How can we stop Arsène Wenger feeling like a murderer? There is very little evidence to suggest that he really is one. It is true that Gael Clichy hasn’t been spotted for quite a few weeks, but why would Wenger murder his first-choice full-back? And how would he do it?

Looking at Wenger, you imagine that he’d be the sort of chap who would prefer to poison his enemies — perhaps with gradually increasing amounts of the extremely toxic metal, thallium — rather than, say, stabbing his victim in the throat in a frenzied attack or flailing around with a machete.

This is, I hasten to add, pure speculation based upon nothing more than the faintest glimmer of suspicion. Innocent until proven guilty, I say.

Wenger made his confession that he felt like he had “killed someone” last week, following a rather troublesome shareholders’ meeting at the Emirates. Arsenal will finish fourth in the Premier League this season, even if Arsène poisons the entire first team, and this is considered not really good enough by the team’s impatient supporters. Another season of Champions League football has been secured (quite a few pundits thought that this was beyond Arsenal, back in August, remember) and his exciting side reached the final stages this time around.

Still, Arsenal fans were leaving their lovely stadium in disgusted hordes long before the end of last week’s hammering by Chelsea, having previously endured elimination from the Champions League. So, yet another season without having won anything, they complain — and worse than this, Arsenal flirted for quite a while with the notion of finishing a disreputable fifth, which would have been beyond the pale, of course.

The obvious response to this is that Arsenal fans are ingrates who do not know how lucky they are, compared to the torments endured by the other 88 league clubs. Not only are Arsenal, by any rational measure, fabulously successful, but they also play a brand of football which is adored by the purists and, further, do all this on a fraction of the budget (or debt) of their closest rivals.

This is the gist of Arsène Wenger’s response to the supposed crisis at Arsenal and every football commentator I have read seems to agree with him. If this were a rational world, I would agree with him too — but it is not. It is the world of Premier League football and rationality does not apply. At the beginning of last season, Arsenal increased the cost of their cheapest season ticket to not very far short of a thousand quid, fully £275 more than that of their most expensive rivals (Liverpool, as it happens).

The club whined that this included the price of Champions League games, but we all know it was to pay off the staggering debt incurred by the move to the Emirates. A good many Arsenal fans, drawn from the club’s traditional northeast London working- class base, simply could not afford such expenditure. Those that did fork out, though, had great expectations; they wanted value for money. If my club charges me more to watch a game of football than any other club on the planet, then it should be the most successful club on the planet: they should not be perennial also-rans.

One assumes that this mindset applies even more stringently to those who have paid for an executive box at Arsenal at a cost of £65,000 per annum, (excluding VAT), or about three times the national average wage.

In other words, the people who are paying to watch Arsenal feel that their expenditure entitles them to participate in the acquisition of vicarious success, rather than simply to watch a large number of people called Emmanuel play with a certain grace and élan. And it is no use Wenger urging patience upon the new Gooners, because they believe they have bought out the necessity for patience. They want value for their money and that means an almost perpetual string of glistening victories, no excuses. The idea that you should be happy with your lot and share in the travails of your local club has become almost wholly redundant — and at those prices you understand why, even if the feeling is perfectly irrational.

The impatience of which Wenger speaks stretches way beyond The Emirates, of course. It is present within the ranks of almost every Premier League fanbase and quite a few beyond. You see it in the speed with which managers are deemed, these days, to have failed at clubs and are unceremoniously booted out — one every few weeks, for all eternity, in the case of Newcastle United, for example. You see it in the speed with which fans head for the exit when their team is being thumped (or, in Chelsea’s case, merely being held to a nil-nil draw).

If you are a manager, it does not much matter if you are dogged with ill luck, injuries or simply insufficient money to win the league — fail and you are out, sometimes simply because of four or five defeats on the trot, as we have seen this season at Blackburn, Spurs, Newcastle, Portsmouth and, of course, Chelsea. The same rules apply, of course — that only one team can win the Premier League, and that’s probably Manchester United — but there is an epic delusion afoot at Middle-Eastlands, and St James’ Park and the Emirates, that because there’s all this money swilling around, it should be us.