An empty seat on each side of him in the dugout at Swansea City's Liberty Stadium, separated from his assistants by a small partition as his players first surrendered an early lead, then squandered a comeback and ended up losing 3-2 to a promoted team containing not a single individual he would swap for one of his own, Arsène Wenger looked more isolated and frustrated than ever last Sunday.

Following on from their late collapse to defeat at Craven Cottage in their previous Premier League match a fortnight earlier, Arsenal's mid-season recovery was hitting the rocks. Once again minds were turning to the club's failure to win anything since settling into their new home in the summer of 2006, and to speculation about the reasons behind a run of non-success all the more remarkable for the glory-laden years that preceded the move.

Could it be something as straightforward as the switch several seasons ago from a flexible 4-4-2 to a more rigid 4-3-3, with which they have yet to secure a trophy? Or is the reason rooted in the club's Wenger-driven philosophy, physically manifested in the Emirates Stadium, of good husbandry and avoiding the high-spending option taken by their direct rivals?

By investing £470m in their plush new stadium, an outlay partially recouped by selling their former home, Arsenal were ridding themselves of the financial handicap imposed by Highbury's 38,000 capacity. The income from the extra 22,000 fans admitted to the new arena, plus the proceeds from 152 executive boxes, would ultimately loosen the strings of a purse whose size determined Wenger's ability to attract the sort of major names being recruited elsewhere.

On the other hand, the manager had already shown a clear preference for bringing players through the club's development system: the very approach that has earned Barcelona such success.

In Arsenal's case, that high-minded project seems to have reached its high point as long ago as January 2007, when Wenger took a squad to Anfield containing eight teenagers and beat Liverpool 6-3 in a Carling Cup quarter-final. Despite the subsequent emergence of Jack Wilshere and Aaron Ramsey, the promise of that memorable performance has never been fulfilled.

The benefits of the enhanced revenue from the extra seats, and increased season ticket prices, remain a matter for debate among the club's supporters, complicated by the intention of Wenger and the board to put themselves in a position to conform with Uefa's imminent financial fair play regulations.

But last summer, affected by the departures of Cesc Fábregas and Samir Nasri and by long-term injuries to other key players, the manager was forced into the market to acquire Mikel Arteta, Per Mertesacker, André Santos, Gervinho, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Carl Jenkinson at a total cost of £48.3m – not merely a little less than Chelsea had spent on one player, Fernando Torres, during the previous transfer window, but £15m less than the club had received from outgoing transfers.

Was it genuine prudence or a fatal caution that prevented them from pursuing an interest in Juan Mata, allowing Chelsea to nip in and sign the Spanish winger? On Friday, as usual, Wenger refused to commit himself to recruiting new faces during this transfer window.

The mixed fortunes of his most recent recruits, combined with a continuing spate of long-term injuries to players such as Wilshere, Thomas Vermaelen, Kieran Gibbs and Bacary Sagna, underlie the team's fallibility. While surpassing the two Manchester clubs by surviving into the last 16 of the Champions League, they are one place and four points outside the automatic qualification zone for next season's competition.

One way of measuring the success of the move to the Emirates is to compare the results in the 105 Premier League games played in their new home to the last 105 they played at Highbury. In their old premises they won 78, drew 18 and lost nine. In their new quarters they have won 70, drawn 24 and lost 11. Their percentage of wins has gone from 74.3% to 66.6%: hardly the sort of return for which they must have hoped.

"I don't know how much the Emirates has to do with their problems," John Hollins, an Arsenal stalwart of 30 years ago, said this week. "It's a beautiful place and it does everything they must have wanted it to do. But they've made it so luxurious for the supporters that it's as though they feel they don't need to cheer any more. Highbury was a tight little ground where you could feel an energy that drove you on."

The change of scene seems to have coincided with, or perhaps helped provoke, a draining of the mental strength for which Arsenal were renowned under George Graham and during Wenger's first 10 years.

The recent defeats evoked the painful memory of two disastrous performances last February, just when the team appeared to be positioning themselves to challenge on four fronts. First they surrendered a 4-0 lead to draw at St James' Park before conceding a late goal to lose the Carling Cup final to a relegation-bound Birmingham City. In between they beat Barcelona at home, but the depression that followed the Wembley defeat seemed to blight the rest of the season.

Nigel Winterburn, a member of the famous back four that underpinned the early triumphs of the Wenger era, shares with Hollins a conviction that the team lacks defenders capable of tactical readjustment. "For me," he says, "it's a matter of having players who're capable, whether they're the captain or not, of spotting what's going wrong and putting it right. It's a job that's best done from midfield or the back, which is why it's hard for Robin van Persie to do.

"If I was having a bad time with a winger, I might ask Marc Overmars, who wasn't defensively minded, to sit in front of me for five minutes, to make the opponent play the ball inside and divert the danger into an area where we might have been a bit stronger that day. The back four and Patrick Vieira and Emmanuel Petit would take those decisions all the time, but I don't see much of it in this team."

Hollins agrees. "Against Swansea, there were pockets of players who looked as if they were doing their own little thing. After they got back to 2-2, they conceded a goal straight from the kick-off. Who was doing the shouting at the back? I don't hear too many voices on the pitch, a Tony Adams or a Frank McLintock."

There have been moments for the fans to savour at the Emirates – an injury-time winner from Thierry Henry against Manchester United in January 2007, or that win over Barcelona – but no celebrations outside Islington Town Hall, such as greeted the Invincibles of 2003-04.Wenger's approach, which once influenced the way all top English managers go about their jobs, continues to define the ideals and ambitions of the club, but he is under fire as never before.

"The club is run correctly," Hollins insists. "The manager makes all the decisions, which is the right way." But looming above Wenger are the figures of Stan Kroenke and Alisher Usmanov, who own 66.92% and 29.35% of the club's shares, respectively.

Kroenke's majority holding gives him control, but perhaps not as much as that wielded unopposed by the owners of their direct rivals.

It was the arrival of Roman Abramovich at Stamford Bridge in 2003, the Glazer family at Old Trafford in 2005 and Sheikh Mansour in east Manchester in 2008 that changed the game for Wenger, creating his current predicament. The freedom of his first decade in north London, spent competing head to head with Sunday's opponent, Sir Alex Ferguson, no longer exists.

And the club's attempt to cope with the harsher demands of the new reality is not what the more vociferous of their fans would like to see, since it requires them to prioritise faith in a longer-term vision over immediate success.

"Look," Wenger said on Friday. "England is bankrupt. Europe is bankrupt. But still everybody keeps on spending. Arsenal are not bankrupt. That's because we spend in a sensible way."

The logic is unanswerable. But to many fans, football is not about logic. It is about finding the line between the common sense that keeps a club in business and the hazards inherent in chasing a dream of glory.

On Friday Wenger blamed recent reverses on injuries and bad luck with refereeing decisions. But midway through his 16th season in England, facing the possibility of seeing their team fail to qualify for the Champions League for the first time in 13 years, Arsenal's fans would like their French general to demonstrate that he is prepared to err, for once, on the side of risk.