Bottom line- Arsenal were a big club before Arsene came in. Wenger overachieved with a cash strapped club to consistently achieve top 4 finishes.
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Also for the time before the Emirates Wenger spent well, which correlates to our success and when he refused to keep up with the market and didn’t we started to see our downfall.
We spent like nearly £15m on Henry back in ‘99 which wasn’t record breaking but was a very high fee at the time, £7m Overmars, £6m on Kanu, £4m on ljunberg, £3.5m on Grimandi, £3.5m Petit, £2.7m Diawara, £2.5m Luzhniy, £2.5m Upson, £2m Vivas and £1m Malz. That’s £49.7m in the year and a half from 97-99 considering that average transfers at the time we’re going well under £5m at the time.
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I can never wrap my head around why people don’t get this lmao. There were 10 league titles in the cabinet before any Arsenal fan had ever even heard of an Arsene Wenger.
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When you say this some people take offence as if it belittles Wengers achievement or takes away from it somehow. Which is ridiculous, Arsenal have always been considered one of the the 3 big English clubs, when Wenger came in we had won at title 6 years earlier and European cup a couple before that.
No one is saying Wenger hasn’t added to that tradition and helped Arsenal become what they are today, but it would be factually wrong to claim Arsenal were some nothing team before he came along.
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I thought you was joking, this waste of space got £2.7m spent on him?
Then we got our money back somehow? 
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I seem to recall @BizzySignal that Henry was £11m from reading the tabloid trash at the time?
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He really did carry the tradition of excellence at the club. The way he went about it was new, but the tradition was there.
Where is that ethos now? What happened in his last 4 or 5 years? Wish he would have left sooner. It makes me sad that his incredible legacy is tarnished by the last 5 years.
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Yep, which is hilarious because they’re the ones taking away from all of the achievements of everyone who came before him when they pretend he essentially founded Arsenal. It’s possible to respect all of it.
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It’s weird how GG is omitted from folklore. Yeah he isn’t a fashionable name but he contributed to the club too.
We overtook Everton’s title count and was well ahead of Man United at the time. Until Ferguson happened.
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Not only that, but he signed some of the greatest players ever to pull on the shirt.
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Pretty sure it was £10m
It was £11m
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Pains me to be reading all this analysis and dissection of Wenger post 2005.
I was fanatically loyal to Arsène pretty much up until 2015/2016 or so. But us finishing top 4 in the Emirates era was not a groundbreaking achievement. We were generally the 3rd or 4th richest team throughout the entire period and achieving top 4 was par for the course. Our transfer fee and wage expenditure was always up there.
He still deserves credit for consistent CL qualification but even back then in the early 10’s, achieving top 4 was seen as the minimum and we were roundly mocked for that being the sum of our ambitions. In that specific era, we could and should have done more to cement our status as one of the big players in the league but instead we started sliding into mediocrity. Title challenges became even more of a fairytale ambition. City and Spurs not only started competing with us for top 4 but then overtook us.
We then found ourselves in a situation where we were declining under Wenger, and had to take drastic action to arrest the slide. We’ve ended up getting even worse but it was going that direction anyway under Arsène. We haven’t found the solution yet, and that’s on the club’s executive for not having a clearer strategy for success (DoF, top class manager and coaching staff, elite scouting etc.)
Love the guy to bits and always will, but we were on a clear downward trajectory in his last few years. It’s undeniable. I maintain it wasn’t purely his fault as he should have had certain structures in place around him to force modernisation sooner, but he was so stubborn and lacking in pragmatism with tactics, refusing to purchase players outside of his own arbitrary valuations (not signing Alonso for the sake of £2m haunts me to this day). Those drubbings to Liverpool, Chelsea and United are stains on this club’s history.
The ironic thing is that his early success is the reason why he was judged so harshly in his later years. The standards were set so high that when he / we as a club stopped reaching them then he was criticised heavily.
Tbh, if he had stayed, the fanbase would have turned on him even more and I’m glad he didn’t ever have to endure the toxicity that Emery and now Arteta are enduring. We’re in a right mess as a club and we need a revolutionary new footballing hierarchy to jump-start us. Edu and Arteta ain’t it chief, but neither was Arsène when we still had him here.
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The issue with George Graham is his name isn’t foreign and fashionable enough to stand up against the people that fans these days love to laud.
Let’s be real here, Graham is an Arsenal legend who laid the foundations for the success that Wenger built on. He may have sullied his reputation with the dodgy deals towards the end and some very subpar League campaigns but just like the latter Wenger years doesn’t undo his prime greatness - it shouldn’t for Graham either.
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Yeah I saw that but they have Dwight Yorke at like 19m so I have no idea where they get their fees from, but the his wiki has no evidence of the lower fee.
It’s all a bit confusing
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Wikipedia’s fees are different from transfermarkt’s it’s odd. Which one to trust?
Trust no one.
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Wise man sage NeedCoffee.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/teams/m/man_utd/1423449.stm
£12m according to BBC.
I reckon they probably have the fee in Euros and converting to pounds. Actually they seem to have everything higher than I remember it reported. Jeffers I remember 10m and they have it 13.7m. Wiltord I remember being reported at 13m and they have it at 16m. Lauren I remember as 7m and they have 10m. Gilberto Silva I had down as 4.5m