Arsene Wenger this weekend says goodbye to the stadium that is testament to his greatness

By Miguel Delaney

As Arsene Wenger faces up to his last home game as Arsenal manager, the club want to give him the sendoff he deserves… but it still isn’t a fuss he desires. The French great just wants to treat the Burnley fixture as a normal game, to the point it’s been reported he hasn’t even provided organisers with a guest list. Compromises have instead been made, with a presentation to take place after the match.

It reflects how there’s a lot more to Wenger’s departure, something that will only be given sharper edge by the fact this is a lot more than a last home game. It is a last game in the house that he helped build.

Really, there’s no manager in the modern era anywhere in the world so associated with a stadium. While the club had wanted to expand Highbury throughout the mid-1990s, the final complications they found with that plan had coincided with Wenger’s arrival and the beginning of a glory era.

Wenger had made them truly international, so it greatly deepened the need for a stadium to match. When they encountered opposition from the Islington Stadium Communities Alliance, then, the manager’s reach was used to counter it.

Once planning permission was granted, Wenger then offered direct input and ideas for the design of the areas that would involve the reason this was all being done: the first team. Beyond anything, the stadium stands as the ultimate testament to Wenger’s influence on the club, to that sensational and game-changing success he enjoyed in his first decade at Arsenal.

It is one of football’s great historical ironies then that the stadium is also argued as the ultimate millstone, and a major reason for the struggles of his second decade at the club.

While there are grander debates about when exactly Wenger first started to slip as manager, you couldn’t really say that was 2006.

This was after all still just two years after the Invincible season, and when he brought Arsenal to their first Champions League final. With the club temporarily forced into extreme financial prudence, the reality is that a rug was pulled from underneath Wenger just when he was at his peak… and, crucially, just when English and European football started to really feel the effect of petro-money.

It shouldn’t escape anyone’s attention, of course, that Arsenal’s very stadium is currently named after a petro-money airline.

Looking back at it all on an interview with BT last year, he outright admitted the first years of the stadium were his toughest at Arsenal. “In 2006 the most difficult period of my life started,” Wenger said. “We had restricted finances, we had to pay back a huge amount of money and we had to sell our best players. We had to stay in the top, to stay in the Champions League and at least to make 54,000 people [attend]. There are many debates when you start building a stadium, how big can it be? It’s quite simple. At the time it was £4,000 a seat. You multiply that by 60,000 it’s £240million. Plus we had to buy the soil, all the businesses we had to buy out. It went to over £420m.

“We had to pay a huge amount of money back every year. That’s why we had to stay in the Champions League.” “That was, for me, the biggest period of pressure between 2006 and 2014. If you told me today I’d do that again I would say ‘no thank you, I’ll leave that to someone else.’” It was just such a pity that, by the time it ended and Arsenal were able to pay for players like Mesut Ozil and then Alexis Sanchez, Wenger’s decline as a manager was indisputable.

He was no longer able to get the best out of a situation that he had invested so much in, and that was finally beginning to reap financial reward. That is really why we are here, why he is going, and why there has been so much to-ing and fro-ing about how to send him off on Sunday.