They will remember David Dein in North London for a wisecrack and a wise decision. At a Champions League group stage draw in August 2003, two months after Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea, Dein made a joke that illustrated Arsenal’s deep-rooted fears — since realised — that their status as London’s leading club was under threat.

“Roman Abramovich has parked his Russian tanks on our lawn and is firing £50 notes at us,” Dein said. If the arrival of a foreign billionaire at local rivals was an unwelcome example of English football’s globalisation, it was Dein’s cosmopolitan outlook that helped to explode the game’s parochialism and make the advent of the likes of Abramovich — and Stan Kroenke, the American billionaire — possible.

In 1996, Dein was instrumental in the appointment of Arsène Wenger as manager and the two forged a close bond. “In ten years, David Dein revolutionised not only Arsenal but the whole of English football,” Wenger has said. “Apart from Josef Venglos at Aston Villa, an English club never took the risk of appointing a foreign coach. It is pretentious to say it, but my arrival was a strong sign. Dein is a mad optimist. He is openminded to new ideas. He really wants me to have the players I am dreaming of.”

Dein became a director of Arsenal in 1983 when he paid £290,250 for 16.6 per cent of the club: a shrewd investment. Ambitious, persuasive and influenced by the slick and moneyed world of American sport, he was a prime mover in the inception of the FA Premier League in 1992. He was vice-chairman of the FA for four years until the position was scrapped in 2004, then was elected to the FA’s 12-man board as a representative of the Premier League.

His immersion in the politics of club and country must have felt like a tightrope act. Long a member of Uefa’s club committee, last October he was named chairman of the G-14 pressure group of elite European clubs, whose interests have sometimes seemed to conflict with those of the governing body.

Dein’s interest in the global game was underlined by the role he played in the appointment of England’s first foreign manager. In 2000, when Sir Bobby Robson was in the frame to take charge again, Dein argued that English football needed to broaden its horizons. He duly acted on behalf of Adam Crozier, the FA chief executive at the time, to take Sven-Göran Eriksson to Soho Square. Despite Eriksson proving a costly failure, when the FA was choosing a successor last year and Steve McClaren looked to be favourite, Dein campaigned for Luiz Felipe Scolari, the Portugal coach.

Dein was initially excluded from the three-man selection panel but soon persuaded his colleagues to accept his input, with his knowledge of world football an important factor — as well as his good relations with Brian Barwick, the FA chief executive.

However, last October, Dein paid for the botched pursuit of the Brazilian when he was voted off the FA’s executive board and replaced by David Gill, the chief executive of Manchester United. Steve Gibson, the Middlesbrough chairman, accused Dein of blocking the FA from talking to Wenger, its first choice, but the Frenchman has said that, although he was wooed by the FA, he did not want the job.

Around the same time, a Newsnight investigation into Arsenal’s relationship with Beveren, the Belgian feeder club, prompted Fifa to ask the FA to examine the matter. That did not reflect well on Dein, who conducted all Arsenal’s transfers since the George Graham “bungs” scandal in 1995 — even though the FA found that there was no evidence to suggest that Arsenal had breached Premier League rules.

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