The day Arsenal started to go backwards under Arséne Wenger was the day they bought Danny Welbeck from Manchester United.

They hadn’t been particularly successful in the years leading up to his purchase but this demonstrated a lack of vision for the future of the club under Arséne Wenger.

Many years earlier, Wenger was famous for bringing in relatively unknown young players and turning them into stars, now he was resorting to buying a Manchester United cast-off. Not just a fairly average player Welbeck was, in fact, a very injury-prone fairly average player a fact proven by his meagre 70 appearances in almost four years at Arsenal.

To make matters worse he had gone through a spell, painful for the Arsenal fans, where he had sold some of his best players who, even back then, had questioned the club’s ambition and, consequently, their own chances of winning silverware.

Emmanuel Adebayor, Kolo Touré, Samir Nasri, Gael Clichy and Bacary Sagna had all left to join the revolution at Manchester City. Then more salt was rubbed into the wound with the sale of Robin van Persie, again to Manchester but this time to United.

Again, matters had been made considerably worse by Wenger’s continued insistence that these players wouldn’t be sold. He was beginning to lose the plot, if not his mind.

Since signing Welbeck, Wenger has signed many more players but the only one who could be said to have been successful and world-class, without ever winning anything of note at The Emirates, was Alexis Sánchez and look what happened to him!

Like many before him, he began to question Arsenal’s ambition and decided that he had to move to fulfill his own. Also like many before him he chose the well-trodden path to Manchester.

So, for the last few years, the Manchester clubs have taken Arsenal’s best players whilst, in return, Arsenal have taken Danny Welbeck and Henrikh Mkhitaryan. Good business Arséne!

It is to be hoped, for Wenger’s sake, that his recent signings start to produce. Alexandre Lacazette has now been dropped because of his inability to score although, in fairness, there was no evidence of any chances being created for him.

Henrikh Mkhitaryan has carried on where he left off at Manchester United, by giving the ball away cheaply and generally not playing well.

Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang looks as though he needs his team to be confident and then he will score plenty of goals. He already has two and this is a bad team!

The other star, Mesut Özil, is wandering round the pitch looking as though he thoroughly regrets having signed a new contract with the club which, in truth, he probably does.

Still, all of this doom and gloom could disappear if Arsenal can beat AC Milan in the Europa League and go on to win the competition. That, of course, would qualify them for next season’s Champion’s League.

The one thing they don’t need if they are to compete with Europe’s best next year is Arséne Wenger still in charge. He has to leave on the relative high of winning the Europa League, if at all possible. If they don’t win the competition he just has to leave.