On 22 October 1949 Arsène Wenger was born. Happy birthday Mr Wenger.
He went on to become Arsenal’s first permanent non-British manager, the club’s longest-serving manager, the Arsenal manager who won the most trophies, the manager with the highest win rate for Arsenal, the record holder for individual FA Cup wins, and the Arsenal manager who delivered the Unbeaten Season.
His was the 25th appointment of a manager at Arsenal, although Mr Wenger wasn’t the 25th manager. Quite how many managers we actually had before Mr Wenger is not known, not least because between March and April 1898 Arsenal had someone in charge of picking the team – it is just that we don’t know who it was. Maybe that person changed with each match – maybe there was a committee, as there was prior to 1897. There are simply no records to let us know.
What we can say for sure is that Mr Wenger is one of just 14 men who have managed Arsenal for over 100 games. He is also one of only two men who managed Arsenal for over 500 games (the other was Bertie Mee).
And he was the only man who managed over 1000 games. In fact his total was 1,235 competitive first-team games. During this time, as I am sure you know, he won the FA Cup seven times, a record for any manager (even those from the early days when only a handful of clubs participated), and the League three times. Two of those League titles were Doubles, and the third was the Unbeaten Season. He also won the Community Shield / Charity Shield in seven of the ten seasons that we contested it under him.
Under Mr Wenger’s tutelage, Arsenal won 57.25% of their games, more than any other long-term manager until just recently, when Mikel Arteta overtook that. Of the other managers who managed over 100 games for Arsenal only Harry Bradshaw, (who managed Arsenal between 1899 and 1904) gained a higher percentage – helped a little perhaps by the fact that Arsenal were in the second division at the time. Arsenal finished second in 1904 and won promotion to the First Division, for the first time in the club’s history. Eighteen of the twenty Arsenal players in the squad had been the manager’s signings.
In fact, the only men to win a higher percentage of their games were Jo Shaw (who took over managing the club after Herbert Chapman suddenly died, and managed the 23 games remaining the season), Mikel Arteta (who took over from Mr Emery), the unknown manager who took control of the club for eight games at the end of the 1897/8 season, and Pat Rice, who managed Arsenal for four games in September 1996, while we were waiting for Mr Wenger to arrive.
At the moment of writing this (22 October 2022) Arteta is on 57.93% to Wenger’s 57.25%.
Arsenal’s list of managers however also includes two other “oddities” if we may call them that. Between August 1893 and May 1897 Arsenal had no manager at all and were run by a committee – which must have made team selection fun. They selected the team for 118 League games and had a percentage win rate of 44.92% which was in fact better than Bertie Mee, our first double winning manager.
And then there was George Morrell who on 13 April 1915 simply upped sticks and left the club seemingly without telling anyone, before turning up as manager of Third Lanark in Scotland.
Overall Mr Wenger won 707 of the games he oversaw drew 280 and lost 248. 2,156 goals were scored during his reign and 1,147 conceded, giving the average score in a match under Wenger as 1.74 for Arsenal and 0.93 against.
We all wish Mr Wenger a very happy birthday.
- Henry Norris at the Arsenal: There is a full index to the series here.
- Arsenal in the 1930s: The most comprehensive series on the decade ever
- Arsenal in the 1970s: Every match and every intrigue reviewed in detail.
