He was the last man standing last Saturday. As the players and men he oversees trooped off the pitch and down the tunnel, Arsene Wenger stood a while longer, waved, smiled and breathed in the cosy Highbury air. Arsenal's last home game of the season had been followed by not so much a lap of honour as a lap of gratitude from the staff to the supporters. Wenger is often portrayed as a cold fish but here his applause was warm and constant. The fans at the Clock End responded heartily to him in particular. It did not feel like the start of a long goodbye.

English football's landscape will be very different this time next year. The two managers who have dominated it for the second half of the 1990s, Alex Ferguson and Wenger, will be on the verge of the horizon. The new men, the Houlliers, O'Learys, Burleys and Tiganas will hope to be jostling for prominence among the next generation.

For Ferguson the end of his contract means the beginning of energetic retirement. For Wenger, eight years younger than his Manchester United counterpart, the end of his contract should signal the start of another. It is unlikely it will be at Highbury, though. The Continent is calling, directly and indirectly, if the reports are right - though Valencia's Hector Cuper looks to have pipped Wenger to the Barcelona post. He will be 52 in October, will have been at Arsenal five years going on six, won the double and perhaps another FA Cup in Cardiff today. Maybe Wenger will feel it time for something new.

As one would expect, the man himself has been rigidly reticent to discuss the subject. June 2002 is the deadline and Wenger has insisted he will be employed by Arsenal until that time. No more, no less. He has said it time and time again and even the men who employ him, directors like David Dein and Peter HillWood, seem to get the same answer. But they know, as does everyone else, that if Wenger wanted to stay at Highbury beyond next June then all he would have had to have done was ask. He hasn't.

Although that situation's climax is a full year away, if Wenger has not addressed it positively in Arsenal's eyes, then Arsenal will have to address it negatively. And soon, the construction of football jigsaws seeming to be planned increasingly in the long-term.

At least Arsenal have experience in that department. Wenger, after all, was courted and appointed long before he actually moved into the chair involuntarily vacated by Bruce Rioch. Rioch was sacked five days before the start of the 1996-97 season, yet Wenger, who was managing in Japan with Nagoya Grampus Eight, and who insisted on seeing out his contract, (shades of today at Highbury) did not physically arrive at Highbury until the end of September.

He had already made an impact, however. That August, with English football wary of its first high-profile foreign coach, three Frenchmen signed for Arsenal. They were Patrick Vieira, Gilles Grimandi and Remi Garde. Vieira cost £3.5 million from Inter Milan.

Vieira's ability quickly endeared him to Highbury. But it was behind the young midfielder where the real concern about Wenger lay. David Seaman was 33 in September 1996, Lee Dixon, 32. Tony Adams was about to turn 30, Steve Bould was 34, Nigel Winterburn, 32, and Martin Keown was 30. Vieira had just left his teens.

The general consensus was the famous back four was about to be dismantled. Even the players thought so. Alan Smith, who had retired the previous summer after nine seasons at Arsenal, and who keeps in contact with his pals from his playing days, argues that Wenger's readiness to be patient and unprejudiced at this critical moment was one of the greatest decisions he ever made.

"The first thing Wenger did was to look at the back four," said Smith at Highbury last week, "and he had the sense to leave them alone despite the dates on their birth certificates."

But Wenger did more than leave them alone. He altered their diet for a start. Then he changed their preparation for games. Then he changed what they did after games. "He added five years to my career because of the stretching exercises he introduced," Bould said of Wenger when he finally retired, aged 38, a few months ago. Adams, who admitted to calling Wenger "Clouseau" and "Windows" when the Frenchman came, and who thought about stirring things up at Highbury to get Wenger out, would eventually say of him: "How much effect has he had on me and the other players? How long have you got?"

Adams was a drinker then and shared the broader suspicions about a quiet, academic from France who had managed only there and in Japan. The doubts were hardly erased when, during Wenger's first half-time team-talk, a time when Rioch and George Graham before him would have been loud and aggressive, Wenger sat down and had a cup of tea and did not speak. "You can imagine what that was like," said Smith.

After his tea, Wenger did talk, but it was short and placid. Pat Rice, an Arsenal stalwart intelligently retained by Wenger as his assistant, spoke for many when he said: "I could not believe it. Unusual? Very unusual. Really unusual."

Then there were the mutterings about Wenger's private life. He wasn't married, lived on his own. What's more, sin of football sins, Wenger didn't play golf. Even as recently as last Saturday, David O'Leary commented that: "Wenger doesn't seem to sit down with anyone." O'Leary meant for a casual chat. In a particularly nasty spell early on Wenger had to confront paedophile rumours and expose his girlfriend Annie Brostherous, with whom he has a daughter, to unwanted publicity.

Part of this stemmed from Wenger's low-profile past. Born in Alsace in 1949, Wenger had a mediocre going on anonymous playing career as a centre-half with Strasbourg (10 appearances). He had a degree in economics from Strasbourg University and for a while pursued that until Cannes asked him to do some coaching. In 1984, AS Nancy lured him to be their manager. Then the richest club in France, Monaco, engaged him. It was 1987 and Wenger stayed until 1994. Monaco won one championship under Wenger and when he then moved to Japan for three years it was no surprise that parochial England found itself asking "Arsene Who?" when his name was first being mentioned at Highbury.

But Arsenal's faith was justified spectacularly. They missed out on a Champions League place to Newcastle United on goal difference at the end of that 1996/97 season but the next, Wenger's first full season, he delivered a double. Manchester United had been overhauled as Arsenal, now featuring the talents of Nicolas Anelka, Marc Overmars and Emmanuel Petit, played some scintillating football. Adams' xenophobia had been cured. "I cannot find the words to tell you of my admiration for the man," he said.

Others were less impressed. Ferguson remarked that Arsenal had more fights than Wimbledon in their heyday. He had a point, Arsenal's disciplinary record under Wenger is a poor one. Other managers such as O'Leary and Peter Reid had touchline and verbal run-ins with the allegedly urbane and pacifist Frenchman. They discovered Wenger had an English football hard core.

But he continued to buy foreigners, thinking British players overpriced, and that led to some dressing-room friction when Overmars and others were perceived to be less committed at places like Bradford and Everton. Was The Arsenal losing some of its identity? The superb training ground outside St Albans, while structured to the last detail by Wenger - each pitch the size of Highbury - also featured three dressingrooms: first team, reserves and youths. Previously the three groups had mixed. "The senior players don't know who some of the apprentices are now," said Smith, who added that he felt there had been a "small dilution" of traditional spirit.

But complaints are far outweighed by praise. "He understands what the club is about," Smith said, "and when you do work for Arsenal it does become a part of you in a way. I think it always will be with Arsene. He'll go down in Arsenal history and might feel that's enough."

Wenger himself admits he is almost one of us now in football terms. He finds the lack of tribal intensity elsewhere dull. But that is where he could be heading. Two Frenchmen lead out two English teams today but while for Gerard Houllier it is just the beginning, Arsenal fans will feel that for Wenger it is the beginning of the end. It is some tribute that they are missing him already.