Europa League gives Wenger the chance to leave on his own terms

Arsenal played one of their most exquisitely Arsenal games of football against CSKA Moscow. That should bring with it its own, established frustrations but it also gives Arsene Wenger the chance to leave on a high. After a miserable half-decade, and perhaps longer, Wenger has something that few people get – a second chance.

Of course, this isn’t a second chance to rekindle the success that he brought Arsenal upon arrival. Few people get a second act in life, a chance to become as brilliant as they once were. You get to burn out, and perhaps find stability but you don’t get two peaks; life just isn’t like that. Wenger has been afforded the chance of mercy, rarely doled out in football.

Football is generally a vocation where people are sacked every 18 months, let go from clubs when they are severely injured, or marginalised at youth level and given little preparation for the rest of the world.

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Wenger had his first chance to leave when he won the FA Cup in 2014, and then again in 2015. Even in 2017, he triumphed against Chelsea, the Premier League champions, making it three FA Cups in four years. Each of those occasions meant that Wenger and Arsenal fans could celebrate together and part on pleasant times.

As the rancour grew since their last league title, each of the victories was a chance to pretend. The FA Cup is now essentially meaningless. It’s a pleasant day out, and a reason to go to the pub, but nobody aiming to be the best has hopes to win the FA Cup. It is an incidental trophy, something that you can win just from turning up often enough.

Nevertheless, the fans and the club would have been willing to make a go of it. Wenger was previously held in such high esteem that the club would have worked with them to make it as convincing as they could have managed.

They could have named a stand after him, given him a seat on the board, and generally made him their Alex Ferguson. There could have been a statue next to Thierry Henry, a memory of their best times. The fans would have declared him their greatest manager ever, with enthusiasm, and it would have been entirely true. There would have been a chance for Wenger to pretend to believe that this was the right time to quit, too.

Wenger clearly thinks that the best times are not yet extinguished, and there is more to be done at Arsenal. He would not still be there if he didn’t think he was doing the right thing. He obviously believes that his financial discipline will pay off in the end, football’s own version of Theodore Forstmann, waiting for the right ways of the past to be proven just by the avaricious methods of the present.

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The problem with that, of course, is that greed never relents, it only accelerates. Wenger’s stand against modern football can be unimpeachably moral but it won’t ever give him the best football club in the country again.

The Europa League, though, is something meaningfully different. Wenger took Arsenal to the brink of Champions League glory but couldn’t hold on against Barcelona. It is more than two decades since Arsenal won the Cup Winners’ Cup, and as Manchester United showed last season, there is a special kind of joy in winning on the European stage, regardless of how the rest of the season go.

A trip to Lyon for the fans and a chance to win one of just two continental trophies on offer, and it would be a real achievement for Wenger.

Until the last couple of weeks, there appeared to only be a negative end to the season for Arsenal. Frustration had largely been converted to outright anger. Fans were staying away from the Emirates Stadium, and they had lost Alexis Sanchez. It was supposed to be a matter of time before Wenger was forced out by the board because of their dissatisfaction.

Textbook

Most excitingly, Arsenal won the game against CSKA Moscow with a textbook Wenger performance. Aaron Ramsey finished exquisitely for his second. Henrikh Mkhitaryan and Mesut Ozil, two brittle but enigmatic playmakers combined to rip apart a defence, again and again, and he had his new French striker on standby to score his own double. It was pure Arsenal, and for once there was no dispute that it worked under pressure.

The Europa League offers salvation. A win would give Wenger something he hasn’t had for years. It would mean that Arsenal were in a better position than they had been a year before.

For the last decade that has almost never been true, as Arsenal endured a slow but steady decline into mediocrity. Wenger would be able to take it as vindication that he can succeed on the international stage after years of not even being able to function properly domestically. Arsenal and Wenger are now on the verge of a goodbye they would not have thought possible just months ago.