The Premier League 60: No 1, Thierry Henry

The Premier League 60 is designed to reflect and honour the greatest players to have graced and illuminated the English top flight in the modern era, as voted for by our writers.

You might not agree with their choices, you won’t agree with the order (they didn’t), but we hope you’ll enjoy their stories. You can read Oliver Kay’s introduction to the series here.

Ask Thierry Henry what made him great, and he doesn’t cite the electric speed, the nimble footwork or the effortless finishing. He speaks of his brain.

“Marco van Basten did something in 1992 which triggered me,” Henry tells The Athletic. Henry was 13 at the time, a student at France’s esteemed Clairefontaine academy. As well as the rigorous football education he soaked up alongside players such as Nicolas Anelka, William Gallas and Louis Saha, Henry studied his idols via television. “Van Basten was my favourite player, and he did something in ’92 at the Euros, when Dennis Bergkamp scored a goal against Germany, which I’d never seen a player do before.

“Aron Winter gets the ball down the line, and Van Basten makes a move to the near post to take the defender away… if he didn’t move, there is no goal, because the defender would have taken him and Dennis and cleared the ball. But while Van Basten is moving, he’s pointing behind. And I remember I saw the replay and I was like, ‘What is he pointing at?’ He was pointing at Dennis.” Van Basten was conducting the play, orchestrating moves in his mind.

It was a moment that opened Henry’s eyes to everything a striker could be. Synapses crackled and fizzed in his young brain. Suddenly football was more than goals — it was space, perception, thought. “The fact that move was from Van Basten, who was known as a finisher, a goalscorer, a killer… people were not looking at his movements and how he was freeing people, and that talked to me.”

Another catalytic encounter occurred when the teenage Henry arrived at Monaco to train under Arsene Wenger.

Wenger gave Henry his league debut for the principality club at 17, but it was when they were reunited at Arsenal five years later that Henry’s journey to greatness began to gather speed. “Everything changed for me in the Premier League, professionally and also personally,” Henry says. “I became a man there.”

Henry and Wenger in conversation in 2000 (Photo by Rebecca Naden – PA Images/PA Images via Getty Images)

It was Wenger who delivered another trigger point, when a dissatisfied Henry approached him after an early training session at London Colney. Henry felt his runs were being ignored by the Arsenal midfield. “I remember I went to see him one day and we were talking about the midfielders and I was like, ‘Sometimes those guys they don’t see me’, you know?” Henry says.

“And I remember Arsene said to me, ‘Do you think that Freddie Ljungberg can see you the same way that Dennis Bergkamp can see you?’ And I was like — and I’m not having a go — I was like, ‘Obviously not. Dennis can see you in his sleep’.

“But then Freddie had a different way of playing. Freddie was taking the ball, head down, so it was a different way of moving. Robert Pires had a different way of moving; when Ashley Cole had the ball, a different way of moving; Gilberto Silva or Patrick Vieira, different way of moving.

“Can I have the ball in behind from Kolo Toure? Not early in his career — at the end of his career, yes. With Tony Adams, yes. With some defenders, no, you have to drop, because they don’t have the range of pass.”

More crackling, more connections, more ideas. “I took it to heart, what Arsene said. Suddenly I started to think about how can I make it easier for my midfielders, instead of them making it easier for me. I started to move in function of who had the ball, not what I wanted to do.

“When you have the ball, you’re at the mercy of your own feet and also the movement of others. But at least you can dictate because you have the ball. When you cannot dictate, you need to make sure that you can offer a solution that the guy can execute. What can you do when the team cannot help you? That’s how I define a striker.

“Look… on average, a player — if he’s great — can touch the ball no more than one minute in the game. So, the rest of the time, what do you do?”

A pause. The question isn’t rhetorical. Here you see a flash of Henry the coach, Henry the current manager of Major League Soccer side Montreal Impact. I hazard a guess. I want to get it right — it’s Thierry Henry.

“You’re moving?”

I’m wrong. “You’re thinking. That’s why I said that Arsene triggered my brain. Most of the time, yes, you’re moving but people do forget one of the most important skills in the world — thinking. That’s all you do in the game. You think.

“You have the ball for a minute, maybe 15 touches. If you’re a great striker, maybe you can have 30, and if you’re really great, maybe you can have 60, but other than that you are thinking in the game.

“And that is something that not a lot of people try to develop: the brain. People will try to make you faster, bigger, whatever it is, but how do you make people smarter? How do you trigger their brain? How do you make them understand space? Understand when, where, how? This is what makes the difference between a great player and an average player.”

Henry’s ruminations led to a unique approach to the centre-forward role. He was the most relentless goalscorer in Arsenal’s history, yet entirely atypical, seeming to spend more time dropping out to the left wing than sniffing around the penalty box. “I remember at the beginning when I arrived at Arsenal, people were like, ‘He’s never in the box, how can he score goals?’” says Henry. “You know, ‘Stay in the box’ — that was the myth — ‘Stay in the box. If not, you cannot score goals’. Now, wingers score as many goals as the guy inside.

“But I wasn’t a box player. I wasn’t great with my head. I could hold the ball up but I wasn’t a box player, so why am I going to stay in a position where you’re going to see my weakness? I’m going to have to bring you on my field, right? And I knew being in the middle didn’t bother me but making that run out on the wing was bringing you back to my ‘garden’ because I used to be a winger, more often on the left.

“If you don’t want to come to my garden, that’s on you — I’ll be alone. If you want to come to my garden, it’s also on you, because now we’re one-v-one. Either way, I win.

“In my mind, I’m in my garden either way. Whether you come with me or not, I’m going to have the barbecue. You’re in my house now.”

Henry enjoys a barbecue with two Birmingham defenders in 2004 (Photo: Phil Cole/Getty Images)

Henry’s words will trigger flashbacks for the generation of centre-halves who reluctantly followed him on to the narrow straits of the flank. When asked for some of the toughest defenders he faced, Henry rolls off an impressive list: “Rio Ferdinand was a good defender, John Terry, William Gallas, who people bypass. Gallas was one of the players who could play across the back four: left-back, left centre-back, right centre-back and right-back. Not a lot could do that. Sol Campbell, Kolo Toure, I can name a lot of defenders. Ledley King.”

While Henry recognises their credentials, none of these names intimidated him. “When I was in-tune, when I was in, I don’t think a lot of people could defend against me,” he says. “When I wasn’t, my dad could defend against me! So, that was always my view of it: to make sure that I work on myself and not saying to myself, ‘I can’t play against this guy’, or, ‘I can’t score against this goalkeeper’. No: ‘You were not good — don’t concentrate on the defender being good, you were not good. Concentrate on yourself, go back to work’. Understand the concept; those guys were magnificent defenders, obviously, but I was never going to give them any credit. Never.”

As Henry’s star exploded, defenders would seek to contain him with increasingly physical tactics. “If you go away — at Leicester back in the day or Southampton at the Dell — at those little stadiums, there’s not a lot of space,” he explains. “You have to make your own space. And those guys were going to be physical. That’s the way it was, so you needed to be able to handle that first, and then play.”

Henry responded by asking the likes of Martin Keown and Lee Dixon to be more physical with him in training, so he was prepared for the treatment he’d receive at the weekend. It toughened him up. He learned to harness his anger, to channel the adrenaline into performance. “Sometimes I was there dreaming and someone kicked me and then that’s it, I’m on,” says Henry. “That’s me, I react quicker to that. Sometimes I said to the guys in a joking way, because you talk trash on the pitch sometimes, ‘You shouldn’t have kicked me, man. You shouldn’t have kicked me because I wasn’t in the game and you just woke me up. Thank you’.”

Henry scored 175 Premier League goals of astonishing variety. However, there is an archetypal Henry goal: sprinting into the inside left channel, alone against the goalkeeper, opening his body up and curling a shot into the far corner with his right boot. From the stands, it appeared entirely effortless. The truth is rather different.

“Do you know the number of hours I spent to be able to master that?” asks Henry. “When I started to do it, you would have laughed because I remember I used to try to do it in training at Monaco, with a goalkeeper called Stephane Porato and the fitness coach, Claude Puel, and trust me: at the very beginning, maybe one out of 50 was on target.

“And even when I started to master it, still, it was 30, 35, 40 minutes of shooting after training. At Arsenal, I’d grab (reverse goalkeepers) Richard Wright, Stuart Taylor, Graham Stack or whoever it was — or even if there wasn’t anyone. The amount of work behind it was just crazy.

“Repetition creates habits. Once you have that habit, your body doesn’t even think that you’re doing it, you just do it, it becomes natural… people tend to see the result and tend to judge and tend to say, ‘Oh that’s him!’ No, that’s work.”

An often overlooked aspect of Henry’s game is that his 258 Premier League appearances also yielded 74 assists. Asked about his creative streak, it is extraordinary to hear him admit that he consciously sought to redefine the parameters of centre-forward play. “I saw it as my duty to evolve the position of the striker,” he says. “At one point in my career, I was like, ‘What can I leave behind me? What impact can I have in my position?’

“I realised at one point that the striker will always finish the job of the team — and he gets the credit, sometimes for the wrong reasons. I can miss 10 one-on-ones and score the winner at the end, and I ‘had a good game’. A goalkeeper makes 10 saves, but he makes a mistake in the 91st minute and we lose the game — he’s ‘not a good goalkeeper’. How is that fair?

“So, I said to myself, ‘If those guys are working hard for me, whenever I can return the favour, I need to return the favour’ — and I started to add assists in my game. And so that was my way to say to the guys that we are a team.”

Henry’s feats made him one of the game’s great entertainers. However, he was no showboater. The beauty was a byproduct. “That’s my way of playing,” he says. “For me, I wasn’t entertaining people because, ‘Oh, you have to entertain them today’ — that’s how I play. But always with a purpose.

“You never saw me nutmeg someone just for the sake of nutmegging. Always to go forward. If that’s the move, that’s the move. When I was trying stuff and it wasn’t coming off, the Arsenal fans were singing to me, ‘Thierry, what the fucking hell was that?’ But listen, if I don’t try that goal against Man United, does it stay in history? No.

“The back heel against Charlton. What else do you want me to do? I tried to shield it, he’s on my back, I couldn’t turn. I saw a window — that’s the window. Now, do you have the quality to execute it? That’s a different story.

“The only thing that you cannot do — forget about being a sportsman — is be scared to fail.”

When coronavirus plunged the world into lockdown, Henry was one of the many millions who watched ESPN and Netflix’s The Last Dance, the documentary series charting Michael Jordan’s time with basketball’s Chicago Bulls.

Anyone who followed both men’s careers closely will have observed parallels: the combination of grace and power, the searing self-analysis, the unerring dedication to winning. It’s no accident: Henry grew up idolising Jordan, whose achievements in the NBA provided another trigger point in the young footballer’s development. Earlier this year, former Arsenal forward Carlos Vela compared Henry’s “hard” exterior to that of Jordan.

Both men earned reputations as being incredibly demanding of themselves and their team-mates. Henry wasn’t a Ronaldinho type, playing with a perennial smile on his face. He was quick to let others know when his high standards were not met. As the Invincibles of the 2003-04 season were dismantled, Henry’s smouldering glare at under-performing team-mates became an increasingly frequent part of his repertoire at both the stadium and the training ground.

Henry is unapologetic. In reliving Jordan’s story, he found vindication. “Listen, I grew up with the Bulls,” Henry tells The Athletic. “I grew up with, and still love, Michael Jordan. And so, when I looked at that documentary I was like, ‘Yes! I wasn’t wrong’. I don’t care what people say.

“If a guy is going to be extremely demanding with himself — the guy is always showing great desire, great professionalism — obviously he’s going to demand a lot from his team-mates. So when I watched that I was like… I was just looking at it and smiling, I was like, ‘Yeah, what else?’ And if you can’t handle what I’m doing in training, what do you think is going to happen at the weekend?

(Photo: Mike Egerton/PA Images via Getty Images)

“When you watch The Last Dance, sometimes his team-mates didn’t know whether to like him or not like him. ‘Yeah, but we won’ — and then suddenly they all agree and, at the end, he showed emotion. Yes, because the war is over. People do not understand how the fighter only shows his emotion at the end of the fight, not while he’s fighting.”

Henry only served as Arsenal’s official captain for two seasons, but he was a leader and talisman for far longer. Is it difficult to be the one to set the standard, to constantly be demanding more from others? “It’s not that,” he says. “What is difficult in that is: who helps the helper? It was always, ‘Oh, look at him, he’s not OK’. Or, ‘Look at him, he’s not OK’. No one ever wondered if I was OK. Like a proper OK. Because I have to be the guy that’s always strong.

“What’s heavy on your shoulders sometimes is that if you’re not performing, you can’t go back in the dressing room and look at your guys. They know that you’re not cheating them, but you’re not performing when you usually are. And so they don’t want to look at you but you know they’re looking at you — kind of, ‘Hmm, what’s wrong with him?’ — and that’s annoying.

“Being on the field, going back to the dressing room not being able…” Henry trails off. Even talking about failure is difficult. “Like, you didn’t help your team and you know it, they know it. I was very critical over myself. You didn’t have to tell me, you know? So many times, I remember, I used to call my agent after the game and my brother, and they were like, ‘Thierry, you know…’”

He makes an equivocating gesture with his hands. “And then I was like, ‘Don’t “You know…” me — I was shite, it happens, don’t try to find any excuses’.”

Henry is grateful that, in such cases, he could call on outstanding team-mates. “Sometimes Michael Jordan couldn’t do it, and Scottie Pippen appeared,” he says. “And then Scottie Pippen couldn’t and Toni Kukoc appeared. That’s how you win titles. Sometimes I couldn’t, then Dennis (Bergkamp) arrived. Sometimes I couldn’t, and Sylvain Wiltord came from the right. Sometimes we couldn’t and Nwankwo Kanu arrived. Sometimes we couldn’t, and Gilberto arrived — like at Leicester in 2003.”

When Henry was hard on himself, Arsenal offered him solace and understanding. “The Arsenal fans and me, we do have a connection,” he says. “They knew when I was upset, they knew when I was on, they knew when I wasn’t on.

“I can’t hide it. You knew exactly from my look where that ball should have gone if a player doesn’t pass it well, you know? And for me, that’s how it is, that’s how you win titles: you win titles with winners.”

Henry the serial winner has found his theme again. “And like Michael Jordan said, ‘You don’t want to come on the ride? Go home’. The Arsenal shirt was too heavy? Don’t wear it. That was my view. That’s it. And only fans should wear an Arsenal shirt. If you’re a player and it’s too heavy for you, don’t wear it.

“That shirt is too precious just to wear it for a jog in the park. That’s what I understood from the old guard. That’s what I was trying to pass on, because it’s a special club: special shirt, special atmosphere, special stadium, special everything it was for me. The least I could do for everybody in the stands is to show composure at times, show desire, show commitment, and I was always trying to bring everyone with me on that level.

“That’s why we won, by the way, because Patrick was like that, because Dennis was like that, because Tony Adams was like that. When you only have one or two, it becomes very difficult. You can only win titles with animals. Sorry to say it and be raw with that one, but that’s how it is. So, when I watched The Last Dance, I was like, ‘Yeah’.”

Henry thrills Highbury once more in 2006 (Photo: Stuart MacFarlane/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)

When you set the bar so high, meeting those lofty expectations could quickly become a burden. “For me, it was my mission,” says Henry. “The Arsenal fans were waiting for me to perform every three days. I can’t let them down. And I did — so many times, by the way. I did let the Arsenal fans down so many times, but not on purpose.

“But my duty was to make sure that I was going to be ready; to make sure that I can’t let them down. I never used to go out, I never used to drink, you know? People would say, ‘Thierry, let’s go (out)’. ‘No, no, no: I have a game on Tuesday, I need to perform. No, no, no, I can’t let myself down, let the team down, let the staff down, let down the people who work at the club. The fans… I can’t’. You guys, the Arsenal fans, were going to Highbury expecting me to perform.

“So how can I go on the field and be like, ‘Oh, I had two hours sleep. I partied last night’. Well, you’d never know, but I’d know. I have to be honest. Yes, sometimes I was shite but it was because I was shite, it wasn’t because of lack of preparation. I wanted to make sure that I was always going to try to perform.

“Am I a saint? No. I’m a human being and I make mistakes. But preparing a game, and being there for people who are waiting for you to perform — I was always there to try to perform. It wasn’t enough at times and I understand that and I’m the first one to say it, but my mindset was that there are too many people waiting for me to perform. I did it for them.”

And for that — for the goals, the assists, the speed, the skill, the brain, the shrugs, the looks, for the charisma and character and the unflinching commitment to excellence — the Premier League is very grateful.

(Main image created for The Athletic by Tom Slator)