Arsene Wenger hates himself

One thing about Arsene Wenger, he’ll be honest with you. To a point, anyway. He’ll never tell you anything really truthful about signing a player, but he’s always been remarkably straightforward about himself and about how he deals with and processes things. In an interview for Norwegian TV recently, this trend continued when Wenger was asked about his feelings about not just how Arsenal are performing lately, but how that performance and his role in it has been received by Arsenal fans. He said:

“I am like everybody – I prefer to be loved than hated but I can take a distance with that. I know as well it is not the person itself, it is the fact the manager does not win the games.”

So he can and does separate how those fans feel about how his managering is going from how they might feel about him personally, which would seem to be a vital skill to possess in this media-saturated era. He also spoke about how he feels after a loss, or after losses:

“In fact, I personally hate myself – the manager – more than anybody when I don’t win the games. I am a very bad loser.”

When I read that, I got this great image in my head of Wenger heading home, getting out of his car, calmly walking into his garage, grabbing a Wenger Out banner, and unfurling it on his lawn before going inside to have a bit of dinner, alone with his thoughts and his turkey pot pie.