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Wenger happy to end his career at Arsenal

Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger said on Sunday he would be delighted to end his managerial career at the Premier League club.

The Frenchman - who turns 61 in October - has had offers in the past to try and lure him away from Arsenal but declined them and is nearing 14 years in charge at the London club.

He told the Observer that should he sign a new contract it would take him up to 65 an age where he said he would definitely move to another less pressurised job than club manager.

‘I am at the stage where if I extend my contract, it means I will finish my career at club level at Arsenal,’ said Wenger, who has failed to deliver silverware to Arsenal since winning the 2005 FA Cup.

‘If I go for a different challenge - I have been offered many challenges you know - it has to be now.

‘That’s a decision I have to make. But basically, I have no desire to change from here. I have one more year, and we are maybe thinking about extending it.’

Wenger, who guided Arsenal to three Premier League titles and the domestic double in 1998, said that unless his body told him otherwise he would definitely retire as a manager in 2014.

‘I’ve set myself a target until 65 and then I will certainly make a move to some different job, unless I still feel like I feel today,’ said Wenger, who desires above anything else to lift the Champions League trophy with Arsenal having lost on their only appearance in a final to Barcelona in 2006.

Wenger, who made his name as coach of Monaco before moving to Japan to coach Nagoya Grampus, believes that the Premier League is the strongest in the world but it risks losing that status as in order to try and help improve the national team’s fortunes they tinker with the rules governing club football such as new squad limits and homegrown quotas.

‘England has to make a decision: Is the Premier League here to prepare the English national team to be stronger or is the Premier League here to be the strongest football product in the world? They try at the moment to combine the two, to do both.’

Wenger’s worry is that by trying to do the best for both entities that they will end up losing on both fronts.

‘That’s the danger for English football at the moment,’ he said.

‘They have really to make a clear statement.

‘Either say: ‘OK, we want to protect the English national team, we kick the foreign players out,’ but you will not have the strongest league in the world. Or say: ‘We go for the strongest league in the world’.

‘They have the opportunity to do it, because all the big rich people in the world are buying the clubs.

‘They can make something exceptional. At the World Cup I realised how popular the Premier League is and nobody in England realises it. It is hugely, unbelievably popular.

‘There is a huge transformation in the game at the moment and we sit in England and still see our traditional Arsenal, Man United, Chelsea, but it is not like that any more.’