20 Years Of Arsene Wenger At Arsenal

This month marks the 20th anniversary of Bobo Primorac signing for Arsenal. The milestone should be a moment of celebration for all lovers of football, and for the qualities of fairness and decency which romantics still believe should attach to sport.

Primorac arrived alongside Arsène Wenger in September 1996. The pair had been recruited from Grampus Eight in Japan. They are by far the longest-serving manager-coach combination in British football ever, maybe in football anywhere ever.
They had met in 1993, as managers of Monaco and Valenciennes respectively. Marseille had just won their fifth Ligue One title in a row – on two occasions just pipping Monaco. Wenger made no secret of his suspicion that there was something dodgy about Marseille’s success.
Marseille, wholly owned at the time by colourful conman and political fixer Bernard Tapie, passed out Monaco to clinch its five-in-a-row with victory over Valenciennes on the final day of the 1992-’93 season. Primorac lodged a formal complaint with the French Football Federation, alleging that Marseille officials had offered kickbacks to three of his players. A police investigation found that Tapie’s club had been bribing opponents for years. Tapie was sentenced to 18 months, served six.
So Wenger was everywhere seen as vindicated, Primorac hailed as a hero? Nah.
Primorac was frozen out of French football. A year later, doubly disillusioned by the torrent of hostility which had engulfed the man who’d blown the whistle, Wenger headed for Japan and Grampus Eight, leaving bitter words in his wake. He made it a condition of the move that Primorac should come with him. Two years later, Wenger became Arsenal manager, again with Primorac at his side as first team coach.
The only time you are likely to see him is occasionally at Wenger’s side in what is properly called the dugout. Club fanzine Vital Arsenal refers to him affectionately as “our invisible man”.
Former Gunners goalkeeper Bob Wilsonsays: “He and Arsène are practically joined at the hip. He is an absolute walking encyclopaedia on world football… He and Arsène also share the belief that the three most important things in the game are technique, technique and technique.”
The pair of them epitomise integrity, a rare commodity in top-flight sport these days.
We live in desperate times. The gap between the rich and the wretched stretches wider than ever before. Every aspect of art and popular culture is bent to validate the interests of the parasite elite. This, not the individual moral deficiencies of Fifa bosses, is the source of the sleaze which has seeped into top-flight football everywhere.
Against a background of major clubs paying non-triers a million a month, endless hoopla and hype around the transfer market-place, the phony melodrama of celebrity narcissists preening themselves on the managerial merry-go-round, venerable clubs used as money-laundering operations by oligarch gangsters bearing looted billions and much else along the same depressing lines, Wenger and Primorac stand out as beacons of integrity, indomitable true believers in the spirit of the game, righteous brothers in a delinquent world. They are among the diminishing handful who keep hope alive.
It’s unlikely there will ever be another Leicester. But while Wenger and Primorac remain in place, there’s still Arsenal.