How many players did Wenger leave for Emery that are remotely good enough to start for any of our rivals?
Wenger was being paid 8m a season for dragging us down, so the supporters have every right to criticise the person who their hard earned wages are being wasted on.
Of course, but being critical and being abusive are too different things… some of the vitriol went way beyond the pale.
Arsenal are difficult to compare to other teams because up until Arsene left, the club took a completely different tack than any other top 6 organization, which was the youth movement. Buying a core of guys and supplementing them with bargains. In hindsight maybe the wrong approach because lolpool are showing that investing in players from foreign leagues ready to make that next step from small league/team to big side just before they jump to Barca, has worked…kinda (still no trophies). Higher risk but higher reward as well. Lolpool has been whiffing for years with that strategy tho.
I don’t think the strategy was necessarily wrong, just the execution… I also attribute at least a little bit of luck to Pool and Spurs for the massive sales they do.
We almost won the league and we have the 3 FA Cups to our name with that strategy. Spurs and lolpool recently have surpassed us in the league but is that because their strategy has worked better or is it because our team peaked and our core guys got old and we are in a down cycle atm?
Ok fwiw went through last 8 years (got bored, can’t do any longer) for spending and net spending for Arsenal and Spurs…
It is ugly reading frankly…
We have outspent them (BUYS) by 134.6 million over that period, or an average of about 17 million per year.
In net spend it gets tragic… they have net spend of -15 million.… MINUS FIFTEEN MILLION
We have net spend of 303.9 million.
that is over the last 8 years combined…
From Transfermarkt
It doesn’t. Lolpool have zero net spend but huge expenditures, should tell u all u need to know. To win u gotta spend regardless of where u get ur money from. Arsenal don’t spend thus we lose. Expenditures 6th league position 6th. What a surprise 🖒🖒
yeah b/c valuing an asset you sell as not factoring in at all in what you then end up spending makes sense… I seriously can’t even believe we are having this conversation.
No point bringing up Arsene stats on spending from 98-2008, I think everyone agrees he was one of the finest managers in Europe for that 10 year period…
Lol that’s my point tho. Arsenal don’t conduct business that way so we are at a massive disadvantage. We held onto a guy like Sanchez in our hopes of winning stuff when he was a 50m dollar asset. We probably would have only reinvested part of that money anyways.
The day David Dein left this club was the beginning of a decline, whether you like it or not , It’s cold hard facts
I disagree completely, which unfortunately makes me the only person on the planet to agree with @BigWeng_4LYFE on something.
I know it won’t change your mind, but I think if you produce the next Messi and sell him for 1000m and buy ten 100m players, regardless of where that cash came from you still bought ten 100m players, which in theory has you a team better than everyone else’s. If they win the double you can’t really say that’s a club that’s spent nothing on their team and just got there through some kind of hard work and genius.
Lacazette could technically be considered a Sanchez replacement because in the previous season Sanchez was our main striker. Whether we took the 60m or not from Sanchez, it doesn’t stop Lacazette being a 50m signing and being judged as such.
Likewise Aubameyang is judged as a 56m signing, he’s not judged as a 39m net spend over Giroud.
People were also happy to brand Carroll a 35m flop despite being a -15m net spend on Torres.
And I don’t think selling players is necessarily something to be celebrated. Selling Coutinho, Suarez, Walker weren’t victories for those clubs and if Wenger had sanctioned those deals Arsenal fans would be going mental.
Sure there’s maximising what you can from players that aren’t good enough (e.g. Liverpool profiting on Benteke is good business), but being willing to sell your best players isn’t a sign of strength to me.
I understand the logic and it depends on what you are trying to measure to a degree - if you are looking at ownership investment, net spend is the only logical way to do it.
If you are looking at how expensively a squad was assembled, I see your point, but on the other hand you also lost Messi, or Suarez, or Coutinho, hugely important pieces… ignoring that completely and putting their value at zero in that equation b/c all you care about is gross spend is massively misleading.
How can you say that selling Coutinho wasn’t a victory for Liverpool though? The money they got from that deal essentially covered the Allison and Van Dijk deals down the line, and they might win a league title because of that.
If you swap those two players out of that side and out Coutinho back in it right now, they wouldn’t be in the position they’re in now. It’s one of the best examples of being smart about selling an asset and reinvesting the funds.
It was a good deal, but they lost a great player… saying that their spend wasn’t affected by that (or their needs) makes no sense…
Losing Suarez was a huge blow… losing Bale was a huge blow. Even if they were GOOD deals, the team was diminished massively… so saying that only spending counts discounts that effect completely to zero.
Do you guys have no life?
Spending this much time & effort in Arsene Wenger thread?
Sheesh
It’s also misleading to ignore the fact Arsenal had a negative net spend for over a decade. That was always going to lead to having less assets to sell on and more investment needing to bring us up to standard.
It also ignores the fact that when we had hardly any money we sold 2 of the best players in world football for little money and reduced our squads quality massively while investing in stable older players to stay in the top 4 flight. It was always going to happen that the older players got old and we’d need to replace again.
It actually got to the stage where we needed to replace the ageing Mertesacker, Kosceilny, Cazorla, Arteta, Flamini and Monreal in 2 seasons. And we had enough cash to splash on Mustafi and Xhaka who were massive flops and Kolasinac who wasn’t much better.
Its a fair point, but our net spend in the last 8 years is over 300 million compared to Spurs negative 15… we aren’t the paupers we are made out to be. During those paucity years we also made some brilliant business (buying Cesc, RVP) but also some boneheaded (prices we got for Henry, etc.)…
I would say that the only thing that matters 10 years ago was the value in transfer fees of that squad that was assembled on nothing though… b/c if it was brilliantly assembled, it wasn’t nearly as much of a handicap…
Anyway, people complaining about our spending NOW are ignoring the facts.
Yes pretty much… I am a financial nerd
