Be careful what you wish for

If somebody better was available and willing to join, I'd be confident that Wenger would have left before he did.
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You miss the point that Wenger was running everything. Why would he get in a replacement for himself? Arsenal had to totally restructure just to get rid of Wenger.

Like I say, I'm sure they would have totally restructured if they had the opportunity to. Regardless of what Wenger was doing at the time, if there was a better option out there, the club would have gone for it. I don't doubt that they didn't try either.

Wenger didn't own the club, he didn't have the final say on his position at the club, despite what he was running and what he wasn't. The owners could have not offered him a new contract at various points and just seen it out IF they thought there was somebody better that could have done more.

But you are missing the point. Wenger was the one advising the owners. Wenger was the one employing Gazidis. Wenger had complete trust from KSE, because they are not football people.

Wenger was engrained into the fabric of the club. He was a proven commodity, Arsenal have operated on a safety first approach for years. The issue hasn’t been so much that Arsenal wouldn’t have been able to attract a coach that could have helped elevate them, it was that they weren’t that interested as they didn’t want to rock the boat.

comment by D'Jeezus Mackaroni (U1137)
posted 1 minute ago
But you are missing the point. Wenger was the one advising the owners. Wenger was the one employing Gazidis. Wenger had complete trust from KSE, because they are not football people.
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So the club sacks Wenger and you still have a broken management structure with bunch of money men who know nothing about football in charge of replacing him.

Yet they can be trusted to replace Wenger with a more suitable candidate to carry the club forward?

Literally exactly the same thing has happened at United, and we have seen the same complete debacle as at Arsenal.

Not if you employ the right men.

As I said earlier, if Wenger had been open to change he could have facilitated it himself, and could have potentially moved us forward himself. But he was stubborn and set in his ways. As soon as Sven Mislintat came in Wenger became defensive and an obstacle to change.
If the owners were more proactive, and less trustful in Wengers ability to control and run the club with little support, then we would have been in a far better position to move forward.

Arsenal have definitely been making a lot of similar mistakes to us. But they are three years out of the Wenger era, we’re eight out of the Fergie one.

The issue here is clearly the timing. It wouldn’t have been nearly as damaging on and off the pitch to have removed Wenger years before they did.

Their problems have been of their own making, they chose not to do anything and it’s snowballed into what we now see.

I know what you're saying regarding Wenger's role, but the owners, be it football people or not, will be aware when the club go from CL money to EL money and when players like Sanchez and Ozil were earning the amount they were a year.

Football people or not, they would not be oblivious to the impacts Wenger were having. They trusted him, which is fair enough, why wouldn't they? But they had opportunities to replace him which they could have done and, as I say, I don't doubt they didn't try. They just wouldn't have got the manager they thought would have been able to take forward until Emery arrived.

Overall, I go back to my original point, I think Arsenal were stuck between a rock and a hard place, probably because of their own doing.

Stan Kroenke was a big fan of Wenger and how he managed the club so I doubt he ever tried to look for other managers until the last couple of years when we started to decline, same with Gazidis. Ideally Wenger should have left a couple of years earlier before he made some bad decisions that hurt us for a long time after, but even if he did the board still wouldn't have handled the transition well. When you get rid of such a long serving and successful manager who had so much control over all aspects of the club, same with SAF, it's almost inevitable that there's gonna be a decline when they move on. Both have been made worse because the boards of both clubs aren't up to the job. But SAF finished in the top 3 every season I think, Wenger top 4 every season apart from the last 2 and fans took that consistency for granted. There's probably only 3 or 4 managers in the game who could have took us over and improved us, got us challenging for or winning league titles given the circumstances.