The late writer and thinker Mark Fisher once reflected on the significance of teenage cultural discoveries: “Is it possible to reproduce, later in life, the impact that books, records and films have between the ages of 14 and 17?” Something similar may be true of first encounters with football, though these tend to occur earlier – at the age of seven, perhaps, rather than 14. The team one grows up supporting as a child will always be the “real” version of the club, the Platonic squad. You come to know and love each generation of players, but later iterations of the team feel somehow both derivative and chronically new, as if one can never quite get used to them.
If, like me, you are an Arsenal supporter born in the mid-1990s, Arsène Wenger’s 22-year tenure as manager of the club – October 1996 to May 2018 – coincides almost exactly with your lifetime. Wenger’s mythic “Invincibles” squad – so named because they pulled off the astonishing feat of winning the Premier League in 2003-04 without losing a single game (their 49-game unbeaten run is yet to be surpassed) – holds an unrivalled place in my conception of the club. Patrick Vieira, Robert Pires, Thierry Henry and co didn’t merely play for Arsenal; they are Arsenal. To my age cohort, Wenger is Arsenal, too – so much so that it’s as if the club did not pre-date his arrival. I think I even half-assumed, in the unexamined way of children, that the club was named after him.
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