Emotional Arsene Wenger ‘very sad and very disappointed’ as final European tilt with Arsenal comes to an end

As Arsene Wenger reflected on his last, lost chance at salvaging a trophy from the final days of his Arsenal reign, there was a moistness and a redness to his eyes

It was a brief, occasionally curt press conference, but none the less devastating for that. As Arsene Wenger reflected on his last, lost chance at salvaging a trophy from the final days of his Arsenal reign, there was a moistness and a redness to his eyes: the look of a man who had been crying, or was about to do so, and was doing his damnedest not to do it now, in front of hundreds of strangers with laptops.

“I am, like the team, very sad and very disappointed,” he said after Arsenal’s 1-0 defeat to Atletico Madrid that eliminated them from the Europa League at the semi-final stage. “Even very frustrated, as well, because when you go out of a competition and you had the performances over 180 minutes that we had, it is very difficult to take.

“For the club, there is now some time to think about what to do for next season,” he said. “I think there are some good ingredients in our team, and they will bounce back. These players have quality, and with the right additions in the summer, the team will compete next year.” And it the moment at which he dared to glimpse into the future – a future in which after 22 years, he and Arsenal are separate entities – that Wenger became most emotional.

Fortunately for him, the next question was about something Martin Keown had said on the telly about Mesut Ozil, the sort of question almost guaranteed to snap Wenger out of his wistful reverie and back into the world of he-said-she-said that he has always found so distasteful. “When you want to be listened to now, you always have to be extreme,” he said with a note of disdain. “Football is a bit more complicated than that, a bit more complex.”

As for Wenger’s own future, nobody knows. Emmanuel Petit said this week that there might be a place for him at Paris Saint-Germain as general manager, while one journalist wondered whether he might be interested in taking on a job in La Liga.

“Look, I have to recover first from a huge disappointment tonight,” Wenger said with a big sigh, his pupils again dissolving a little. “I’m very, very sad to leave the club with that exit. I will take some time to recover from that. After, I will see what I do with myself in the future. I have no plans at the moment.”

And with that, he was gone.