... engrossing, surprisingly poignant and often exasperatingly buttoned-up ... Anyone expecting Mr. Wenger to suddenly open up his puffy coat and reveal the secrets he has long kept to himself has come to the wrong memoir ... The only dark truth that emerges in these pages is that he didn’t really like broccoli ... Part valedictory lap, part future TED Talk and part apologia to his family and friends ... Wenger will no doubt be erected outside the Emirates Stadium...his patrician head held as high as it is in these pages.
There are a million questions that Arsenal fans would want Wenger to answer. The answers, unfortunately, are either missing altogether from My Life in Red and White, or expressed in a way that is long familiar to us ... The opening chapters of what is a surprisingly short book, about Wenger’s childhood and playing days, are elegiac and rather moving ... His career has been spectacular, rich, colourful. But when he is talking about the end at Arsenal there is a glimpse of regret and bitterness. He tells us that after the Invincibles season he turned down job offers from PSG, Juventus, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, England and France ... He clearly doesn’t think that loyalty was returned ... But that, really, is all this clever, charismatic man will say about his forced departure. Perhaps there will be another, more revealing book, when he has stopped work altogether.
Leaving [José ] Mourinho out of his life story is like Balzac leaving Vautrin out of Père Goriot: it removes one of the essential engines of the plot. It also deprives us of one of the story’s most interesting characters. Wenger has explained that he wanted the book to be 'positive', which, from the reader’s point of view, is not the best motivation for writing a memoir ... Wenger’s decision to eliminate the negative leaves a book that disappoints as an account of football management, if we view the football manager as the most important person at any club ... My Life in Red and White is a disappointment to those of us who anticipated the sort of book at which Wenger once hinted. No score-settling, and very little explanation of some of the more puzzling moments in his career are on offer. There is also a reluctance to address football’s less edifying excrescences ... Instead, there is a surprisingly honest self-portrait of an obsessive, driven man, who decided that the game really could be beautiful, and was prepared to sacrifice himself to that belief.
... boring ... His account of his childhood in Alsace is intriguing ... When his book finally gets to Arsenal, however, there’s nothing a fan won’t already know. He doesn’t say anything about transfers (did he really turn down the return of Fàbregas?), or tactics (why play Nicklas Bendtner on the wing?), or feuds (Mourinho doesn’t appear anywhere in the book), or supply any gossip at all, really (what does he think about silent Stan Kroenke, the Trump-supporting Walmart-heiress-marrying current owner of the club?). There are bromides about team building and the importance of communication ... The most interesting thing I learned from My Life in Red and White is that four of the seven best English table tennis players are from the same street in Reading. Do table tennis fans already know that? ... Aren’t we entitled to an explanation for what happened to Arsenal under his watch?
My Life In Red and White feels like a wasted opportunity, a weak penalty aimed straight down the middle. It starts well enough, with elegant reflections on Wenger’s childhood in Alsace ... Even if he is too polite to air his dirtiest laundry, he could at least offer some insight into the details of his thinking. Although he talks in the abstract about what makes a good player and coach, specifics are thin on the ground ... At the end of the book we are no closer to knowing Wenger’s mind than we were at the start ... I wonder if so many years of press conferences have spoiled Wenger’s sense of a yarn. He is so accomplished at leaving out the good stuff that he has forgotten how to put it in ... he remains a beguiling figure for a biography, but he may not be the best person to write it.
