by Sati Malik

Created on: November 18, 2008

As the first Arsenal book I've fully read, this one had a wonderful introspective quality. Many of the local contours I've groped for in five consecutive years of fandom are illuminated. Arsenal, in its recent history, is a story of aspiration, audacity and footballing purity. This comes out wonderfully in this book.

The book is written by two inside trackers: the "football guru", Alex Fynn, Editor of the "fanzine" The Gooner; and Kevin Whitcher, a famous football pundit. It contains lots of interesting information, much of it gathered from primary sources. To give you an idea of the intimacy, Whitcher reported from Manager Arsene Wenger's living room while his wife cooked dinner.

It's 245 pages, but reads well due to the wide margins and uptempo pace. Sounds like the English game, I'm surprisingly happy to say; naturally, however, it progresses as if ideas were longballs, thematically instead of chronologically. As an Historian I find this messy. Regardless, the details run logically enough to give it fluidity.

Up until the early '90s, Arsenal were a relatively parochial, working class North London soccer team, albeit with a rich history. The book begins with the arrival of a self-made maverick to the Arsenal board in 1983. A "football man," as described by the authors, David Dein's lofty ambitions for his beloved team took real shape with the formation of the English Premier League in 1992, and the subsequent merchandising and broadcasting windfall for the "Big 5 teams (of which Arsenal were included). Foresight drove Dein to hire an obscure Frenchman as manager in 1996. That would be Arsene Wenger, the other dominant character in the story. The two were to form an inseparable bond until Dein's uncermonious ouster as Vice-Chairman of Arsenal in 2007.

The meat of the book is contained between these two dates; and financial matters take precedence in the narrative. By utilizing Wenger's brilliance for finding, growing and selling young talent, Arsenal formulated an unconventional model for success. While the other big teams spent tens of millions to acquire mature stars, the astute Wenger could assemble his roster from "gems in the dirt" at deflated prices. He would then sell these players once they approached their potential. The trasfer fees would be reinvested to sign more players. The result: for a paltry deficit of 44 million, a sucession of young teams that won five Premierships and four FA cups over Wenger's first nine years. Just as significant, in the

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