Arsène Wenger
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
And I must give him absolute credit because still today he has never...
He drank any drop of alcohol.
That is a remarkable strength of character.
And I could convince the other players that if we want to give him a chance, we cannot drink in front of him.
So that helped me a lot.
But when he didn't play, the pressure was still there to have a drink after the game.
So I didn't compromise.
I think when you come from outside as a foreign manager, you have to respect the local culture.
And know what you can compromise on and what you don't tolerate at all.
And they smell very quickly.
I was not ready to tolerate alcohol.
I could fine or not play them.
When you're a manager, when you pick the team, you have ultimate power.
And one of the difficulties of a job is on every Friday before the Saturday game, we make jobless people over the weekend who feel useless, who hate you.
And on Monday, you employ them again and you say to them, look, we do now like nothing happened and you give your best again.
And that's the difficulty of our job.
Because I think it's difficult to measure the quality of a manager.
So I thought the perfection of my job would be one year not to lose a game.
And I must say, it was an exceptional experience to play 49 games is one and a half years.
You imagine one and a half years without losing a game.