They say that when the mood takes him at Arsenal’s training ground, Alexis Sanchez can occasionally walk off the pitch before a game or exercise has finished, a simple but effective way of reminding everyone who holds the power at the club.

As he disappears down the track back to the main building, the game resumes, life goes on, but everyone has been given a taste of what it will be like when the best player in the club finally walks out for good.

That time is near now, and it says something about the Sanchez effect on both players and fans that it is now considered the best option for Arsenal that he does not see out his contract this June and goes this month. Sanchez has always put Sanchez first in four years at the club and for some of that time, it was good for both: an A-list footballer with the skill and bloody-mindedness to win a game on his own.

At his best he played with a hustle that the opposition just could not live with. At his worst it was Arsenal who could not live with him.

There have been few sights that better suggest the true nature of Arsene Wenger’s second Arsenal decade than Sanchez single-handedly charging at an opposition back four and demanding that his team-mates join him in his own independent gegenpressing movement. Not so much for Sanchez’s despair when he is passed around, but for the hesitation of his fellow Arsenal players in following him, as they ask themselves if this was ever part of the plan.