Arsene Wenger's blueprint for the future of football

The former Arsenal manager is now in charge of the game's global development at Fifa. He talks with Miguel Delaney about overpriced players, park football, and 'striker schools'

- Miguel Delaney

There are still moments when Arsene Wenger sits at his desk in Zurich - of course overlooking every type of pitch, from 11-a-side to beach football - and wonders about the scale of the task he has taken on. Perhaps facing Sir Alex Ferguson or Pep Guardiola was easier.

"When you sit here and think, 'I have to improve football in the world', you realise that it's not easy, you know," Wenger laughs, before gesturing to the pitches below. "I would rather say 'give me a team and down there I can show you what I can do'. But once you sit here and say, 'how much, 211 countries? OK, thank you very much!'" 

And yet, as great as Wenger's managerial legacy is, there are so many moments in speaking to him about his role as Fifa's chief of global football development when it's impossible not to wonder how much the wider game could have benefitted from his rare insight.

"I can understand that as long as I was at Arsenal I didn't care too much about that because I had to win the next game," he says. "Once you have a global vision of world football, you realise something is not right."

Wenger has probably attracted most focus in the role for fronting the move for a biennial World Cup, but his real work and a truly great responsibility - is raising the level of the sport across the planet so every country and every child has a chance in the game.

"I believe really football can change the world," he said at the Fifa Women's Football Convention in Sydney last month. "Not just on the football side, the human side. That's the next step."

Wenger is sitting here on transfer deadline day explaining in a wide-ranging interview with the The Independent exactly how. It is a particular challenge when he goes to countries like Ivory Coast and the president tells him they haven't had an official youth game in five years.