Here is the latest in the always-interesting series of documentaries from pitchside-reporting maestro Gabriel Clarke, following excellent profiles of Bobby Robson and Jack Charlton: the subject is Arsenal’s long-serving manager whose initial burst of success was soured by years of fan rancour before he decided to step down in 2018 after 22 years in the job. Completing this loose trilogy about outstanding managerial careers, this time Clarke shares directing duties with French TV commentator Christian Jeanpierre – but while Wenger proves a genial and sage-like interviewee, it’s fair to say that he still remains almost as much a mystery as before.
Wenger isn’t a sphinx, exactly: he has plenty to say and says it with considerable emotional articulacy. But the material essentially engages with his player management, stressing what he doesn’t do, rather than what he does – and in that sense there’s not a huge amount here indicating what he actually brought to the game, in England or elsewhere. His former players, from Dennis Bergkamp to Patrick Vieira, show him a fierce loyalty, and we hear a lot about Wenger’s confidence-instilling fatherliness and connoisseurial appreciation for a balanced team, but there’s little actual detail on what “Wengerball” is, or was, and how he achieved it.
Still, the roll-call of appreciators is impressive, including erstwhile antagonist Alex Ferguson, and the film’s focus on Arsenal’s unbeaten 2003-04 season is a natural reflex. Wenger submits with good grace to the film’s artsier sequences, which involve him walking and jogging in extended Steadicam, striding ruminatively across football pitches under the lowering eye of a soaring overhead God shot, and the like. Wenger touches on the difficulties of his later years with Arsenal, admitting he stayed in the job too long, and there’s some interesting material on the nasty media hatchet job that was aimed at him early on in his Arsenal career. But unlike Robson or Charlton, he’s just a bit too guarded to give away too much of himself, for better or worse.