habits. Plus the immortal unbeaten season of 2004, when his “Invincibles” went a full season without defeat.

“I often relive those 49 undefeated matches,” he writes. “I do believe in signs to a certain extent and as I was born in 1949, I sometimes tell myself that it was our destiny to lose the 50th.”

It's a lonely story, at times, and Wenger is unafraid to acknowledge that he felt a little lost after leaving Arsenal in 2018

He was right: the 50th game was against – who else? – Manchester United, a spiteful, hugely physical clash revolving around a disputed penalty, a 2-0 United win, post-whistle pushing and shoving, and “afters” in the tunnel that culminated in Cesc Fabregas flinging a pizza slice, which hit Ferguson on the head. Wenger saw omens in the defeat, a sign that “it would be hard to capture that state of grace.”

And Arsenal would never again recover the knack of winning the league. They never quite replaced the flint of those early teams, and Wenger had to juggle the insane financial stress of moving the operation to the Emirates.

Of the painful moments when the Arsenal fans turned on him, Wenger says only that he felt the criticism was “unjustified”. He makes it plain that he feels blessed in life, but it’s a lonely story at times, and he is unafraid to acknowledge that he felt a little lost after leaving Arsenal in 2018.

Phenomenal

The sheer length of Wenger’s reign was phenomenal and won’t be seen again. Once he found Arsenal, he never wanted to leave. The clue to his personality is contained in the marvellous first line: “I’ve always suffered from the intensity of my desires, even if I didn’t know where the feelings came from.”

Read in isolation, it might seem to belong to a philosophical novel rather than a football manager’s biography. But that’s the French for you.

If Arsène Wenger stands as one of the giants of two raucous decades of English football, then what of the smiling, transcendent Jürgen Klopp? As said, Liverpool sailed as a kind of ghost ship during the height of the Ferguson-Wenger era. Not anymore. A few weeks ago, a video circulated of Klopp on his sofa beaming as he sang various John Lennon classics to celebrate what would have been the perpetual Liverpudlian’s 80th birthday. All you need is love, indeed.

Eros drifts through the pages of Klopp: My Liverpool Romance, an offbeat book by Anthony Quinn, a 1960s Huyton kid turned historical novelist. Quinn also worked for 20 years as film critic for the London Independent and his elegant style belied a tendency to do the occasional Razor Ruddock on stuff he didn’t like. Like many Reds fans, he had begun to despair of seeing the team win another league title in his lifetime.

Klopp has worked his way into Liverpool’s big sentimental heart like a German love bomb. And Quinn couldn’t resist writing an ode, an unabashed fan’s notes: to Klopp and his boyhood city and the ghost of Shankly; to the day he snuck in to see The Deer Hunter and left enchanted; and, in a moving early paragraph, to his father’s complicated relationship with Liverpool.

Freeform

It’s as freeform in chronology as Wenger’s is ordered, bouncing here and there. He doesn’t ignore Liverpool’s hypocrisies, pointing out that it took the club until 1974 to sign a black player and noting that for all the vaunted socialist values of Shankly and Klopp, when the pandemic occurred, the club chose to “piggyback the government’s compensation scheme and furlough its non-playing staff, thus saving about £1 million. This from a club that made a pre-tax profit of £42 million in 2018-19, with an annual wage bill of £310 million. What would Shankly have done? Not that, for starters.”

The owners quickly reversed the decision but it revealed the essentially capitalist heart behind the breathtaking football nights and the romance. Quinn seems to wrestle with this. He is mostly a long-distance fan, watching the games on television in London rather than on the Kop. But that’s fine: the book is a strange mix of autobiography and selective biography of Klopp and related ephemera.

Quinn sees in Klopp that rare figure in British life: a true inspiration. He scans the political and media and business landscape and finds no comparison

It includes an unexpected section in which the author admits to head-butting an opponent during his weekly Friday footie game – not the usual carry on from listed Faber authors. A tackle, two men old enough to know better, and then this ashamed diary entry, reproduced here. “I just nutted him, quite hard. I recall now the shock on his face – there was a tiny delay before he realised what I’d done.”

And this is a moment pulled not from Quinn’s younger days: it happened in January gone. The reason he can ’fess up is that Klopp also admitted to “nutting” a teammate during training at Mainz. This comes to Quinn as a huge relief. “Even Homer nods. Or nuts.”

Quinn sees in Klopp that rare figure in British life: a true inspiration. He scans the political and media and business landscape and finds no comparison. Indeed, the book opens with an intriguing quote from playwright Lucy Kirkwood who notes that in the age of Trump and Johnson, Klopp “delights me as an example of what male leadership can look like: passionate, humorous, generous, kind, driven by humility and integrity and above all decency”.

Quinn sets out to demonstrate this with a light touch in the following pages before reaching the swooning conclusion: “He is for all of us.”

Of course, Quinn bleeds red. Try convincing the United or Arsenal fans of that. And watch the pizza fly.