I know someone who wanted Arsène Wenger to remain Arsenal manager because — don’t judge a man by his friends — of the “semiotics of him”. This sage understood well enough that a coach then nearing 70 was hopelessly spent at football’s elite level. What justified his retention was that he was an omnilingual graduate, a political liberal, an aesthete among barbarians. That is, he annoyed all the right people. He was on our cultural team, even as he led our footballing one to three consecutive 5-1 losses to Bayern Munich.
The picture of Wenger as a suave modern — he lives between London, Paris and Zurich — is as inexact as all cartoons. In their one insight, his formidably bland new memoirs reveal a man still influenced, even haunted, by the Catholic Alsace of his youth. But then the point of semiotics is outward appearance. To this day, Wenger commands a strident following on the basis of what he represents in the abstract, not just his doings. To side with him against his critics is to imply something flattering about one’s own education, taste and even morality.
For an old-ish man, he embodies a very current trend. It was on show last week, as American and European liberals cheered the re-election of a leader in another hemisphere whose domestic record is mostly unknown to them. I was going to say that I have never encountered anything quite like the worldwide cult of Jacinda Ardern. But then of course I have. Justin Trudeau once inspired a similar reverence: intense, global, vague. Those who saluted him from other continents might have been apprised of his administrative performance, but you will excuse me if I suspect not. It was enough that he was a telegenic francophone with progressive instincts and vulgar enemies. It was enough that he was who he was.