Arsene Wenger – great manager, terrible book

Arsene Wenger was a great manager, the best of the Premier League era according to Neil Warnock. In his time as Arsenal manager, he won the Premier League three times and his 2003-04 Invincibles are the only team ever to go a whole Premier League season without losing a game.

His book, My Life in Red and White, is absolutely awful.

It is interesting to think that someone who is largely credited for modernizing English football – replacing ketchup with vegetables and a drinking culture with one focused on sports science and nutrition – could write such a dreadful book. But there you go.

His one-time arch nemesis, Jose Mourinho – who, by the way, is only mentioned in passing in the book – once called Wenger a "specialist in failure". And while that is probably a touch unfair for the man who won the FA Cup more than any other manager, when it comes to writing interesting books, it would be a most apt description.

In Episode 12 of the Ademola Bookmen podcast, my co-presenter, Al, and I reviewed Wenger's book. It's a stinker. Don't read it.

In Episode 15, we reviewed another manager's book, that of the aforementioned Neil Warnock. In the 22 years that Wenger was at Arsenal, Warnock managed Bury, Sheffield United, Crystal Palace, QPR, Leeds, Palace again, QPR again, and Rotherham. And that accounts for only around half of a managerial career that took him from Gainsborough Trinity in the eighth tier of English football, all the way up the ladder to the Premier League.

Warnock's book, The Gaffer, is one of many football books that is part autobiography and part behind-the-scenes guide to the world of football. It doesn't follow the conventional autobiography format - I was born here, I played this team, and then I managed that team. Like Peter Crouch's book, it instead arranges chapters around particular elements of the world of football - dressing room culture, training grounds, match day, and so on. But whereas Crouch's book jumps from one such topic to another, without offering much autobiographical detail, Warnock does both, describing a particular aspect of football in a given chapter while also sketching out the broad strokes of his career as a lower league player and then as a manager.

The book is all the better for it. Books like Crouch's – and also James Milner's - that promise to give the reader a glimpse behind the curtain into the world of football, but which don't tell the author's own story tend to disappoint. They wander aimlessly, denying the reader any sense of profluence – the literary term for the feeling of momentum and ultimately resolution that we crave in any story.

But its perhaps not profluence that makes Warnock's a good book so much as it is pettiness. He was known as a whiner. Where autobiographies are concerned, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

What I've learned from reading these books over the course of the last year, is that you want the author to give you detail – the more sordid the better – and you want them to name names.

I know from reading Warnock's book that he does not like Graham Poll, the referee (nor does Robbie Savage, as it happens). On the face of it, that doesn't sound very interesting. But it really was interesting. Poll is, according to Warnock, a petty and conceited man. Lovely stuff. Nor does he like Shaun Wright-Phillips, which is perhaps more surprising. I remember Wright-Phillips as a tricky and mostly smiling winger but to Warnock he was a spoilt, disinterested pro playing for a manager who he thought he was above. More please…

Adel Tarrabt was a gifted player with a terrible attitude. As the standout player in the Warnock's Championship winning QPR team, it was Tarrabt who gave them the flair and the edge that got them promoted. But he was regularly late, often a total no-show, and generally just difficult to manage. As Tarrabt's star rose and he wanted away, Warnock's way of encouraging him to stay was to tell him that other managers might not know how to get the best out of him. That was self-serving from Warnock no doubt, but time has proven him correct on this point. Tarrabt, once coveted by Chelsea and PSG, is now playing in the UAE, having spent a few years plying his trade with the Benfica B team and never fulfilling the promise of those early years under Warnock.

It is not exactly profound to say that because someone was a good player or a good manager, their book is not necessarily good. But it's useful to remember this if you are interested in reading a football autobiography.

As football pays more and more and as the profile of those in the industry grows, there is probably less incentive for players and managers to write good books. If anything, the rule of thumb is probably, the bigger the player, the blander the book. A book of Cristiano Ronaldo's abs would sell more copies than any book by a recent Irish international could ever be expected to.

While laziness and disinterest probably account for some of the reasons that many footballers' books end up plodding and pedestrian, a larger consideration may be the fact that the authors generally want to continue being employed in football in some capacity or other. The more bridges a book burns, the harder that might become. Or at least that is probably the logic.

The single worst book we have reviewed so far is James Milner's and he is likely to become the player with the most ever appearances in the Premier League if he stays with Brighton next year. Keeping your head down probably helps in forging a long career in football but it sure doesn't help when it comes to talking about it in a manner that is remotely engaging.

In the case of Wenger, when he finally left Arsenal, he took up a role with FIFA and perhaps that's why his book is as bad as it is.

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