By Simon Hooper for CNN

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LONDON, England (CNN) -- With almost clockwork regularity, the end of the season brings fresh speculation about Thierry Henry's future at Arsenal.

This week alone the French striker has been linked with moves to a who's who of world football, including Barcelona, Real Madrid, AC Milan, Inter Milan and even Liverpool.

It is only a year since, in the wake of the London club's Champions League final defeat by Barca, the French striker put pen to paper to sign a new four-year deal that Gunners fans had surely hoped would quash transfer talk this time around.

That Henry had so ungraciously slammed Barca's performance in a pitchside interview after the final also suggested he had burnt his bridges over any possible move to the Nou Camp -- his most persistent suitors.

Then-vice-chairman David Dein later revealed that he had turned down two £50 million ($100 million) offers from Spanish clubs -- assumed to be Barca and Real Madrid -- for Arsenal's captain.

Henry himself commented later that he hoped to end his career at the club: "If an opportunity like Barcelona comes again, with all my respect for such a club, I will refuse." Yet now, Henry faces a fresh crunch decision over his future.

Under Arsene Wenger's tutelage, Henry has become as much as an icon of Arsenal's footballing renaissance as the French coach himself.

Joining the club as an unproven winger in 1999 -- albeit one with a World Cup winner's medal -- Henry has blossomed into one of the world's most complete forwards, twice being nominated for the World Footballer of the Year award and twice winning English player of the season honors.

And after those World Cup cameos as a teenager on home soil in 1998, the Arsenal-model Henry was crucial to his country's success at Euro 2000 and played a starring, if erratic, role in Les Bleus' run to last year's World Cup final.

But this has not been the season Henry surely imagined when he re-signed with the Gunners.

Arsenal have not progressed as they would have hoped, slipping to a lackluster fourth-place finish in the Premier League, despite the advantage of a spectacular new home at the Emirates Stadium, and capitulating weakly against PSV Eindhoven in the Champions League last 16.

Meanwhile, boardroom manoeuvrings have seen Dein, formerly Wenger's closest ally in the club's hierarchy, ousted amid swirling rumors surrounding a possible American takeover that have thrown the coach's future into question for the first time since his arrival 11 years ago.

And by the time the new season gets under way Henry will be 30, with his best football surely behind him. Some Arsenal fans may finally be wondering whether the time is right to cash in their prize asset before wear and tear further decimates his worth.

For now, Henry remains tight-lipped. "Since I started playing football there has been speculation about me going to a lot of clubs and that will never, ever stop," he said last week. "But as I said, for now I'm an Arsenal player, so there is nothing to add to it."