WHY THIS ARSENAL SIDE ARE AN INSULT TO PROUD PAST

IT is a close-run thing but the idea that Arsenal gained admittance to the European Super League is even more bitterly funny than the fact Spurs would have been in it, too. And in the couple of weeks everyone has been laughing about it, it never seemed funnier than when Arsenal slipped quietly and pathetically and apologetically out of the Europa League on Thursday evening, vanquished by Villarreal.

I was at El Madrigal 15 years ago when Arsenal played out another 0-0 draw with Villarreal, who had the great Juan Roman Riquelme in their ranks then, but on that occasion, it took them and their manager Arsene Wenger through to the final of the Champions League. Arsenal, with Thierry Henry and Robert Pires in their team, really were part of Europe’s aristocracy then, but so much has changed that that night feels like a relic of a different world.

These days, Arsenal are only Super League material in the dollarladen delusional dreams of their owner Stan Kroenke and in the desperate schemes of Florentino Perez and Andrea Agnelli. Kroenke does at least possess the brains to realise that when a club are as badly run as his are, buying your way into a closed shop of owners who hate the idea of a meritocracy is the only route to gaining membership of a football elite.

Arsenal don’t qualify by any other metric. They have not been worthy of a place in the Champions League for the last five seasons. This year, they have been so limp under Mikel Arteta that it is unlikely they will even qualify for the Europa League next season. They’ll be lucky if they can be counted among the top 10 in England, let alone Europe.

And so, for the first time in a quarter of a century, it seems Arsenal will not play in European competition next season. The gap between them and the rest of the top clubs in England is getting wider and wider. The only league they really contend in is the one that measures which club rips their fans off the most. They’re near the top of the ticket-price league but that’s where their dominance begins and ends.

Everything else reeks of mediocrity. Arsenal are average in pretty much everything they do. Average manager, average defence, average midfield, average forward line. They are what they are: a classic mid-table team. The Kroenkes and their loyal henchmen at the club are managing decline. Nothing more.

They have some fine players. Kieran Tierney and Bukayo Saka are reasons to be optimistic but they’re balanced out by men like Willian, picking up their pension every week and not doing much else. Emile Smith Rowe and Thomas Partey should be part of the future, too, but at the moment they are struggling to keep their heads above the flotsam and jetsam the tide is bringing in.

Sack Arteta? That would not solve anything. Arteta isn’t the problem. Not really. It goes much higher and much deeper than him. Earn it? The problem is an ownership that doesn’t want to do that and doesn’t know how to. That was why they joined the Super League. The chief executive, Vinai Venkatesham, is supposed to be a personable fellow but he is tainted by his enthusiastic espousal of the ESL and he always will be.

There is no prospect of the mediocrity abating any time soon. It is ingrained. It is systemic. The days are gone when Wenger battled a shrinking budget and still performed the miracle of getting his team into the top four every season.

Those seem like halcyon days now. And for that, he was hounded out by angry fans flying banners from planes and screaming at him as he stood on the touchline.

Things were starting to fall apart before Wenger left. That much is true. Even he could not disguise the malaise that was spreading through the club any longer. But since he left, the owners have no camouflage. Everything is falling apart in plain sight. Semi-interested, semi-committed, semi-competent, Arsenal are a no man’s land of a football club.

They used to stand for class. They used to stand for dignity. They used to stand for gravitas. They used to stand for English football’s proudest traditions. All that has gone.