Arsène Wenger grew up a devout Catholic, attended mass every day and often when it came to confession he had long forgotten the various misdemeanours he had committed over the course of the week. So he started making up sins, just so he would have something to confess. “You’re never completely happy because you never do well enough,” he told the BBC’s Desert Island Discs in 2020. “You feel always a bit guilty because the Catholic religion is like that.”
For Wenger, the man and the coach, the endless search for an unachievable perfection would come to define his life. We are reminded that the word “passion” derives from the Latin patior, meaning “suffering”. His passion for football was a Christian passion, the passion of wounded sides and dried blood, of giving something up now (mortal life/time and effort/the opportunity of signing Eden Hazard) in order to assure the greater glories to come (eternal sanctity in the arms of God/fourth place in the Premier League/long-term financial stability and a timely payment of stadium debt). Every defeat was a scar on his heart. Every victory only forestalled the guilt for another week.
Jürgen Klopp’s relationship with Christianity was always a little different. A little looser. “Being a Protestant,” he once said, “leaves a few doors open. It’s obviously not that dogmatic.”
When he misbehaved as a child, his mother would ask him what God would think and Jürgen would reply that God was probably too busy. The only real imposition his faith made on his football was in restricting his ability to play on Sunday mornings, the start of what would become a lifelong distaste for early kick-off times.
Does this explain anything on its own? No, of course not. But Klopp leaves Liverpool and there is shock, anguish, devastation. Fans call up radio phone-in shows and dissolve into tears. Wenger leaves Arsenal before he is shoved out of the door in a stupor of ennui and indifference, gets a valedictory farewell from supporters who quietly admit that it’s probably for the best.
“Probably the worst day of my life,” one Liverpool fans sobs on TikTok. “Arsène, thanks for the memories but it’s time to say goodbye,” read the famous banner at the Hawthorns in 2014. As the club Arsène built prepares to host the team that Jürgen built, it’s worth pondering for a moment on why.
Because on the face of things, the legacies of Wenger and Klopp largely bear comparison with each other. By common consent each belongs in a top-five of all-time Premier League managers alongside Sir Alex Ferguson, José Mourinho and Pep Guardiola. We can balance and juggle the merits of a Champions League win against an invincible season, bliss versus beauty, the influence of gegenpressing and throw-in coaches versus the influence of lightning possession football and pasta, whether ’tis nobler to finish runners-up with 97 points (Liverpool 2018-19) or to win with 78 points (Arsenal 1997-98). This part of the exercise belongs largely to the realm of the pub debate, a debate whose very existence underlines the common magnitude of their achievements.
And more than this, too: in a way Klopp inherited Wenger’s mantle as English football’s unheeded conscience, the wizened sage telling it the truths it did not want to hear. Just as Wenger railed against the inequities of unfettered spending and was derided as a “specialist in failure” for his trouble, Klopp went out of his way to decry the scourge of state investment and expanding schedules, and was accused of sour grapes for doing so. So they continued to labour in the shadow of a Manchester giant, driven above all by their principles and values, a keen belief that doing something in the right way is as important as doing it in the first place.
Why, then, does Klopp leave with garlands being thrown at his feet while Wenger was hustled and screamed towards the exit? To a large extent this is a matter of timing. If Wenger had left in 2005, nine years into his Arsenal reign, he would probably have been remembered even more fondly than he is now. Since leaving the dugout he has wondered aloud whether he stayed too long, whether something fundamental ruptured in the years after the invincible season. He feels – not for the first time – a guilt at the life and relationships he sacrificed in the addictive process of becoming the best manager he could be.
So you suspect that when Klopp referred to Wenger as the “football maniac” early in his Liverpool career, he was not being entirely flattering. Wenger teaches us that you have to sacrifice your life for football.
Klopp teaches us that actually, no: you don’t. The intensity required to win and keep winning was the intensity that eventually burned him out.
Unlike Wenger, who lived ascetically and never went out 48 hours before a game, Klopp is the only Premier League manager who has ever offered this writer one of his cigarettes during an interview. Glory in the next life; glory in this. Perhaps this explains why Klopp is more loved at the end of his time than Wenger was at the end of his. But it also explains why no elite manager will ever come close to emulating Wenger’s 22 years at a single club.
For all their similarities as coaches and leaders, what ultimately defines these two great men is a divergence of outlook. For Wenger, faith was an undertaking, a long calvary lined with guilt and suffering. For Klopp, it was a ritual, freely chosen, a way of understanding and connecting with people. Two concepts of the self; two concepts of the world and how best to serve it; two concepts, ultimately, of what it means to love.
