LONDON—Arsène Wenger, the longest tenured manager in English soccer, will step down from his role at Arsenal at the end of the season after 22 years in charge, the club announced on Friday.
Wenger, 67, had another year remaining on his contract, but with the Gunners on course for the worst league finish of his tenure, pressure was mounting from the board and disgruntled fans for him to leave. Rather than suffer the ignominy of being fired, Wenger agreed to announce his exit on his own terms, according to a person familiar with the matter.
“After careful consideration and following discussions with the club, I feel it is the right time for me to step down at the end of the season,” Wenger said in a statement. “I’m grateful for having had the privilege to serve the club for so many memorable years. I managed the club with full commitment and integrity.”
Arsenal didn’t immediately announce a replacement. And Wenger—who is still interested in managing a team, the person said—hasn’t spoken about any future plans. His hope, he always said, was to finish his career in North London, but results in recent seasons have made that impossible.
The club won the last of Wenger’s three league championships in 2004, when Arsenal became the first modern English side to go an entire 38-game season undefeated. There was also an appearance in the Champions League final in 2006, but the club lost to Barcelona and hasn’t returned to Europe’s most prestigious game since.
More recently, the club has had to settle for success in the FA Cup. Arsenal lifted the trophy in 2014, 2015 and 2017, to bring Wenger’s total haul to seven, but those triumphs masked larger issues. The reality was that Arsenal was no longer a contender to win league titles, sitting in the dust of freer-spending, more ambitious clubs such as Manchester City and Chelsea.
To the fans, who had grown accustomed to the stylish success of the 2000s, frustration hit a fever pitch. They held sporadic protests outside Emirates Stadium before games to urge Wenger to retire. The phrase “Wenger Out” became so popular it turned into a meme, appearing at mass gatherings everywhere from college football Saturdays to anti-government protests in Zimbabwe. At one point last season, supporters even hired an advertising plane to fly over a match with the slogan fluttering behind it.
As if to illustrate how fraught the issue had become among the Arsenal faithful, a different, pro-Wenger plane buzzed the stadium minutes later.
This spring, however, there is little disagreement among the club’s fans. The consensus was Wenger Out.
More Premier League
Arsenal is floundering in the championship standings, sliding to sixth place and threatening to drop further. One depressing result follows another. The Gunners are the only team in England’s four professional leagues not to register a single point on the road in 2018. And that is having an impact at home, too, where fans are shunning games in protest.
Recent matches at Arsenal’s 60,000-seat stadium—another of Wenger’s legacies at the club—have seen the stands at least a third empty.
Yet, right up until the end, Wenger remained typically defiant.
“My personal situation is not so much my worry at the moment,” he said on Thursday, a day before the announcement. “My worry is to transform a season with many disappointments away from home into a success. And that’s what matters to me.”
Wenger first arrived at Arsenal in 1996 as a relative unknown to the English game. Though he had made a reputation managing clubs in his native France, his last job before moving to London was in the soccer backwater of Japan, where he ran Nagoya Grampus Eight. Lured to the Premier League by former Arsenal vice-chairman David Dein, the professorial Wenger soon set about creating a revolution inside the staid old club.
In short order, he cut out the players’ drinking and candy-bar habits and is credited with introducing proper nutrition to English soccer. His early teams were known for their speed, style, and brilliant players unearthed from nowhere as they challenged the dominance of Manchester United.
They were only left behind in the mid-2000s, when Arsenal made the turning-point decision to invest in building Emirates Stadium by funding it itself. From then on, Wenger kept the purse-strings tight. He refused to spend on talent and rack up financial losses the way his richer rivals could. Except for all of his skill as a spotter of talent, he couldn’t close the gap.
Wenger kept Arsenal just successful enough for the business to tick. But in a league where the average manager’s shelf-life is 14 months, that alone wasn’t enough after 22 years.
“You have to give me some credit,” Wenger said on Thursday. “If you look back at my career, you would have to accept that my priority was always the interest of Arsenal Football Club.”
Write to Joshua Robinson at joshua.robinson@wsj.com