Jonathan Wilson: Wenger and Arsenal's decline due to idealism or fundamentalism?

[Jonathan Wilson]

There is probably no better account of a leader in decline than the depiction Gabriel Garcia Marquez gives of the final days of Simon Bolivar in The General in his Labyrinth. The great liberator is seen as exhausted and paranoid, clinging ever more desperately to the doctrines that made him great even as he drifts down the Magdalena toward death. Soccer managers tend not to have sufficient longevity for their decline to achieve such an epic feel, but the protracted misery of Arsene Wenger does. All great men, perhaps, are doomed to slide into self-parody.

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