Jose Mourinho and Arsene Wenger rivalry becoming irrelevant as league landscape is redrawn

It was tempting to imagine the reaction had it been Jose Mourinho speaking. Perhaps it would have been seen as a sly dig at an old rival, perhaps a way of suggesting he did not regard him as threat any more. The presumption would have been that there were some Machiavellian motives.

Instead it was Pep Guardiola who, upon his arrival in England, underlined the competitiveness of the Premier League by naming the elite managers. One by one, he ticked them off: Jurgen Klopp, Antonio Conte, Claudio Ranieri, Mourinho, Mauricio Pochettino, Ronald Koeman. Except one: Arsene Wenger.

Coming from Guardiola, it felt an innocent omission. Yet, with the exception of himself, he may have named the eventual top six finishers as well as the defending champion. Perhaps, in a moment of forgetfulness, Guardiola foretold Wenger’s descent into irrelevance, at least as far as the title race was concerned.

Yet Mourinho is almost as far off the pace. When they reconvene on Sunday, it is in unusual circumstances. They have never met with neither in the top four. When they first clashed 13 years ago, it was with a shared aim: to become champions. Now their objective is the same again: to secure a place in the Champions League. Mourinho is on course for his lowest league finish in a full season in charge of a club, Wenger his lowest since Monaco came ninth in 1994.

It feels as though their rivalry has been doubly downgraded, first by underachievement and then by choice. It is arguably the second most significant in Premier League history, behind only Wenger’s with Sir Alex Ferguson. It swiftly became toxic, the sense of men with contrasting ideals clashing and with the way poison appeared injected whenever Mourinho strayed beyond the pale in his comments. Wenger was “the voyeur” and “the specialist in failure,” according to the Portuguese.

He objected to the way the Frenchman positioned himself on the moral high ground. He sought to demonstrate his superiority on the field. He effected one of the great shifts of power in the Premier League: just as Ferguson knocked Liverpool off their perch, Mourinho knocked Wenger off his. The older man’s Arsenal career can be divided into two halves: before Mourinho arrived, when he won titles, and after he came, when his sole silverware has been in the FA Cup. Mourinho won the war and he won the battles. He never lost to Wenger when points were at stake.

And then, in a sign their enmity is less intense and their duels less significant, Mourinho signalled he would reduce it further. He suggested he would field a weakened team on Sunday. It may be a pragmatic prioritisation. Or Mourinho being Mourinho, it may be a double bluff, a way of confusing Wenger, of luring Arsenal into a false sense of security and then unveiling a blueprint to beat them. Yet the very notion of it is new: for years, the idea Mourinho would omit several of his preferred players against Arsenal would have seemed absurd.

Or maybe Mourinho, with his innate gift for PR and his habitual ability to ensure his story becomes the accepted account, is simply establishing his version of events before they have even happened. It gives him scope to explain the end of his unbeaten run, both in the division as a whole and in a private rivalry, as a technicality, just as Chelsea’s 2015 Community Shield loss to Arsenal could be placed in the ongoing debate whether it is a competitive fixture or a glorified friendly.

The Portuguese has taken to arguing that United play for trophies, not fourth place. It could be interpreted as another dig at Wenger, given the Frenchman’s long-held belief that Champions League qualification is equivalent to silverware. Indeed while the league table suggests a shared decline, they could win three trophies between them, just as they did in 2005 and 2015 (and 2010, but then Mourinho was responsible for all three).

Yet the footballing landscape is being redrawn, and not by men who once painted powerful images. This season threatened to be dominated by Mourinho’s battle with Guardiola. Few thought the dominant duo would be Mourinho and Wenger. Yet few thought they would be distanced to such an extent by Conte and Pochettino.

There has always appeared a permanence to Wenger’s fortunes and, viewed through the prism of the present, it is hard to see him rebounding to recapture past glories next season. Mourinho’s is a more intriguing case. Given a season with fewer injuries and less Europa League-induced fatigue, with fewer of Louis van Gaal’s players and more of his own, with a dilution of his predecessor’s damaging philosophy and a greater sense it is his team, it would be dangerous to write him off.

Certainly, should Guardiola be asked the same question this July, it is hard to imagine him neglecting to mention Mourinho. His best days may not necessarily lie in the past, but the capacity of his rivalry with Wenger to feel all-consuming certainly seems to.