Arsene Wenger today says goodbye to the stadium that is testament to his greatness but was also a reason for his wasted years

As Arsene Wenger faces up to his last home game as Arsenal manager, the club want to give him the send-off he deserves… but it still isn’t a fuss he desires.

The French great just wants to get on with things and 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.

Given how genuinely significant an occasion this is, how seismic a moment for the club it is, it’s difficult not to think there’s still a natural element of denial to Wenger with all of this. He is in a situation he just doesn’t want to be in, and that goes way beyond “the fuss”.

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, with that only emphasising how deeply important he was to Arsenal for so long.

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. Arsenal had wanted to expand beyond a 48,000 capacity anyway, but that was a much more logical decision when they had a team who were at that exact point playing the kind of luscious football that was making them among the most admired sides in the world.

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. Signs bearing the slogan ‘Let Arsenal support Islington’ were strategically placed behind Wenger at press conferences.

The stadium was then built on the back of his brilliance.

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. Sir Alex Ferguson even used to remark with no little envy about how this was a great thing for a manager to be able to do, effectively constructing your surroundings to what suited how you worked.

It also meant the stadium blueprints bear Wenger’s imprint. That unique football mind really is ingrained in the ground’s very design, to go with what was seen on the pitch.

Beyond anything, the stadium stands as the ultimate testament to Wenger's influence on the club, to that sensational and genuinely 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 to be had about when exactly it was that Wenger first started to slip as manager, when the decline really started, 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 - and that despite the big sales having already begun.

With the club temporarily forced into the most 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. Chelsea’s success under Roman Abramovich had already begun, and Manchester City’s takeover was just two years away. Arsenal felt the brunt of both more than most. Chelsea’s first big success after the takeover was to take Wenger’s title, in 2004-05. City’s first big statement after their takeover was to take two of Wenger’s best players - Emmanuel Adebayor and Kolo Toure - in the summer of 2009.

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

The nuance of that aside, the situation also fired one of Wenger’s favourite press conference subjects, in discussions that really went to a lot of football and economic philosophy: “financial doping”. Through that, the stadium also stood as a testament to the manager’s argument that clubs should only be able to spend money they can generate themselves.

It was still difficult not to wonder whether it forced a much greater “purism” on Wenger than even he would have wanted.

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.

Wenger himself once described the construction of the stadium as one of the biggest moments in Arsenal’s history, along with the appointment of Herbert Chapman.

His own appointment is up there, as now is his departure.

Events in the stadium on the day will have to appropriately recognise that. It’s just another irony that, when it happens, Wenger will for once want to be anywhere but there.