Arsenal boss Arsene Wenger looks to be coming to the end of his reign… let’s just hope he can bow out with his dignity intact

CLAUDIO RANIERI is the bookies’ favourite to be the next Premier League manager sacked — just nine months after masterminding sport’s greatest miracle.

Though even if Ranieri is axed next weekend, he’ll have outlasted the previous title-winning manager Jose Mourinho (sacked before Christmas), last year’s FA Cup-winner Louis van Gaal (sacked two days later) and the League Cup-winner Manuel Pellegrini (sacked before he even won it).

These are tumultuous times in football and the wider world.

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And so the Arsenal boardroom, where old Etonian Sir Chips Keswick holds sway, is a tranquil desert island in an ocean of white noise.

Sir Chips and his American paymaster Stan Kroenke will allow Arsene Wenger to decide the timing of his exit.

Hopefully before the tortured genius cuts off his own ear in frustration.

After a 13th successive year without a league title was confirmed by defeat at Chelsea, Wenger was still attempting to rewrite the laws of association football to benefit the Arsenal.

This time he was advocating the introduction of mandatory pogo dancing for jumping players.

Wenger claimed Hector Bellerin could have suffered a brain injury because Chelsea’s Marcos Alonso headed the opening goal by leaping like a normal person rather than pogoing with his arms by his side, like us Sex Pistols fans were doing at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall in 1976. The Frenchman has a strange attitude towards physical contact.

When it is intentional and aimed at authority, such as his own shove on fourth official Anthony Taylor, it’s not all that serious.

When it’s unintentional and made in an honest bid to win the ball, it needs punishing.

And when it’s ill-timed and perpetrated by Granit Xhaka, well who could expect a £30million defensive midfielder to tackle properly anyway?

All of which leads us to conclude Wenger conducts post-match press conferences on the basis of Trump-style ‘alternative facts’.

After the Chelsea defeat Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain accidentally ‘liked’ a tweet demanding ‘WENGER NEEDS TO GO’ emanating from Arsenal Fan TV.

This is a YouTube channel featuring much-mocked supporters who become ‘internet sensations’ while swearing violently at one another about Wenger.

Yet filter out the expletives, and they often make more sense than the boss himself.

Elsewhere on the internet, there is a fashion for number crunchers to sit in their parents’ box rooms and compile alternative league tables, based on statistics other than actual football results, in order to prove whatever they want to prove.

Wenger will soon stumble across one of these algorithms which claims Arsenal have rightfully won seven titles since 2004 and decide to extend his contract beyond the summer.

Even if, as seems likely, Arsenal finally slip out of the top four.

Should Wenger stay, many of us neutrals would genuinely love it. Away from the post-match red mist, he continues to be enlightening and entertaining.

His commitment to purity is still capable of inspiring masterpieces of footballing art.

And Arsenal’s insistence that they will never sack their once-great manager is so far removed from the prevailing mood that it’s difficult not to admire.

But those Arsenal fans who support Wenger do so on the basis of achievements from between 13 and 20 years ago.

Elsewhere in football, they forget titles won just months ago. So this feels like the endgame for Wenger now.

We can only hope against hope that it’s carried out with a little dignity.