It looks like this will be the second season in a row. Unless we make wholesale changes in the summer I can’t see much changing.
The character and culture of the players is really low right now. Just changing that character, culture and expectations is going to take a long time. When you here people like Roy Keane and Gary Neville talk you can understand why they won. Incredibly high standards in training, in fitness and in matches. I think our squad has low standards and a lackadaisical attitude towards everything.
It was nothing like that.
Graham was only here a couple of seasons before Wenger, so it’s hardly going back to the olden days, if anything, you’re going back to Wenger as if it’s just a couple of seasons ago.
Remember, the team that won Wenger his first title was mainly Graham’s defence.
So why did Wenger keep lying to the supporters then, saying we could afford anyone and he wasn’t afraid to spend?
When Wenger did spend, what did he achieve?
It was still a struggle to get a top four place and he stuck with Giroud for more then five seasons and his defensive signings, as well as his defensive coaching, were mainly poor to average.
The spending argument is fine when comparing it to what Man U, Man City and Chelsea were spending but when the likes of spurs, Leicester and other mid table clubs are catching us up and overtaking us, then who’s fault is that?
It’s as if every WKB supporter thinks everything that was good about the club was because Wenger is a genius but the repeated mistakes, useless transfer windows, persistence with under performing players, wasted money on expensive flops, complete failure in the CL, etc, is someone else’s fault.
That graph only tells part of the story. Extend the data back to 2005 and you’ll see that for most of that 2005-2010 period we were pretty close to United and spending 10-20m more per season than Liverpool. There was a brief period in 2010-2011 where Liverpool equalled us but then we began to spend more than them again. This is one of the big reasons that Liverpool was able to spend far more on net in the transfer market during this period from 2006-2014 than us, despite having substantially less turnover than us.
The bottom line is that we prioritized spending on wages over spending in the transfer market really throughout the post-Emirates Wenger period. Combined with the cash reserves that we conservatively sat on for much of this time, there were alternative approaches to our finances that would have allowed us to spend significantly more in the market and we simply didn’t take them. And that occurred during the greatest bull market in player valuations and transfer fees in history. The only way to lose in that market was not to play and we didn’t play.
All the rewriting of history that makes it seem like we were a poverty club just doesn’t add up once you actually look at the basic financial facts. After moving to the Emirates, we were the 5th biggest club in the world by turnover in 2006-2007. Our revenues were only 10-15% less than Barcelona’s for the next couple years. Our debt service wasn’t actually that high, around 15m per year or roughly 5-7% of turnover.
Wenger operated under constraints but he also made deliberate choices and he chose wrong in some very big ways. Hindsight is 20/20 but its crystal clear in hindsight that he made some disastrous choices. Player valuations were exploding, the biggest source of revenue growth was through commercial sponsorships, and the key to increasing commercial revenue was to buy exciting players and win trophies to raise your club profile internationally. In that environment, the biggest mistakes you could make were to be overly conservative with your finances and to sit on the sidelines in the transfer market rather than taking risks.
Exactly.
While other clubs were investing in players Wenger sat by and spent almost nothing in some windows when there were glaring holes in our first team.
Then, when it was too late, he had to spend just to catch up and it cost him more than twice as much.
So, through his constant haggling, indecisiveness and warped view of economics, he ended up paying more than twice as much for players, he could have got a few seasons earlier, that would have been younger and cheaper, with some resale value.
You have to appreciate the hilarious arguments the Wenger lovers come out with.
On the one hand he deserves all the credit in the world for keeping Arsenal relevant and afloat, for running the club from top to bottom without help…oh but where spending ridiculous wages on shit players or transfer flops come into the equation, or when he decided to spend nothing at all, then Wenger had no power or clue what was going on.
This shit will go on forever and ever without stopping.
You’ve completely missed the point. This isn’t really about how much we choose to pay our best players. It’s about how we used the ‘socialist structure’ to reward the Denilsons (7 years at Arsenal), Diabys (9 years), and the Djourous (10 years). 50k on Chamakh is great if he turns out to be the shit. If he turns out to be shit, that salary is difficult to shift.
Rewarding mediocrity fattened our wage bill so that it was in the ballpark of Man United, Man City and Chelsea. It also meant every summer was a question of ‘how do we get rid of the deadwood’? Most of those players have had to leave on a free transfer.
We don’t even need to look too far into the past to see how big an issue this was. The same exact thing has happened with Mustafi and Kolasinac.
Selling out every week on the verge of a new stadium.
Won one FA cup in that period. How do you think there managing to do that ?
Is it maybe because of the history that comes before the Premier League do you reckon. Course it is. These clubs and English football in general is huge. Really do push to much ignorance on the history of the game on this point.
And now flesh that list out and add in the teams who had more titles than us back then, unless you’re afraid our high position in that list will undermine your whole point about our natural position pre Wenger being mid table.
Edit: didn’t see @DavidHillier basically make this point already, I’d have liked it and moved on without posting myself.
It wasn’t really a problem because those doods costed peanuts and they played their role for us. Continually achieving top 4 and playing in the CL, you have to have a big squad to play on 3 or 4 fronts every season. For every actual bad player you named like Denison and Chamakh (which weren’t big issues because they costed virtually nothing) I can name 2 guys who Arsene made look like world class players who we easily shifted for major profit, because our business model worked for the time we worked under major austerity, thanks to tha Gawd Arsene. Song, Adebayor, Theo, Iwobi, Nasri, the list goes on and on. We paid for 4th place talent, Arsene made them look far better and then many a time we sold them. Between 07 and 13 we had 26m in profit from sales. All of our spending has come post 2013. Issue you have is that when Wenger leaves and the players go back down to their level you lose money on them. Those bad buys like Mustafi or Kola, we woulda got our money back if they were still playing under Wenger.
Wenger deserves all the credit in the world for keeping Arsenal relevant and afloat, for getting a mediocre squad to finish consistently in positions which allowed Arsenal to maintain a healthy financial state, despite receiving no help from the board.
I do not believe Wenger was the CFO of Arsenal managing contract negotiations and maintaining accounts.
People in charge with finances kept fucking up and Wenger kept bailing them out.
Arsenal gave nothing to Wenger and Wenger still gave a lot back.
The biggest travesty of the sacrifices the club made financially in the mid 2000’s is the fact those cunts at Chelsea and City came along and changed the financial landscape over the course of a few seasons. Combined with the self sustaining model and the kroenkes running the show, it was all for nothing. We’d be in such a strong position.
Swear he didn’t just end up in Japan as if he was banished like you make it seem? Didn’t he head there mid season because of the scandal in French football?
Highlighting that dismissing clubs before the PL is nonsense.
The fanbase of Everton like Arsenal etc is built on so much more than football in this era.
