Arsene Wenger says he was pleasantly surprised by the welcome he received on his first day as Arsenal manager.
The Frenchman celebrated the 19th anniversary of his arrival at the club this month, and says it has been a “great honour” to be in charge for so long.
Wenger has won three Premier League titles and six FA Cups during his spell in north London, but he can still remember walking into his office for the first time in 1996.
“I was a new manager with a lot of ambition, a lot of desire and a huge desire to do well and show that I had the quality to take this club further,” he told Arsenal Player.
“Nineteen years later I’m still here so that doesn’t make us younger but it is a fantastic part of my life and a great honour to have guided this club for such a long time.
“It is amazing because it’s a rarity in our job. I’m conscious of the size of the club, the expectation level, so the pressure is even bigger than the first day I arrived.
“I was surprised [in my first week at Arsenal] because of the structure of the club with a size like this one. I was surprised that I was quite welcome inside the club, how humble people were and I was also surprised by the quality of the players.
“I expected the players not to be as good as they were because I didn’t have the right image of them. The players were of quality when I arrived here and that was a good surprise.”
Copyright 2024 The Arsenal Football Club Limited. Permission to use quotations from this article is granted subject to appropriate credit being given to www.arsenal.com as the source.