Arsene Wenger officially out at Arsenal: On the legacy of the man who changed the Premier League

It’s strange how some things can be both utterly predictable and still quite a shock. Arsene Wenger’s time at Arsenal has been up for a while. Everything has been in place for his departure: the justification only increasing, the need only getting more urgent, the act more inevitable. And yet, well, to actually announce the thing. To make it real. It’s moderately world shaking.

On Friday morning, Wenger announced he would be leaving Arsenal after the season in a note posted to the club’s website.

“After careful consideration and following discussions with the club,” he wrote, “I feel it is the right time for me to step down at the end of the season.”

The news is world shaking because Wenger, by virtue first of his impact and then his longevity, is one of the most significant men in the history of the Premier League. World shaking because he had become, by the end, almost part of the furniture, the still centre at the heart of English football’s carousel of chaos. World shaking because tiny things that always happen — the rueful post-match interview, the fumbling for the zip, the raise-two-fists-and-shake celebration — won’t be happening any more.

It’s odd to think back, from this moment where Arsenal are some combination of an argument, a punchline, and a headache, and remember just how good his title-winning teams were. And how fresh. All those clever foreign ideas about pasta and broccoli and not getting pissed absolutely all the time, brought to England, which distrusts cleverness almost as much as it distrusts foreignness, and absolutely cannot abide them in combination.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that the football that emerged from Arsenal’s outside-the-box appointment was consciousness-expanding. They way they moved. The lines they ran. The speed and the slickness of the whole machine. Even to a non-Arsenal fan, they were at times laughably brilliant.

And English football stretched and bent and reshaped itself to meet this new challenge. Everybody started eating broccoli. Alex Ferguson built Manchester United into the anti-Arsenal, shaped himself into the anti-Wenger, and the two clubs and gave the watching world one of English football’s great sustained rivalries, a multi-season fiesta of spite, snark, and proper title fights. It took the arrival of the petrodollars to end it.

But with the footballing impact of his legacy so frontloaded, this long latter period has been strange and at times uncomfortable. In a way, the kind of manager that Wenger has been — long-term, dynastic, utterly wedded to every aspect of the club — is the romantic notion of what a manager should be. And yet, as football has changed around him, he’s gone from being a revolutionary to something almost quaint, a lingering reminder of how things used to be (and, perhaps, why they aren’t that way any more).

The last time anybody had to appoint a manager for Arsenal’s men’s team was August 1996. The next time won’t be 2040.

As is always the case at moments like this, we can expect the dissatisfaction of recent years to metastatise into an outpouring of affection and remembrance. At this very moment, all around London and beyond, Wenger Out signs are being torn up, folded away, shuffled to the back of drawers. This is of course entirely appropriate: even if he hasn’t been the right servant for Arsenal in recent years, he’s still been one of their finest ever.

Yet maybe the Wenger Out signs have become, by this point, their own free-floating reference. Like Kilroy Was Here. They’ve been to the wrestling, they’ve been to political protests. They’ve broken free. Perhaps they will live on, like Kilroy Was Here. And perhaps, taking all of Wenger’s time of Arsenal, that would make a kind of sense. Beautiful, paradigm-shifting football on the one hand. On the other, a free-floating expression of ambient dissatisfaction with the general state of things.