Now is not the time or the place to work in a fawning opening about the charisma-machine that is Jose Mourinho.

There will be other occasions in which to bring up his brand of low-brow cool, other days to find the words to describe his hard-edged genius.

Instead, this column will be about Arsene Wenger, a moderately less inspirational figure, as he will no doubt admit to you himself. It’s time to talk about Wenger because while he is not the perfect manager – he is emphatically not Mourinho – he is also not worthy of the mockery he has inspired this season more than ever. His position needs to be contextualised.

The pattern seems to be set with regards to Wenger. As each season progresses and his Arsenal team has not acquired a luxurious new player from another mainstream European club, offering only art-house signings such as Yaya Sanogo, the pressure builds. As each season progresses and old mistakes rather than new trophies appear, the pressure builds.

The pattern, though, has lost a sense of perspective.

The way most people talk about Wenger – and the discussion has developed again this season, becoming more aggressive and certain of itself – ends up being based on the base-level misconception that he’s making more mistakes than his counterparts at other clubs. And he’s just not.

This is the thing: his mistakes are more readily available for deconstruction, because he doesn’t have a squad which required £ 1billion’s worth of backing to come together.

The most prominent misconception about Wenger is that he doesn’t know how to build a functional defence – you know, one that doesn’t concede goals as regularly as opponents, thus enabling the team to win. The evidence backs this idea up. Against Aston Villa on the opening day of the season Gabriel Agbonlahor’s pace – a pretty blunt tool – made Arsenal look silly. But this still doesn’t make the wider idea that Wenger lacks a clue about what he is doing justifiable.

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What we need to keep in mind is that other managers are bad at building defences too, but they never get found out. Because wealth, in football as in life, equals a thousand chances to get it right before getting it wrong matters.

While Roberto Mancini was rightly questioned over most things, it was generally assumed he knew what he was doing in putting together a defence. But think for a second: you’d never really find out if that was true, because the situation at Manchester City when he was there allowed him to manage about a dozen defenders, usually bought for a few million each (Lescott, Kompany, Nastasic, Savic, Boyata, Richards, Clichy, Kolarov and Zabaleta).

You’d never notice him getting it wrong, because he’d just try another expensive combination.

Wenger doesn’t have the quality and quantity like Mancini or most of the people he’s expected to compete against. He definitely doesn’t get the two combined. And the simple end result of that is that his weaknesses are exposed more than theirs: he gets one chance, other people get a dozen.

Mancini bought Stefan Savic, a bad defender, but money meant that mistakes like that could be corrected and replacements were quickly found. Wenger’s mistakes are allowed to define him because they hang around for a long time. Laurent Koscielny still plays regularly.

This is all quite obvious, and yet the discussion around Wenger treats him like he’s operating under the same conditions as everyone else.

There’s always the suggestion that Wenger has money and chooses not to spend it to complicate this comeback. “He has £ 70million” was the line this summer. But even if that isn’t just propaganda, it’s also not as much money as is being made out.

City spent almost £ 100million in the last three months on what was, essentially, fiddling with their squad. What does £ 70million buy you? It’s an awkward amount of money – not enough to know you’re definitely in the market for all the big players, but just enough to suggest that you are to your fans.

It’s just not very fashionable to accept that someone can make mistakes but still not be an utter disgrace who needs to be fired. It doesn’t fit well into an argument to say, ”yes, but.” And yet this is exactly what needs to be said about Wenger.

Arsenal still play the slickest passing football in the Premier League – they walked the ball around Fulham on Saturday in a manner more impressive than anything offered by the teams who might well finish ahead of them.

Olivier Giroud has started the season looking more like the consistent goal-scorer he was supposed to be when he signed. Aaron Ramsey has been given time and coaching and has started looking like a capable midfielder again. These are all proper managerial achievements: signing good players and using them to create an impressively coherent unit.

Wenger’s not perfect, like Mourinho, but he does enough things right to be really good at his job. He just doesn’t have £ 1 billion to hide his mistakes.

Ethan Dean-Richards is a London-based writer. Follow him on Twitter.