He remains massively engaged. He continues to think about not just short term but the long-term development of the club. He’s excited about the future, and we’re excited about our future with him.

Wenger has been at the club 20 years this fall, and his tenure is really remarkable in the modern era of soccer. Do you have a regular conversation with him about how long he wants to keep doing this?

There are two different things here. One is the issue about when the time will be right for the club and for Arsène to say the time is right to make a transition. And that’s a conversation that I keep private between myself and Arsène that’s periodic.

But I think more important than that is the fact that the actions that we take, the decisions that we make, are all the same irrespective of the time frame that we might be looking at in terms of a transition. Let me give you an example: this year we’re investing over 20 million pounds in developing our facilities: our training ground for young players and our academy and the main training ground. Those are investments that are being made for the long-term future of the football club, for the next 10, 15, 20 years. And we’re making those decisions in exactly the same way, and Arsène is actively involved in them, even though he probably won’t see the fruits of all of those investments.

We would not be successful if we simply went out into the transfer market and tried to outgun our competitors. We’re run in a self-sustaining way, and a way that we believe in, because we believe it gives us certainty for the future, and enables us to plan our future with confidence. That means we can’t afford to make huge mistakes in the transfer market. We can’t afford to outgun competitors that have far more money to splurge on transfer fees than we do. So we have to be very careful, very selective about how we do things.

Do you feel a sense of validation of that philosophy when rivals like Manchester United and Chelsea stumble as they try to make transitions, or try to spend their way out of problems and find that they can’t?