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In his latest exclusive interview with Eurosport, Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger discusses how important it was for Manchester United to keep hold of Wayne Rooney, and what would have been at stake for the club if he had left.

Were you surprised that Wayne Rooney is staying at Manchester United after the media talk?

It is a bit surprising because when you say publicly that your player is likely to leave, it means you have accepted the idea that he will do so.

A message to say: 'Come around the table, we are ready to sell the player.' So it is a bit surprising that they changed their mind..

It seems that United became aware of the consequences for the fans and the atmosphere inside the club if he did leave - especially considering the rise of Manchester City. It would have given them the reputation of being a declining club in comparison to the upwardly-mobile Citizens.

Afterwards, they had to take into account the impact signing Rooney to a new contract would have upon them, because it is going to be a big financial change. It means they have let Rooney have what he wants - and they are also going to be in trouble when it comes to renewing the contracts of the other players.

So the club's reputation was at stake?

When you let everybody know that you allowed your best player to leave at 25 years of age, rather than 30, it means that somehow there are clubs stronger than yours.

When you sell a player, you must consider what you are losing; the player himself, of course, but in addition all the consequences for people who follow the club. By that I mean the media, fans, the club's reputation and the indirect effect upon the other top players at the club, who may think: 'If the best players are leaving, what we are going to do now?'. So everyone at the club could start worrying.

Could the deal have been done in order to sell him for more money next June?

That is a really good question. However, if they sign him to a new contract for five years then sell him in June, it will be worse than if they had let him go now.

Were you convinced he was going to leave?

Yes, because when the club said they would talk about a transfer, I assumed they were ready to sell him.

If he had left, do you think it would only have been for another English club?

No, I think he might have moved anywhere in the world. Surely they would have been more open to a foreign club coming in for him than an English one - because the only domestic rival who could afford to buy him was their neighbour.

Do you think that he had to leave, considering the public opinion about his problems outside of football?

No, because people are focused on what happens on the field. What happens in a player's private life only feeds the scandal pages of the newspapers.

If you are 12 years of age, you only look at his performances on the pitch. You like him because he is able to do things you cannot do - and you want to copy him. You don't care about how he is living off the pitch.

Can he change the opinion of United fans?

Trust me: in this job, the only thing which changes everything is your performance on the pitch.

You could be the nicest, most elegant and polite guy in the world off the pitch - but if you are bad on it, everybody is going to hate you.

You can be unpleasant off the pitch, but if you are an extraordinary player, people will forgive you anything. It may not be fair, but it is the reality. People pay to see special things, and if you manage to give it to them, they enjoy it.

Would you have liked to sign him for Arsenal?

We never thought about it because we have enough people able to play up front. Moreover, if Manchester United are not able to pay his contract, Arsenal cannot even think about it.

So it means that he will keep scoring against you as he did in the past?

No, it doesn't mean he will keep annoying us - it just means that he will keep trying to annoy us. We will try to prevent him.

He likes to score against Arsenal.

Yes. He is world class player.

It was God luck that initially saved those 33 miners when the mountain collapsed, but it was not luck that kept them alive

Mining created Chile. The story of men who go down into the mountain and chip away at minerals in the darkness and then suffer an accident that leaves them at the mercy of that darkness is part of the DNA of Chile, an integral part of the country's history. It was one of the first things I learned about Chile when I arrived there in 1954 at the age of 12.

"Open your books to the story El Chiflón del Diablo," our Spanish teacher said on the first day of class. "The Devil's Tunnel by Baldomero Lillo. Written in 1904."

It was a story very much like the one that, many decades later on 6 August 2010, would afflict the miners of San José. It is all there – how the earth devours those who dare to probe its depths, in that classic story and all the others that Lillo wrote at the beginning of the 20th century and that every child in Chile studies. Those 33 miners could not know when they read those stories in school that they would someday be living that terror. They could not know that more than 100 years after that fiction was written that the conditions of mining life, the risks to the miners and the inhumane exploitation would be basically unaltered.

People around the world have been amazed at how the 33 miners have organised themselves in shifts, generated a hierarchy of command and crafted a plan for survival drawing from all the skills they have accumulated through their working lives. I am not in the least surprised. This has always been how Chilean workers have endured and persisted in the face of tremendous challenges. It is the legacy of those who extracted nitrate and who, at about the time that Lillo was writing about the torments of miners, were establishing the first trade unions, reading groups and newspapers of the Chilean working class. Those lessons of unity, fortitude and orderliness were handed down from father to son to grandson. It was what each male needed to know in order to outlive the disasters that could befall him in a merciless environment.

Of course, it was luck that initially saved those 33 miners when the mountain collapsed. But it was not luck that kept them alive. Inside them was the training and stamina inherited from forefathers, murmurs from those who were not willing to die over and over again in the darkness. There was a miracle at work, therefore, in San José, but to focus exclusively on good fortune is to perhaps miss the true and deeper significance of what happened. It begs the real question..

How is it possible that, more than a century after Lillo's stories denounced the inhuman conditions of men toiling underground, that insecurity and danger persist? How many more accidents like this one will be needed before legislation to mandate safeguards is enacted and workers can descend into the mountain without putting their lives needlessly at risk?

These 33 miners are now international heroes, with the world celebrating their rescue and their progress towards the light.

By one of those coincidences that history loves, these men were buried at the moment when the latest statistics show that the percentage of Chileans living in poverty has, for the first time since the end of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship, gone drastically up rather than down.

Is it too much to hope that the ordeal these men have gone through will trouble the conscience of Chile and create a country where, 100 years from now, the stories of Baldomero Lillo and the story of the 33 miners from San José, will be a thing of the past? Now that would be a real miracle.