Patrick Vieira has admitted he is dreaming of managing Arsenal one day in a news report that I might need to be left alone with for a few minutes.

I’m not going to sit here and admit that I’ve played close attention to Patrick Vieira’s managerial career.

I gave it a cursory glance when he was in the States and it was rumoured he was being trained up to become Manchester City manager one day, but after he moved to France I’d be lying if I said I continued to pay attention.

That being said, if you offered me the option of Vieira now or continuing with Emery, I’d take the former option. Does that make sense? Not in the slightest. But then football fans rarely do.

“If it’s my dream to coach Arsenal or France?,” Vieira said when asked by Le10Sport. “Yes, like any player, when we do this job we want to touch the very high level. But the very high level I can touch with OGC Nice from the moment we give ourselves the means to succeed and from the moment the way which we work is quite consistent.

“But we do this job, and I do this job, to one day to be the coach of a team that participates in the Champions League.”

Well, that’s not Arsenal at the minute, is it?

Anyway, Vieira is currently averaging 1.44 points with Nice after 50 games, hardly figures to get people excited and a drop on what he returned in New York (1.58). At Arsenal, Emery, despite boring us all to death, is averaging 1.99.

Vieira’s Nice side have only scored 47 to the 57 they’ve conceded. So they’re scoring less than a goal a game and conceding more. Even Emery is better than that with 137 goals scored from 69 matches. He’s conceding more, however, with 82 shipped – a slightly worse rate than Nice.