At Highbury, Arsenal was the biggest medium-sized club in the world.
At the Emirates Stadium, it’s become the smallest big club in the world.
Arsenal is a big club run by small people and the manager is committing suicide in slow-motion as he tries to prove his critics wrong.
But he never will.
His 2010-11 season was a year of angst and pain and farce and kicking water bottles.
After the Carling Cup final fiasco and the consequent meltdown, Fabregas and Nasri called time on Wenger, although Nasri hasn’t left yet.
What thousands feared is happening at last because Wenger’s Arsenal has finally imploded.
It looks like a masterplan only he could conceive, and something only a doctor could explain.
In 1994 he decided to pack his Monaco team with kids and Africans and they dropped right down the league, so he got the sack.
Then Wenger went to Japan and became very detached.
He came to Arsenal in 1996.
Being detached helped when he had George Graham’s defence and David Dein’s Bergkamp and big-hearted Ray Parlour.
Then he turned it into French club. And then he turned Arsene FC into the West Ham of the Champions League. A selling club with a lot of deadwood.
By 2011 the team was playing to 40,000 people who didn’t really care and who don’t know football. There was no atmosphere. And if the crowd don’t care about every game and every result, your foreign players certainly won’t.
With the billionaire owner living in Columbus, Missouri, Wenger can be more detached than ever. There’s nobody to say, “Arsene, don’t do that.”
Clearly, Stan Kroenke is a godsend to Wenger because he is an absentee owner who lives 5.000 miles away and is not interested in soccer. As long as Wenger makes a profit, he has a job.
However, his best players will always leave.
Van Persie will be next and Manchester United already want Jack Wilshere. That is the inevitable result of this manager’s policies.
We’re witnessing the loudest silent explosion in the history of phootball.
This is Monaco II- the Sequel.
If I was a Gooner, I’d be heartbroken.
I’d think, “The only winners are the fans who didn’t renew.”