Wenger's ageism costly

Along the way to completely rejuvenating the North London club from top to bottom, Wenger has captured two league and cup doubles, reached the club's first European Cup final and completed an entire league campaign unbeaten.

One thing he had not experienced until recently, however, was the handful of fans calling for him to leave the Emirates Stadium.

Such deluded demands are well wide of the mark; disgruntled Gooners might like to ponder the 21-game unbeaten run in the Premier League. But Tuesday's humiliating home defeat to Manchester United in the Champions League has condemned Arsenal to at least five trophyless years, something the fans are not used to.

The French coach now faces the realisation that he must reinvent himself as much as he reinvented the club he has come to define if he is to drag them back to the top.

For years he has justified his heavy reliance on young players by insisting that - with the Emirates being built and Highbury yet to be sold - he does not have the transfer budget to compete with the other big clubs, despite club chief Peter Hill-Wood repeatedly declaring that the money is there to spend if he so wished.

However honorable Wenger's intentions in refusing to commit the club to the kind of 'financial doping' that has left Manchester United, Liverpool and Chelsea saddled with huge debts, the simple fact is that the Gunners have more often than not been left struggling to keep up rather than setting the pace.

A lot has been made of Arsene's Junior Gunners' weakness, but Wenger's insistence on marginalising players once they turn 30 is just as significant.

While Arsenal have five players born in the 1990s on their books, of the first-team squad only goalkeeper Manuel Almunia and defenders William Gallas and Mikael Silvestre - both unwanted by their rivals - can look back on their 20s.

Compare that with Chelsea who, with more than twice as many over-30s in their squad, are third in the league with one major final confirmed and another pending. Even his supposed nemesis, Alex Ferguson, still feels comfortable enough to field senior players like Paul Scholes and Ryan Giggs, to the point where this season the former passed the 600-match mark and the latter notched up 800 and was named PFA Player of the Year.

Robert Pires was forced to leave to find for job security than the one-year rolling contract on offer in North London, and he and Thierry Henry continue to perform at the highest level in Spain, while the midfield struggles of Denilson and Alex Song show that Patrick Vieira, sold to Juventus in 2005, is still missed.

If nothing else, the presence of Pires at London Colney would hugely benefit the likes of Samir Nasri and Theo Walcott, while Henry's haul of goals in La Liga this season is equal the combined total of Robin van Persie and Emmanuel Adebayor.

That is not to say that Wenger's youth policy has not reaped its rewards. Cesc Fabregas is one of the most highly-coveted midfielders in the game, and a great deal of the future of the England team rests on Walcott's shoulders, but the balance is all too often skewed towards emerging rather than established talent.

The jackpots that the club have hit with the big-money sales of Nicolas Anelka (£23 million), Marc Overmars and Emmanuel Petit (a combined £30m) and most recently Alexandr Hleb (a mind-boggling £11.8m) have not nearly been matched in the opposite direction.

Even the signing of Andrei Arshavin would not have happened had the Russian not flown himself in to complete the deal.

The Premier League, and football in general, has much to thank Wenger for, but unless he makes his peace with the financial realities of the game as it is now, he may never lift any silverware at his team's shiny new home.