Unfortunately for Arsène Wenger, it is not necessarily a good sign that José Mourinho is no longer talking about him with a curled lip and the overwhelming sense that he has made it a personal mission to see how close he can push his old adversary towards the brink of spontaneous combustion.

If it is true, as both managers have said over the last few days, that a truce has been called, it is some turnaround bearing in mind it is not so long ago that the two men could barely bring themselves to make eye contact, never mind extend the courtesy of shaking hands, and Mourinho in particular gave the impression that if he saw Wenger drowning he would chuck him both ends of the rope.

Mourinho has taken a malicious sense of pleasure from needling Wenger and it is not easy knowing what to make of the fact the Manchester United manager has started talking about his Arsenal counterpart with something straying dangerously close to respect and decency. Or, indeed, that Wenger has also indicated it might be time for a new start when, if anything, his dislike of Mourinho was even more acrimonious than the enmity that used to exist between himself and Sir Alex Ferguson.

Wenger now says he is open to the idea of cordial relations and Mourinho, in response, says he already considers that to be the case. “He doesn’t need to [say that] because there are no problems. He doesn’t need to make peace. When there is peace, we don’t have to have problems.” And if we can them take at their word it feels as if one of the more embittered managerial feuds of any era – Wenger versus Mourinho, about as spiteful as it gets – should now be talked about in the past tense.

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All of which sounds unusually grown-up and dignified bearing in mind the rancour of the past: the put-downs, the arguments, the confrontations (including one on the side of the pitch at Stamford Bridge when Wenger seemed willing to have it out one on one, the old-fashioned way) and the sense from both managers that it was the other guy who had the problem – and nothing, to borrow a line from Woody Allen, that couldn’t be put right with a little Prozac and a polo mallet.

But then you have to ask yourself why Mourinho, once described by an old foe in Serie A as “cold as a killer”, has moved on from Wenger and suddenly seems so ambivalent to the idea of persecuting the Frenchman any longer. Is it genuinely because Mourinho has mellowed with age or, more likely, is it for the same reason why Ferguson, after all those years of conflict, eventually started to be civil towards Wenger, once he realised he didn’t have to worry about Arsenal any longer?

That is the difficult truth here. Ferguson stopped aiming his barbs at Wenger once it became clear his old enemy was no longer capable of producing title-winning teams and it doesn’t feel like a coincidence that Mourinho also seems indifferent now that Arsenal have dropped even further back.

Mourinho might not be quite as abrasive now he is in his mid-50s and that once-thick plume of hair has turned silver. Do not think for a second, however, that he is no longer drawn to conflict. He just has different managers in his sights now and they are the men, unlike Wenger, who threaten his own success. Antonio Conte, for one. Jürgen Klopp is another and, if the two Manchester clubs lock horns at the top of the table next season, the ceasefire with Pep Guardiola will inevitably disintegrate.

Something, however, has changed when it comes to the longest-running managerial feud in English football and what does it say for Wenger that the current United manager, just like Ferguson before him, has decided there is little point being filled with insecurity about someone whose team has finished, on average, 14 points off the top since their last title and who are currently 21 points adrift of the leaders, albeit with a game in hand?

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There are many of us who dislike the campaign to make Sunday’s encounter with United Wenger’s penultimate match at the Emirates and would dearly love a once-brilliant coach to turn down the volume on some of the people who appear to want to bundle him out of the back door and send on his belongings in a Jiffy bag.

Back in the real world, however, it is difficult not to fear for Wenger if, as expected, he signs a new contract at the end of the season and puts a superbly built reputation in danger of more disintegration. Mourinho’s indifference is just another reminder about how the landscape is changing and, in Ferguson’s case, it was almost pity in his voice on the last occasion I heard him speaking publicly about Wenger.

Ferguson’s rivalry with Wenger was laced with such acrimony at one point there were complaints from the Metropolitan police and government ministers, the Football Association wrote to both clubs demanding a peace treaty and the League Managers Association offered to mediate.

Wenger, according to Ferguson, confronted him in the tunnel at Old Trafford after the infamous pizza‑throwing incident in 2004 with fists clenched, arms raised, and asking, Lenny McLean-style, what he wanted to do about it. It was never entirely easy to know if that was an accurate account (or one of the many stories that had been sprinkled with Ferguson’s magic dust) but I was there for Arsenal’s next game when Wenger declared he did not “have diplomatic relations with that man” and would never discuss him again. Nobody could ever have imagined the two men would ever find common ground.

The difference with Mourinho is that, unlike Ferguson, he has never had to endure a period of Arsenal domination and has always used his own superiority as a weapon, hence the bludgeoning line about Wenger being a “specialist in failure” – directed towards a man who, lest it be forgotten, had won two Doubles by that stage and is now going for his seventh FA Cup, the same number Chelsea and Liverpool have managed in their entire histories.

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What is not so widely known is that Mourinho did apologise for the “voyeur” insult in 2005. That, however, made it even worse. Mourinho’s apology was delivered inside a Christmas card.

A member of Arsenal’s staff then contacted an acquaintance at Stamford Bridge to check the card was genuine and when that got back to Mourinho he took it badly, decided the apology had been thrown back in his face and refused to shake hands with Wenger when the teams met the following Sunday.

It’s an incredible petty business sometimes and it has taken more than a decade before the two managers have reached this position where they can talk about burying the hatchet. Yet here’s the thing: would Mourinho be so conciliatory if he could imagine Arsenal being serious title challengers during the rest of Wenger’s long goodbye? Nobody at Arsenal, least of all their manager, should be happy that an arch-rival suddenly wants civility.

FA priorities await inquiring minds

One of the issues for the independent inquiry investigating football’s sexual abuse scandal is to establish the reasons why the Football Association decided in 2003 to withdraw all funding from what was supposed to be a five-year research programme into child-protection policies.

The project was duly abandoned three years early and hopefully the QC-led inquiry will be able to provide some clarity bearing in mind the suspicions of some of the people who were prominently involved at the time.

Page 205 of the 2006 book Child Welfare in Football, written by Celia Brackenridge of Brunel University and three of the other researchers who were involved, is certainly an interesting read given its pointed reference about the way the shortage of money did not prevent the organisation from awarding it’s best-paid employee, the then England manager, Sven Goran Eriksson, a £1m-a-year pay rise.

Were the two related? It seems that there was clearly some opposition to the project within the FA, given that 10 of the 14 staff who were asked for interviews did not even respond and, according to official notes from the time, others were “prevented” or “bullied” from co-operating.

This was also the time the new Wembley was taking shape, at a formidable cost. Other cuts had to be made, including a number of redundancies, and the same book acknowledges that the research study was only one area that suffered in the “financial crisis associated with the departure of the FA chief executive Adam Crozier”.

Nonetheless, it does show the priorities of the people who project themselves as guardians of the sport that around the same time the FA was abandoning a project that would, in theory, have made football safer for children, Eriksson was being offered a bumper new deal even though he still had more than two and a half years of his original contract to run.

Play-offs could be played fairer

This is the 30th year that the Football League’s play-offs have been running and every season there are the same complaints about it not being fair that there is so little advantage for the side that has finished third, narrowly missing out on automatic promotion, as opposed to the team that have come in, say, sixth.

Those complaints have some credence bearing in mind what happened to Brighton last season, when they looked physically and emotionally shot after Middlesbrough had beaten them to promotion, courtesy of goal difference, on the final day and Chris Hughton’s side promptly went out of the play‑offs against a Sheffield Wednesday side that had finished 15 points further back. Indeed, none of the highest-placed sides in the Championship, League One and League Two play-offs last season even reached Wembley.

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So here’s an idea: why doesn’t that side qualify automatically for the final while the other three contenders go through a handicapped system that rewards the teams for where they have finished? In the Championship, for example, sixth would take on fifth and then the winners would come up against the side that finished fourth, on each occasion in a one-off match staged at the ground of the higher placed team. Whoever finished in third position would be waiting for them at Wembley.

That way, we might also avoid a repeat of what happened at Birmingham last weekend when Huddersfield, already assured of a place in the top six, made 10 changes and lost to a team that had not won since February, a result that is now under investigation because of the potential repercussions for Blackburn and Nottingham Forest in the relegation fight.