Gunners boss helps maintain team focus with secret document

Ever wondered how new Arsenal players manage to the side’s unique style of play soon after their arrival? It’s not because they train hard, incessantly practice drills or study tactics day and night, but because they read a document full of buzz words and jargon before each game.

The Daily Mirror are calling it “the amazing secret document behind Arsenal’s surge to the top of the Premier League,” and they have published a copy that Professor Wenger handed out prior to Bolton’s schooling at the Reebok last weekend:

Confidential
Team meeting 19th September 2008

The Team:
A team is as strong as the relationships within it.

The driving force of a team is its member’s ability to create and maintain excellent relationships within the team that can add an extra dimension and robustness to the team dynamic.

This attitude can be used by our team to focus on the gratitude and the vitally important benefits that the team brings to our own lives. It can be used to strengthen and deepen the relationships within it and maximise the opportunities that await a strong and united team.

Our team becomes stronger by:
Displaying a positive attitude on and off the pitch

Everyone making the right decisions for the team

Have an unshakeable belief that we can achieve our target

Believe in the strength of the team

Always want more - always give more

Focus on our communication

Be demanding with yourself

Be fresh and well prepared to win

Focus on being mentally stronger and always keep going to the end

When we play away from home, believe in our identity and play the football we love to play at home

Stick together

Stay grounded and humble as a player and as a person

Show the desire to win in all that you do

Enjoy and contribute to all that is special about being in a team - don’t take it for granted.

The document, which was originally uncovered by The Guardian, was put together with the help of the club’s sports psychologists, and is said to be responsible for the strong bonds in the Arsenal dressing room and the uninhibited style of play they demonstrate on the road.

This is the kind of motivational technique that could only work at Arsenal: with all its positive language and pithy spiritual maxims, it’s hard to imagine a manager like Alex Ferguson slipping a document like this under Wayne Rooney’s door the night before an away game…