If covering Sir Alex Ferguson was very famously like standing in the eye of a storm – or at least a hairdryer - the experience with Arsene Wenger was more akin to a bi-weekly audience with a charismatic professor of social anthropology.

Open conflict was rare but it was the depth and breadth of Wenger’s insights – and the distance he travelled on some of his tangents – that set him apart among football managers.

With who else in sport could discussions range from global politics, religion and poverty to his fears for the impact of technology on relationships and why he eventually expects a world government? Happiness, he once told us, was only possible in the present due to the regrets of the past and the uncertainties of the future. He would, in quite abstract terms, even sometimes discuss the meaning of life itself. “The only way to deal with death is to transform everything that precedes it into art,” he said. “We must try to make every day as beautiful as we can.”

Many of these conversations did not make it to print amid whatever other day-to-day narrative was unfolding but is why that book he has always promised has such potential.