Bergkamp outlined his determination to be a revolutionary: ‘Like when I chose Inter instead of Milan or Barcelona, I thought: “I’m the sort of player you don’t see at Arsenal, so maybe I can show people this is my way of playing.”’
Arsenal, who had generally been reluctant to pay large fees and therefore missed out on top talent during the Premier League’s first three seasons, broke their club record fee three times over to sign Bergkamp and immediately reallocated Paul Merson’s number 10 shirt to their new technical leader. The Independent’s headline read, ‘Rioch signs Bergkamp to signal new era’. That would prove particularly prescient, but there were sceptics – England left-back Stuart Pearce said it was a ‘massive gamble’, pundits questioned his value when he took seven games to score, while Tottenham chairman Alan Sugar said his arrival amounted to ‘cosmetic surgery’. Instead, it was more like a brain transplant. ‘He was the one that changed our whole attitude towards training,’ said Ray Parlour. ‘Just watching the way he handled himself from day one was an eye-opener. It made you think: hold on a second, I need to up my effort here.’
Rioch, in particular, offered tremendous support, defending him staunchly from the early criticism and encouraging Bergkamp’s teammates to supply him frequently between the lines, although Arsenal were sometimes crowded in that zone, with Bergkamp, David Platt and Paul Merson broadly playing similar roles. It was a notable shift, however, from Arsenal’s previous approach of incessantly knocking long balls over the top for Wright. Bergkamp’s first campaign was patchy – and he endured more quiet seasons at Highbury than his reputation might suggest – but he was unquestionably Arsenal’s game-changer, someone who brought the best out of others. Bergkamp had finished as Eredivisie top goalscorer three times, but said his role changed upon arriving in the Premier League, becoming an assister more than a goalscorer, as shown by the fact that he collected 93 Premier League assists compared with 87 goals. Tellingly, the only other players to have scored 50+ Premier League goals but been more prolific assisters are all midfielders: Ryan Giggs, David Beckham, Damien Duff, Gareth Barry and Danny Murphy.
There were many similarities to Cantona; Bergkamp was also a perfectionist who worked upon his game tirelessly after training, practising seemingly simple passes repeatedly, setting the standard in terms of technique and professionalism. Supporters instantly recognised his ability, but teammates raved about the things you can’t fully appreciate from the stands: the weight of his passes, the spin on the ball. Similar to Cantona, his pace was often overlooked – before the 2003/04 season, when Bergkamp was 33, he recorded the third-fastest 60m sprint time at Arsenal, behind Thierry Henry and Jermaine Pennant, but ahead of Ashley Cole, Robert Pirès, Gaël Clichy and Sylvain Wiltord. And as with both Cantona and Zola, opponents often remarked upon his surprising strength for a primarily creative player, enabling him to compete with aggressive centre-backs. ‘People don’t think that Dennis had such strength,’ said Sol Campbell, a future teammate, ‘but believe me, he was one of the strongest I played with or against.’ Early in 1997/98, he scored a brilliant long-range strike having shoved aside Southampton left-back Francis Benali, considered the dirtiest defender in the Premier League. For all his technical quality, Bergkamp also had a petulant streak. He was dismissed four times throughout his Arsenal career, all straight red cards: an elbow, a push and two wild tackles, so ‘the Iceman’ always seemed a peculiarly inappropriate moniker. Besides, as nicknames go, considering Bergkamp’s famous refusal to board an aeroplane, ‘the Non-Flying Dutchman’ was difficult to beat.
Bergkamp was, aesthetically, among the Premier League’s greatest players and scored some wonderful goals during his 11 years at Arsenal. His classic strike was receiving the ball just outside the box in an inside-left position, before opening up his body and curling the ball into the far corner, a goal he scored four times in the space of 18 months, against Sunderland, Leicester and both home and away against Barnsley in 1997/98. Bergkamp also netted two of the Premier League’s most famous goals. The first was against Leicester in 1997, where he brilliantly brought down a long ball, turned inside and finished coolly – a goal which foreshadowed his similar World Cup winner against Argentina the following summer – and there was also the astonishing, extravagant opener against Newcastle in 2002, where he flicked the ball one way around Nikos Dabizas with the inside of his left foot, then spun in the opposite direction before collecting the ball and converting with his right. It prompted years of debate about whether it was intentional, and when Arsenal commissioned a statue of Bergkamp outside their Emirates Stadium, the sculptor complained that goal was simply impossible to depict.
Bergkamp only played for a year under the manager who brought him to Arsenal, and the circumstances of Rioch’s departure were peculiar. He was dismissed shortly before the start of 1996/97, a fortnight after signing a new contract. This time around, Dein got his wish and Wenger was appointed. But as Arsenal chairman Peter Hill-Wood admitted, both he and Dein had already been in regular dialogue with Wenger, who later accidentally revealed that he’d been consulted about Bergkamp’s arrival. It seems Rioch was unwittingly a caretaker manager, a short-term stopgap between two very different eras of Arsenal, but he nevertheless deserves great credit for starting the revolution.
Back in 1996 hiring a foreign coach was considered extremely dangerous. There was one other in the Premier League, as Ruud Gullit had recently been appointed Chelsea player-manager, but the Dutchman was a world-renowned footballer who had already played in the Premier League. Wenger was understandably unheard of in England, at a time when there was minimal coverage of foreign football aside from Channel 4’s Football Italia, and before the internet was widespread. Six years earlier Aston Villa had appointed the first-ever overseas manager of a top-flight side: the mysterious Dr Jozef Vengloš. It was a disastrous experiment. Villa had finished second the previous campaign, but under the Slovakian (he was then considered Czechoslovakian) they finished two places above relegation. He appeared incompatible with the English approach, but the man with a doctorate in physical education was essentially a forerunner of Wenger, and not simply because he was foreign – he attempted to professionalise English football. ‘Never had I imagined it was possible for human beings to drink so much beer,’ he gasped shortly after his arrival. Years later he took a more considered view. ‘A few things in those days were a bit different to what we had been doing in central Europe – the methodology of training, the analysing of nutrition, and the recuperation, regeneration and physiological approach to the game.’ The Premier League desperately needed a foreign coach like Wenger to successfully implement modern methods. As Dein said, ‘The combination of Arsène and Dennis changed the culture of Arsenal.’
Wenger was completely different from anyone else in the Premier League, frequently described as looking more like a teacher than a football manager; he spoke five languages, had a degree in economics and had briefly studied medicine. More than anything, he appeared extraordinarily calm, a quality he’s occasionally lost in recent years. Football managers were supposed to be ranters, ravers, eternally angry people; Alex Ferguson famously dished out the ‘hairdryer treatment’. A year before Wenger’s appointment, Leyton Orient manager John Sitton had been the subject of a Channel 4 documentary that recorded him threatening to fight his own players in a famously bizarre dressing-room outburst. ‘When I tell you to do something, do it, and if you come back at me, we’ll have a fucking right sort-out in here,’ he roared at two players. ‘All right? And you can pair up if you like, and you can fucking pick someone else to help you, and you can bring your fucking dinner, ’coz by the time I’ve finished with you, you’ll fucking need it.’ That was the 1990s football manager. Wenger was the opposite, stunning his players by demanding a period of complete silence at half-time. More to the point, he certainly wasn’t asking players to bring their dinner.
Wenger’s major impact upon English football was revolutionising his players’ diet. Before the Frenchman’s arrival, Arsenal’s squad – in common with the majority of Premier League teams – had the culinary preferences of a pub team. They’d enjoy a full English breakfast before training, and their pre-match menu included fish and chips, steak, scrambled eggs and beans on toast. Post-match, things became even worse. On the long coach journey back from Newcastle, for example, some players held an eating
