The Wenger conundrum — is Arsenal still better off with him in charge?

It took precisely one match in the new Premier League season for Arsene Wenger to find the hot seat. (Reuters)
Has time passed Arsene Wenger by?
The new Premier League season isn’t quite one match week old, since we’ve still got the Monday contest to go. But the question already imposes itself after Arsenal’s topsy-turvy come-from-ahead 4-3 loss to Liverpool at home on Sunday. It’s a question that will be asked all year, as Wenger, the club’s manager of two decades, is in the final season of a contract that might very well be his last.
The conundrum of whether the club would be better or worse off with somebody else in charge looked different in the 63rd minute, when Arsenal was down 4-1, than it did by the 75th, when the margin was back down to a goal. But it persists all the same.
Sure, it was only one game – here we must insert the usual qualifiers about sample sizes and anecdotal evidence and all that – and it was a weird one at that, since Arsenal were the better team in the first half before utterly collapsing in the first 20 minutes of the second half. But the spare truth is that Arsenal hasn’t been quite what it’s supposed to be for years. Maybe even a decade.
Last season, it had its highest finish in 11 years, coming second, yet that felt enormously flattered. It was one of the more dispiriting Arsenal campaigns in a few years. That the Gunners came second was more to do with failing upwards than anything else, since their rivals – save for improbable champions Leicester City – all failed harder.
On Sunday, the Gunners lost to a team that tied its worst-ever Premier League finish last year and has been stuck in perpetual rebuilding mode for the better part of a decade.
Remember when Wenger first came to England? He was revolutionary. He told his professional soccer players to start acting and living like professional soccer players and the results were immediate and remarkable. They stopped guzzling beer after games and began eating better. They got fitter. And they became champions three times in seven years while never failing to finish lower than second for eight consecutive seasons. But 2015-16 was the first time Arsenal made the top two since 2004-05, even though the season was one of its most disappointing yet.
Now Wenger seems out of touch with the way the world works. The way the Premier League world works these days, anyway. While an arms race has broken out around him and everybody else is buying newfangled missile systems, Wenger sticks to his trusty Winchester and his rusty old pocket knife. Just like last summer, he spent almost nothing on the market, only buying a holding midfielder – albeit a good one in Granit Xhaka – and reinforcing one of the few positions where he didn’t need it.
“It’s not a financial competition,” Wenger said before the season. “Football is a performance competition.” Except that it is a financial competition now. He pointed at Leicester’s title to underscore his argument. Which was a strange sort of thing to do because the fact that Arsenal finished behind the Foxes should have been humiliating, rather than something to be bandied about as the proof to some personal Wenger theorem.

Absent an elite striker and once again decimated significantly by injuries – because who needs depth anyway? – Arsenal nevertheless made a strong start to the game. Before the half hour, Liverpool’s non-left back-ish left back Alberto Moreno misplayed a ball in his own box and then took out Theo Walcott. But he saw his own penalty saved by Simon Mignolet.

Walcott then scored a few minutes later anyway. Francis Coquelin won the ball from Adam Lallana high in midfield and played it to Alex Iwobi, who slid the ball across to Walcott for a slotted finish.