Yes please.
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What is being competitive in your view? But we have been âfirmlyâ out of CL places for only one season? 16/17 and 18/19 one point out. If Emery does his job we make it comfortable this season. Imagine Lampard and Solksjaer finishing above him.
HA!
In 2024 players will cost 2 billion
Being competitive is playing better football, not having such an abysmal away record, instilling defensive nous and actually having a tangible identity.
For me doesnât matter if its a point or not, itâs now three consecutive seasons without CL football which is a pattern and thatâs us firmly out of the competition.
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So the actual reality is that two of the three year Arsenal were actually close, and things arenât that bad, but you believe we are firmly out of it? That is a unfair representation of reality.
I thought being competitive is actually compete with City. But i think you just word the same in a bit more cumbersome (?) way.
Yes, three consecutive years without CL regardless of how close you come in my view means youâre firmly out of it. Being close does nothing for us.
Sounds to me like you just assumed what you wanted to.
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Itâs a joke that we are blaming Wenger and Gazidis for our current predicament. Yes, they had 3 shitty windows, but our business till that point had been pretty spot on. They operated within a budget and kept on meeting their goals. The continous underinvestment was masked by the fact that we kept on getting into the champions league year after year. Honestly we havenât been competitive for years.
Not investing in the team when it was needed the most and when we had the money in the bank was criminal and has eventually caught up. This comes down to the owners rather than the manager/ executives.
What I have a gripe with it that we have a mega TV deal lined up, signed a huge kit deal, renewed sponsorship terms, are still playing in Europe but evidently are not willing to spend despite witnessing a steady decline. I canât understand how we are getting blown out of water in terms of spending by the likes of West Ham, Everton and Wolves who have a fraction of our revenue.
The club canât be operating by its own rules any longer. Either pipe down and stop talking about ambitions cause you donât want to invest or put your money where your mouth is.
I could never have imagined that weâd be feeding at the bottom of the barrel for scraps to fill crucial squad positions. Not long ago we were loaning the likes of Wilshere to Bolton and we are now hoping to land a player with similar skill level going into a new season where we are expected to compete for European places with clubs that have spent our entire transfer budget on one signing.
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Well said mate. The ownership and boardroom are not serious.
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No it hadnât. Weâve been signing dross for years now. We never built on the ability to draw talent like Ozil and Sanchez because weâd do things like not sign a single outfield player (2015) and that had nothing to do with operating within a budget. Nobody at Arsenal told Wenger not to sign an outfield player because his budget was ÂŁ10m for Cech and only Cech.
The recruitment has been shit and underwhelming for a long time now.
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Exactly, Wenger, Gazidis etc are at a minimum equally to blame as the board and owners.
Which now leaves us in the curenrt predicament of having struggle finances exacerbated by our inability to shift utter garbage players and relying on loans.
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Yeah the transfer policy DRASTICALLY changed since Wenger left, didnât it?
Look at all the world class players we have.
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this dumb narrative is just 
by now lol
I donât blame Wenger so much except in having too much faith in his players, but Gazidis is the one who made a mess of things. In fact (as Iâve documented), Arsenalâs net spend over the past four years has been significantly higher than Liverpool, Chelsea or Spurs (the latter who have actually made a profit on transfers). So itâs not owner investment at all. Itâs that the club was run woefully. Liverpool turned a net spend that was 20 percent less than Arsenalâs into a gross spend that was 50 percent higher because their club has been run so well. The ultimate blame does fall to ownership, but not because they werenât cutting checks and spending like drunken sailors (which would be illegal under Financial Fair Play anyway and which even City and Chelsea can no longer do), but in being complacent thanks to the 20 years of Champions League that Wenger provided.
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Liverpoolâs net spend is highly augmented by player sales.
You can criticize Arsenal for not selling well but it is not a good indication of individual clubâs purchasing capacity
The 3 shit windows I was refering to were 15, 16 and 17 which is also the time we started spending big on the one off individual deals. Before that we had operated on a net spend on 0 across 10 years. This period of underinvestment coupled with the increased spending power of clubs both above and around us led to our fall from grace
We operated on a model of finding and buying young talent by the truckload and it was easy to write-off the duds when it didnât work out. We eventually dumped the tried and tested approach and decided to play with the big boys without having the same appetite of risk. We were okay to sign the the one off expensive player, but when it didnât work out, we were too relcutent to cut our losses and move on. Thatâs why we are still stuck with dross like Mustafi and the idiots on the board are demanding 10 million for a 34 year old defender who canât cut it anymore. Transfers will always have the element of luck, sometimes they click, sometimes they wonât, but it is far easier to write off Amaury Bischoff than Granit Xhaka. If the club and the board werenât ready for the risk that came with expensive transfers, they should have lived with the old approach, rather than this half baked neither here, not there transfer strategy that has led to this mess.
Wenger definitely has to take a part of the blame in not doing a better job of creating a system with the players he had at his disposal, but our board has been a massive collection of clusterfucks who have barely been able to put a coherent transfer strategy in place and have relied on signing players as they become available rather than going after clearly identified targets whenever there has been money to spend. Apart from Xhaka and maybe Lacazette I canât remember a single first team player who was identified and signed for a specific role in the squad. This is why I refuse to blame Wenger for the 2015 window. For all you know, he might have had targets in mind, but the club has rarely ever gone and acquired the players he scouted or asked for.
The bottom-line being despite the appearence of money being there, we have never gone on and done what is needed. In the past I would have put it on Wenger like a lot of us do, but the past 3 windows have convinced me that the owners and board donât give a ratâs ass and they will always look for either a miracle or a fall guy as long as their investment continues to grow.
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It may well be that the wage bill was at its limit in 2015
fek me.
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Nice. No room for anything like that with Emeryâs tactics though 
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But we went into the period where we started spending more better off than Spurs or Pool.
Was there? Donât get into the netspend argument as a lot of their spends get augmented by the one off player sales. Long before we started spending moderate sums on transfers Liverpool were spunking 35 million on the likes of Andy Caroll. And even now, I canât see us spending 75million on a defender or a goalkeeper even in the next 5 years.
Spurs just broke our transfer record on a midfielder from the French league and they have been outspending us for a period of 10-12 years, bar a few season in between.
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