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footballing backwater – a club just one year removed from Cup Winners’ Cup triumph and two from a domestic cup double – then it is also fair to say that they had never before shopped in this aisle of the transfer market. The £7.5m paid to Inter represented a trebling of the club’s record outlay. Indeed, for the briefest of moments it was a British transfer record – before Liverpool completed their £8.5m purchase of Stan Collymore from Nottingham Forest. Furthermore Arsenal had shattered their wage structure with a package worth £25,000 per week, prompting the chairman Peter Hill-Wood to decry his own club’s spending as “absolutely mad”. He also offered a justification, however. “We have got better value for money than some of the big transfers of late,” he noted. “This player we have bought is truly world-class.”
    That, in itself, seemed an alien notion at a time when every Premier League squad remained overwhelmingly British and Irish. Although there were a number of talented and productive foreign players throughout the division, English clubs did not yet boast the resources to compete financially with the continent’s richest sides. Arsenal’s own foreign legion extended to Glenn Helder and John Jensen. The great players who did arrive from abroad often came with a caveat. Eric Cantona moved to England only after becoming so enraged by decisions handed down by the French Football Federation that he briefly toyed with retirement. Jurgen Klinsmann’s one-year stay at Tottenham had concluded with the club’s chairman Alan Sugar railing against “Carlos Kickaball” foreigners exploiting British generosity to make a quick buck.
    Bergkamp also came with red flags against his name. His time at Inter had not been a happy one, marked by just 11 goals in 52 Serie A outings, and a difficult relationship with the Italian press. Uncomfortable with the intensity of media spotlight in Italy, Bergkamp was labelled aloof for declining interviews, and cold for not being more verbose when he did give them. Even several years after his move to England, the newspaper La Repubblica protested that dealing with Bergkamp had been “like talking to a cash machine.” In the absence of direct quotes from the player, the speculation had been relentless. “For a while when he was at Inter, Bergkamp had a high Rockabilly quiff – very blond – but then at a certain point he decided to cut it short,” recalls David Winner, author of Brilliant Orange: the neurotic genius of Dutch football. “So then this story shows up in Gazzetta dello Sport saying his hair was falling out because of the stress.”
    But if said haircut also contributed to Bergkamp acquiring the nickname Beavis – on account of his perceived likeness to MTV’s chortling cartoon teenager – then it was Moratti who behaved like a Butthead. In persuading the Dutchman to join in the first place from Ajax, the Inter president promised his new signing that the team would be built around him – with an attacking formation designed to make the most of his talents. The experiment lasted barely a month, abandoned after a poor start to the season and long forgotten by the time of his departure – two managerial changes later.
    The very words with which Moratti damned Bergkamp after completing his sale betrayed how Inter had misunderstood the Dutchman’s genius. “Arsenal will be lucky if Bergkamp scores 10 goals this year,” crowed the Inter owner. From a statistical perspective he wasn’t that far wide of the mark, Bergkamp concluded the 1995-96 campaign with a modest 11 from 33 league games. The difference at Arsenal was that his contribution was measured by far more than just how many times he hit the net.
    Where Inter had too often used Bergkamp as a lone striker, at Arsenal Ian Wright was only too happy to shoulder the goal-scoring burden – leaving the Dutchman free to take up deeper positions, to focus his energies at times on creating