The Mixer: The Story of Premier League Tactics, from Route One to False Nines. Michael Cox
at a time when there was minimal coverage of foreign football aside from Channel 4’s Football Italia, and before the internet was widespread. Six years earlier Aston Villa had appointed the first-ever overseas manager of a top-flight side: the mysterious Dr Jozef Vengloš. It was a disastrous experiment. Villa had finished second the previous campaign, but under the Slovakian (he was then considered Czechoslovakian) they finished two places above relegation. He appeared incompatible with the English approach, but the man with a doctorate in physical education was essentially a forerunner of Wenger, and not simply because he was foreign – he attempted to professionalise English football. ‘Never had I imagined it was possible for human beings to drink so much beer,’ he gasped shortly after his arrival. Years later he took a more considered view. ‘A few things in those days were a bit different to what we had been doing in central Europe – the methodology of training, the analysing of nutrition, and the recuperation, regeneration and physiological approach to the game.’ The Premier League desperately needed a foreign coach like Wenger to successfully implement modern methods. As Dein said, ‘The combination of Arsène and Dennis changed the culture of Arsenal.’
Wenger was completely different from anyone else in the Premier League, frequently described as looking more like a teacher than a football manager; he spoke five languages, had a degree in economics and had briefly studied medicine. More than anything, he appeared extraordinarily calm, a quality he’s occasionally lost in recent years. Football managers were supposed to be ranters, ravers, eternally angry people; Alex Ferguson famously dished out the ‘hairdryer treatment’. A year before Wenger’s appointment, Leyton Orient manager John Sitton had been the subject of a Channel 4 documentary that recorded him threatening to fight his own players in a famously bizarre dressing-room outburst. ‘When I tell you to do something, do it, and if you come back at me, we’ll have a fucking right sort-out in here,’ he roared at two players. ‘All right? And you can pair up if you like, and you can fucking pick someone else to help you, and you can bring your fucking dinner, ’coz by the time I’ve finished with you, you’ll fucking need it.’ That was the 1990s football manager. Wenger was the opposite, stunning his players by demanding a period of complete silence at half-time. More to the point, he certainly wasn’t asking players to bring their dinner.
Wenger’s major impact upon English football was revolutionising his players’ diet. Before the Frenchman’s arrival, Arsenal’s squad – in common with the majority of Premier League teams – had the culinary preferences of a pub team. They’d enjoy a full English breakfast before training, and their pre-match menu included fish and chips, steak, scrambled eggs and beans on toast. Post-match, things became even worse. On the long coach journey back from Newcastle, for example, some players held an eating competition, with no one capable of matching the impressive nine dinners consumed by centre-back Steve Bould. When Tony Adams and Ray Parlour were given a police caution for spraying a fire extinguisher at abusive Tottenham supporters, the incredible thing wasn’t that the incident had taken place at a Pizza Hut, but that when the police pulled up outside Adams’s house later that night, the pair had recently taken delivery of a Chinese takeaway, too.
Wenger, meanwhile, had been impressed by the healthiness of Japanese cuisine, noticing the low level of obesity throughout the country. He quickly overhauled the dietary options at Arsenal’s training ground, banning sweets, chocolate and Coca-Cola, and encouraging his players to eat steamed fish, boiled chicken, pasta and plenty of vegetables. Whenever Arsenal stayed in a hotel before an away match, Wenger banned room service and insisted that the mini-bars were emptied before the team’s arrival. Crucially, he introduced dieticians who educated the players about good nutrition, and concentrated heavily upon the benefit of chewing slowly to digest food properly. Wenger knew there would be a backlash, and intelligently ensured that meals were particularly bland and flavourless in the opening weeks. Then, when the players complained, Wenger made concessions – allowing them tomato ketchup, for example – so the new arrangement appeared a compromise. Wenger set the example, always eating exactly the same meals as his players.
The previous innovator in this respect was Australian Craig Johnston, who played for Liverpool in the 1980s and was one of football’s most intelligent, innovative characters, designing the Adidas Predator boot after his retirement. He was inspired by a book called Eat to Win by Robert Haas, and eschewed Liverpool’s steaks in favour of rice, soy bacon and egg, initially prompting mockery from teammates. But when they noticed his tremendous stamina, they gradually switched to his diet. Intriguingly, Adams says he and a couple of Arsenal teammates read the book in 1987, nearly a decade before Wenger’s arrival, but if it provoked them to eat some healthy food they were clearly cancelling out any benefits by also consuming pizzas and Chinese takeaways.
It wasn’t all about food, however. Wenger also encouraged his players to take supplements, an unorthodox concept at this stage. Vitamin tablets were placed on tables ahead of training, and many players started taking Creatine to build muscle and improve stamina. Again, everything was explained by experts, and while an improved diet was mandatory, the supplements were optional. Bergkamp was sceptical and didn’t take anything, while goalkeeper David Seaman started off without them, then noticed how his teammates were improving physically, so changed his mind. Ray Parlour admitted he simply took whatever was given to him without a second thought. Arsenal’s physical improvement was obvious, and on international duty, England teammates asked the Gunners contingent what they’d been taking, and quickly copied, which annoyed Wenger, who was understandably determined to maintain Arsenal’s competitive advantage. Unintentionally, the Frenchman was revolutionising the whole of the Premier League, not simply his own club.
The arrival of Wenger, who had grown up in his parents’ pub near Strasbourg, also coincided with the end of the drinking culture at Arsenal. Regular boozing was a widespread practice at Premier League clubs, but appeared particularly prevalent at Arsenal, with captain Adams the ringleader of the famous ‘Tuesday club’, when a group of players would follow a heavy training session with a heavy drinking session, safe in the knowledge that Wednesday was a rest day. Even then, however, drinking the night before training was common, and turning up hungover wasn’t frowned upon by teammates if the player got through training properly. On Bergkamp’s first pre-season tour of Sweden, he was dismayed when, midway through an evening stroll with his wife, he spotted the rest of the team drinking at a local pub.
But everything changed a fortnight before Wenger’s arrival, when Adams shocked his teammates by announcing he was an alcoholic. Two of his teammates immediately wondered, if Adams was an alcoholic, whether they had a drinking problem too. This worked out perfectly for Wenger, who would have encountered serious problems overhauling the drinking culture himself. When Ferguson had attempted to solve this problem at Manchester United, he was forced to sell the two chief culprits, Paul McGrath and Norman Whiteside, who were among United’s star players and fan favourites, and he initially struggled. Wenger, luckily, found his captain did the job for him, and Parlour admitted Adams quitting drinking was the best thing that could have happened for his own football career, never mind Adams’s.
Similarly, Wenger was fortunate that Arsenal had signed Platt the previous summer, shortly after Bergkamp’s arrival. The midfielder had spent the previous four seasons in Italy and introduced new practices to the Arsenal dressing room: the use of a masseur, for example. Again, the introduction of foreign concepts was more likely to be accepted coming from Platt, who had captained England 19 times, rather than from an unknown Frenchman who had been working in Japan. Bergkamp’s professionalism, Adams’s new lifestyle and Platt’s Italian innovations were a series of happy coincidences that prepared Arsenal for Wenger’s new regime. Even Platt, however, hated one of Wenger’s ideas: stretching sessions. Ahead of Wenger’s first game, away at Blackburn, Wenger called an early-morning meeting in the hotel ballroom and instructed his players to go through a mixture of yoga and Pilates routines. Eventually, stretching became an accepted, regular part of training – albeit not on matchdays – and Arsenal’s veteran defenders credit this practice for extending their careers.
All these physiological innovations were crucial tactically, because while Wenger’s Arsenal would later become renowned for their technical football, his 1997/98 double winners were more celebrated for their physical power, especially in the centre of the pitch. While the defence and strike partnerships