Arsene Wenger Football Quotations

I am supposed to take the bullets and absorb them. Like a bear. A polar bear.

In England, football is important for everybody.

I have only been here since 1996 but between 1966 and 1996 England had thirty years without foreign players and didn't win any more competitions in that time.

Thierry Henry could take the ball in the middle of the park and score a goal that no one else in the world could score.

The moral values I've learnt in my life I've learnt through football.

Sometimes now, when I watch continental games on television, I'm a bit bored. I ask, 'where is the intensity?'

If I were going to war I would want to be alongside an Englishman not a Frenchman. The Frenchman would think too much.

The best football players in the world still earn very little money compared to people who really earn money.

Work on your strong points because they are what made you.

You ask me: 'Was he a fair player?' I say: 'No, I'm sorry, for me he was not a fair player.' I just think I respect him highly as a quality player. I did not like some things he did on the football pitch and I have the right to say that. It's not because you are older, suddenly, that you are a saint.

We played a whole season unbeaten but you did not see me every week jumping on the tables. Once it's over it's over and you do in the next one as well as you can. Plenty of managers who have won the Champions League will not be considered great managers.

I would be much more annoyed if we hadn't won the game. As a manager, you have to see the positives and I think Pires has a vaccine for the rest of his life.

We have tried to get closer to them, but we never copied anybody, we always tried to play our football

As far as I'm concerned, this guy should never play football again. The answer you normally get after a tackle like that is 'he is not the type of guy who does that.' It's like a guy who kills one time in his life - it's enough. You have a dead person. This tackle is absolutely horrendous.

What makes him special? He has a mixture of physical talent and technical ability, as well as remarkable intelligence and above all a great passion for the game.

The score is high and very brutal but does not reflect what we saw on the pitch. The first shot on goal was a goal. The second was an own goal. The third was straight after half-time. They defend like mad and they catch us on the break.

It's a strange atmosphere always over there, it is darker and less glamorous, and you don't feel as high. It is a different kind of test - can you raise your level in a less exciting environment and perhaps still a very difficult one?

What motivates me is an ideal of thinking about how football should be. And to try to get near this way of playing. And to try to improve all aspects of my personality that can help me get near this ideal way of playing football.

I take pride in the fact that people go home having felt that for 90 minutes today, life is beautiful - and that's it, basically. That's why professional football exists.

Football is an art, like dancing is an art - but only when it's well done does it become an art.

I've told him to cut off his ponytail. I think it makes him less aerodynamic.

It is one of my biggest regrets that Niall Quinn was not here during my time... I felt he was an intelligent player. It would have been a good combination with Thierry Henry. What I like with Quinn is if you look at the player who played next to him, he always scored 40 goals because he had a hand for his head and he just put the ball where you were. He was a team player. A top-class player makes other players look good and he had that player.

I believe in work, in connections between the players, I think what makes football great is that it is a team sport. You can win in different ways, by being more of a team, or by having better individual players. It is the team ethic that interests me, always.

Gerard Houllier's thoughts on the matter international football echo mine. He thinks that what the national coaches are doing is like taking the car from his garage without even asking permission. They will then use the car for ten days and abandon it in a field without any petrol left in the tank. We then have to recover it, but it is broken down. Then a month later they will come to take your car again, and for good measure you're expected to be nice about it.

When I arrive at the gates of Heaven the Good Lord will ask ‘what did you do in your life?’ I will respond ‘I tried to win football matches.’ He will say: ‘Are you certain that’s all?’ But, well, that’s the story of my life.

A football team is a like a beautiful woman, when you do not tell her, she forgets she is beautiful