Except it isn’t as black and white as you claim it to be. Being close means there is at least a platform present to build upon to make top four happen. Of course it matters if you finish with a 10 point gap three years in row in comperison with one point off twice. The quality/potential for top four is there, it’s on Emery to get it out.
Playing better football and have a stinger defense, but still finish 20 points behind hardly means you are competitive, does it?
Spurs netspend was 17th out of teams I analyzed for last 7 years. Our netspend during that period outpaces them by over 200 million. They are literally the poster child of not spending. Looks like they may finally this year, but we’ll see if they sell Eriksen.
Liverpool was able to parlay a net spend that was about (off the top of my head) £48 million less than Arsenal’s over the past four years into a gross spend (again, off the top of my head) that was about £200 million more because they both bought and sold players wisely. They turned an £8.5 million investment in Coutinho into basically enough money to pay for Van Dijk and Allison. They also sold several other players shrewdly and rarely missed in the market. They picked up players such as Salah, Mane and Robertson at relative bargain prices. They weren’t letting players run down their contracts until it was too late to get a proper price for them or just allowing them to walk away from the club for free. Almost every move they’ve made over the past seven or eight years has been spot on. They’ve been pretty much the anti-Gazidis Arsenal.
The player sales doesn’t weaken the argument it enhances it, they invested in players and sold each at the right time usually before they had made them comitt to fresh contracts.
It’s no fluke since its happened multiple times, they made shrewd moves that paid off again and again. Us on the other hand…
I acknowledge that in the very next sentence.
It doesn’t change the fact about how much money needs to be spent to achieve what Liverpool has achieved. In that regards, we have not matched them
Great post.
The lack of investment, when we were desperate for quality after we moved to the new stadium, meant that we had very few top quality players and the ones we had wanted to leave because of our lack of investment.
Consequently we lost the likes of Henry, Cesc, RVP etc, on the cheap and were not adequately replaced, if at all.
We accumulated several cheap CB;s and DM’s, rather than just one world class player, when it was possible to get a top quality player for around 30m.
When we eventually did start splashing out on Oil and Sanchez, they were only bought because they were top players at bargain prices and, like you say, the wrong players for the positions we desperately needed filling.
How Wenger thought that getting Ozil and Sanchez, while sticking with Giroud playing in front of them, was a good idea, I don’t know.
We don’t have a transfer strategy.
It’s who we can get on the cheap, that is adequate rather than elite.
What top club, apart from us, waits more than five seasons to get a top striker, or so long to get a DM and GK.
This transfer window is the perfect example of a club no transfer plan and no urgency.
It’s obvious to everyone that we need a CB, winger and a replacement for Ramsey.
It looks as if there is going to be no CB, a flimsy attempt at getting Zaha, although I am expecting the words “we tried” to be trotted out rather than the player himself and a loan player.
I was going to say we are doing the bare minimum yet again, but it’s not even that good.
Actually there is a strategy. Said this, at least, two times before but you don’t agree with it. That is something completely different.
Now with only two weeks remaining it has to been seen if they can execute.
Unless the strategy is to ignore the positions that need filling and go into every season unprepared, I can’t see what it is.
The club are clearly not ignoring the positions. They’ve signed a CB and are actively trying to sign another one as well as a LB. We’re on the verge of bringing in a CM and also actively chasing a winger.
At the start of the window, we all earmarked:
LB
CB
CM
Winger
As the key positions and the club are clearly attempting to address all of these.
I would surprised if any of them will be much better than the players we have, unless we get Zaha.
Why don’t we get our business done earlier like other clubs?
It’s not as if the players we’re after are starting for Real Madrid or Barcelona.
You’re right, we did have as a bare minimum, a LB, CB CM and winger, on our list of players we must get but we haven’t got any of them yet and it looks unlikely that we’ll get the sort of quality we need.
Out of the 4 positions, we’ve so far only addressed one of them for this year.
16 days to go but still loads to do. I’ll continue to reserve judgement as we are trying to do deals but can’t say I’m optimistic at this point.
No doubt business has been slow but I was responding to his assertion that we were “ignoring” the problem which clearly isn’t the case. We’re clearly “trying” to sign players in positions we need them so to suggest that the club are ignoring them is frankly inaccurate.
But yeah, looks like another shit summer lol
People really need to accept the fact that the regime doesn’t think that a centre back has priority for this season.
There’s no way that’s true; if it is then they should all be sacked just for that judgement alone because anyone who knows anything about our squad is aware that we are in desperate need of quality at CB.
My guess would be that they basically can’t find a player that they think is good enough for what they want and is also available to us at the moment. You’d think they could be a little more creative though and atleast find a CB or two who could at the bare minimum improve us because the bar isn’t very high.
I don’t count the Saliba deal because although it’s good long term planning, we’re also in need of a CB for this season and especially now that Kos has had his temper tantrum.
But the only way Arsenal can match them is to be smarter and operate in a similar manner to how Liverpool has operated. That’s my entire point. Kroenke can’t just cut a check for £200 million out of KSE to fund players because that’s illegal. You’re only allowed to spend money the club has generated through revenue and player sales. You can’t put the cart before the horse.
The signing to be of Saliba indicates he is in fact the CB they were looking to invest in, until the Kos fiasco started it seems unlikely they even put thought to signing another CB apart from Saliba this summer.
As messed up as it is it rings true, which of course means there won’t be a quality CB budgeted for this window.
You may be correct about that, but surely after this Kos bullshit plans must change. They should drop the Zaha chase now and use those funds to try and bring in a CB who will improve us immediately because we are in such a desperate need of that.
But Arsenal have 250m in the bank
It’s a special Arsenal bank.
You can put money in but you can’t take it out. 
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???--------Ozil-------Auba
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For home games…