Arsene Wenger's Catch-22: The worse Arsenal get, the harder it is to leave

Wenger will almost certainly see out his current two-year deal
Arsenal FC via Getty Images
John Dillon29 August 2017

The most persistent hashtag in football is back. #WengerOut is flooding across cyber-space like a Tsunami of desperation.

Even now, there are probably sign-writers at work preparing the banners for the next fly-past protest across the north London skies at the game against Bournemouth on September 9.

But if Arsenal’s fans think their views are going to make a blind bit of difference as the first crisis of the season engulfs the club well ahead of schedule, they have still got things very, very wrong.

Their opinions never mattered before. And they won’t matter now. Which, in all honesty, is probably right because management by a committee of 60,000 is no way to run a football club. Not that the Stan Kroenke Method is a runaway success, either.

There’s another, much more salient reason why the #WengerOut hashtag will go unanswered again, however.

The plain fact is that the worse things get for the team, the harder it will be for him to quit.

Even if that thought ever crossed his mind, he’s never failed to see out a contract in his career. And he still has this season and next to go at the Emirates.

Surely, he couldn’t possibly walk away in the aftermath of something like the devastating 4-0 defeat at Anfield on Sunday - because it would permanently taint everything he has ever achieved in England.

Some say that is the case already – that he should have quit after the third FA Cup triumph in four years last May.

But after all that he did in his first, fabulous 10 years as the man who revolutionised the Premier League, he simply has to finish it all on some kind of high-note.

That’s true more than ever right now even though things have been so frustrating and disappointing for the supporters on the down-ward curve which followed the reaching of the 2006 Champions League final.

Its an ever-more urgent imperative after he signed his new two-year contract three months ago.

With the TV pundits – including, quite admirably given his allegiances, Thierry Henry – laying into Wenger and his team and branding them cowards who should all be on the transfer list, Arsenal are caught in some awful kind of football Catch-22.

Why do you think the Frenchman agreed his new contract and signed up for another two years of all this and the potential, final dismantling of his legacy?

It's because he believed he could put things right. And still does, despite the shocking evidence on Merseyside at the weekend.

That belief cannot possibly have vanished in the space of three Premier League games and 16 days, no matter that Arsenal also lost at Stoke and had many faults exposed in the opening night’s 4-3 defeat of Leicester.

So yet again, he will stubbornly battle on and attempt to resolve the side’s problems, even though they now appear so deeply hard-wired into the club’s DNA.

Wenger could never leave with things as they stand, no matter the clamour branding him Yesterday’s Man. Not after 21 years in charge.

Neither is there any indication that the board would ever sack him, given that they handed him his renewed contract last May despite a long, painful Spring of complaint from some supporters about his continued tenure.

Of course, if things reached some extra-ordinarily untenable situation – another six defeats on the spin, say – then something might change. Wenger is not daft.

But that point never arrives at Arsenal. The team and the squad is simply too good for that. And therein lies the heart of that Catch-22 torturing so many of the fans just now.

They know what this group of players could achieve and they’ve been told often enough by Wenger that they have it within them to win the league. Yet they only ever get glimpses of that potential.

It really does seem that some kind brainstorm hit him at Anfield, with so many players out of position and the £47 million striker, Alexandre Lacazette, on the bench.

The manager hinted at some private reasons – within the club presumably rather than personal - for what happened. But then he often does, with little emerging later.

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That Bournemouth game is now critical when it never should have been. And after that, Arsenal are at Chelsea on September 17.

Twice at Wembley this year Arsenal have beaten Chelsea and shown that they can locate some vein of toughness and purpose within themselves.

Wenger’s job now is to force his players to understand that this kind of spirit isn’t just for the big occasions. It's required all day, every day.

This is precisely the job he signed up for when he decided to stay on.

That job now after the debacle at Anfield is to prove very quickly that his decision wasn't merely the deluded self-indulgence of a man past his time.