It’s no secret that Real Madrid (and a load of other clubs and countries) have tried to lure Arsene Wenger away from the Emirates.

Speaking recently to the media in France, former agent, Marc Roger, has confirmed that the Spanish giants tried to sign the boss and, as we reported earlier, Wenger is the ‘only man in the world to refuse to manage Real Madrid’.

Those quotes were based on ones doing the rounds on Twitter so we called up our resident French writer and asked him to translate the full comments from L’Equipe and you can read those below:

“He [Wenger] used to speak to two agents only; Santos Marquez and me.

“After the Makelele transfer [to Chelsea], there were some meetings organised with Vieira and especially Wenger.

“It was his [Perez’s] dream to hire him. But Arsene, who has the mindset of a youth training coach, did not want to go there.

“He is the only man in the world who refused to manage the Real Madrid with Roberto Carlos, Figo, Zidane and Beckham. And he took a lot of time to refuse the offer.

“We started the meetings in 2001 and in 2003 we were still discussing and negotiating.

“In the last meeting in January or February 20003, only Valdano came as Perez did not believe it would happen anymore.”

It’s disconcerting to think that Wenger considered the offer so seriously, making you wonder just what would have happened to the club had he left – would they have moved to a new stadium? And if they had, would they have remained as competitive as they have done under Wenger and severe financial restrictions? Or would we be like Liverpool and Tottenham, still struggling to develop anything while simply dreaming of one day making the Champions League?

Thankfully, those are questions we never had to ask.

Roger was the agent for Thierry Henry, Patrick Vieira, Nicholas Anelka, Laurent Blanc, Sylvain Wiltord, Ibrahim Ba and Claude Makelele.