Arsene Wenger’s Arsenal teams helped Americans fall in love with soccer ... and then showed them how to suffer

Arsene Wenger helped Americans fall in love with soccer.

It’s easy to forget this. Or at least, after Arsenal’s stalling as a club over the last five years, it’s easy to just think about late-period Wenger, the forlorn coach stuffing his hands in his pockets as his team, once again, gave up a silly goal to secure, for the umpteenth time, a fourth-place finish in the Premier League.

He’s gone now, announcing on Friday he would be leaving the club after this season.

But I ask that you think back. Think back to his rise with the club, when Arsenal started playing soccer more beautifully than we had ever seen. Think back to that Invincibles team, how it changed what we thought a Premier League season could look like.

Now think of every American fan you know who loves Arsenal. It’s not an accident so many soccer fans in this country fell in love with this team.

The major part of this was those early teams’ brilliance. Americans love winners, and Arsenal won. They won a lot.

But it was more than just winning. It was the style with which they played the game. Those late ‘90s and early ‘00s Arsenal teams, to this day, remain one of the aesthetic high points of soccer at any level. Some of that was Wenger’s tactics ... a lot was his ability to find the best players at just the right moment, from all over the world.

A big part of it was timing. For Americans who grew up loving the game, Arsenal’s rise to brilliance occurred just as the Premier League started being televised in a big way in the States, and just as we started being able to watch video highlights on the internet.

I remember sitting in my buddy Harry’s dorm room the first time we watched this clip.

It was about that grainy, too, for the record. Maybe grainier. It didn’t matter. We saw that first touch. We knew brilliance.

Or what about the first time we saw this?

(I recently asked a few friends to try and choose between two Arsenal goals — the Henry goal or the Bergkamp goal — and I didn’t have to clarify which ones I meant. We all knew exactly what I was talking about. For the record, this is an unanswerable question.)

Part of it was the players, of course. For many Americans of color, Wenger’s early Arsenal teams — especially after the signing of Thierry Henry — gave them heroes they could connect with and love.

“Thierry Henry and Arsenal were a lot of black folks’ gateway drug,” said writer and host Kevin Brown, in a roundtable discussion organized by MLS. “Arsene Wenger was one of the first managers who made a real effort to integrate the Premier League.”

While other Premier League teams seemed like they were filled with lumbering Brits (and a lot of them were), Arsenal were a team of the world. They had sophistication. They has style. French, Dutch, Swedish, Spanish, Brazilian, Cameroonian, black and white. Henry and Vieira. Bergkamp and Pires. Edu and Silva.

Wenger seemed to understand that so many ideas about “cohesiveness” or teams “needing a proper identity” were tied up in xenophobic and racist bullshit — he brought in styles and personalities from all over the world, something other managers thought could never work, and showed English football what was possible.

Like all innovators, Wenger was in part a victim of his own success. The things he was committed to — health and fitness, finding talent from all over the world — became the norm. I remember thinking distinctly during Leicester City’s magic run a few years ago: “N’Golo Kante is going to be one of the best players in the world, and 15 years ago there is zero chance he would have ever played for a club like Leicester. He would have been on Arsenal.”

The players only Wenger would have signed ... other teams signed them. They wised up. Worldwide scouting became the norm. That tactical innovation, introducing a roaming defensive midfielder who could free up more players to attack ... everyone started doing that. Monitoring players’ diets became standard operating procedure. Everything that once set apart Wenger’s sides became rote.

Once the rest of the world caught up, Wenger ran out of ideas. Arsenal stopped winning like they once had, and in fact become notorious for losing. The beauty wasn’t always there anymore. The teams always seemed to disappoint. The once confident, glorious manager became the doddering, dour ghost on the sideline, forever stuck mid-frown. His Arsenal was gone, and what replaced it could never quite recapture the magic that made these fans fall in love with the game.

And in that, I’d like to think he introduced all the Americans who fell in love with the game through his teams to another important part of soccer fandom — he taught them to suffer.