Yeah, in fairness the general flow of discussion here is about understanding of football, making the right hires, and caring enough to ensure there is efficient accountability for poor performers.
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It’s because he didn’t invest in the team when we built the stadium between 06-13 (we’ll not instantly from 06 but you get it) that’s the problem. If not you sit there with an entire squad that cost peanuts and perform as such after every good player leaves you because we don’t show any ambition. The result is we had a squad so fragile one or two bum windows and we’re out.
Now we’re paying for damage control, that’s what’s happening. It’s good that he supports Arteta, hiring any manager and not supporting them is idiotic. But that should’ve been the case all along, and he just looked like an owner who enjoyed how his manager got CL football every year with 0 net spend, until it stopped working and then he fired him.
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Well established now this was driven by Wenger at the time?
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what do you mean by well established, and what do you mean by driven.
He’s not the owner. He is hired.
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There’s information out there that the club didn’t need to be as austere in transfer dealings during the 06-13 period. Wenger had huge flaws in terms of reading the market, squad building and negotiation which resulted in underinvestment in the side.
The board deferred to Wenger the entire football operation. They were never going to challenge his methods or lack of top level success
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I realised my mistake when I was inviting a discussion on this that I really didn’t want to have 
So I’ll give you one post 
my bad. Anyway:
No. Just no. There are literal quotes, even videos of the board saying they decided the budget. Not him, he just said yes. We’ve heard players, pundits, board members etc. saying the same thing. Players left because we couldn’t show ambition. Wenger offered jobs at bigger clubs than ours that he said no to. We literally proclaimed in public that we’d paid off the bulk we needed to pay off, and we could start spending and then tripled our transfer record.
This is not an opinon.
When we go out and say “we can buy anyone” of course we do. If not we might as well shut down shop, you can’t go on the market and just say you have no money. That is a strategy, not our economic situation.
Wenger’s fault in this part was maybe that he said yes, ok, let’s do it. And he did (try at least), probably thinking long term about how it would set us up for a better future.
All the comments on his actual -managing- which I agree is what he actually did, that’s fine, I don’t mind any opinions on that. Bad strategy - no problem. He decided our spending (though I’m sure there was some give and take, but in general) - no he didn’t.
I’ll never accept the board said “sorry we won’t pay the extra £3m for Xabi Alonso” but in the same breath said “yeah no problem we’ll give Denilson a £3m a year deal”.
Our wage bill suggests to me we had ample money to spend we just didn’t spend appropriately. It’s clear as day that Wenger had his own valuation of playing talent and refused to be loved from that valuation.
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I don’t know what the full truth is, between the owners and Arsene, but the whole thing about finances was nuts. While we were not making big transfer fee buys our wage bill was crazy, particularly because we were overpaying youth before they had achieved anything. Penny wise pound foolish sort of thing.
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Wenger’s already given up the ghost on this. They were all in on that plan.
The priority was champions league football, anything else was a bonus. There was other ideas like taking
advantage of FFP but those were DOA.
"Everything that we have achieved… has been created by the club itself. It has been done through discipline over time.
"We can plan for a future that sees Arsenal at the top of the game in five, 10, 20 years from now.
“The message of responsibility and continuity is very important for the broader game.”
We’re mugs.
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Gazidis was just a weaselly passenger at that time so it isn’t really proof (?).
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Sorry, that just in reference to FFP. Wenger gave an interview on Bein Sports about needing to finish in top 4 and sell a star player to stay afloat. (Trying to find it)
Edit: Here’s a link with some quotes.
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When you see how Gazidis has overseen the Milan rebuild you can pretty much gather he’s nowhere near as incompetent as Arsenal fans made him out to be.
He’s basically hired competent people to do a job and they’ve worked within sensible financial parameters to rebuild a squad that was disastrous and average.
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Is the 370m net spend?
Even if it is, it still only works out at around 30m a season, which is way below what one of the most profitable clubs in Europe should be spending, considering “we are ambitious and will compete with the big clubs.”
As @oompa ssid, we are having to spend now because of the unbelievable lack of investment when we moved from Highbury.
Kroenke’s tight fisted approach showed he hasn’t got a clue how to run a PL club and the lack of investment as well as his ack of football knowledge was a false economy which ended up costing him more.
@Iceman I found it
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I said above that the upper limit, getting the most out of everything, with American ownership, is probably Liverpool, who will always be overachieving to challenge Man City. Bearing that in mind though, we fell behind even a club like Leicester. That of course has to do with a lot more than spending money. It is about spending money well.
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Either that or maybe he learned a lot by fucking Arsenal up. Ppl do learn things and evolve, ya know, or maybe hes just shit and got lucky because thats what Kroenke did with the rams.
I agree with this 100% - but for so long people DID beat him specifically with the “greedy,” “tight”, “won’t invest” BS. It simply isn’t true.
But it is equally fair to say he is a bad owner b/c he doesn’t seem to know how to hire/trust the right people, which is really his main gig.
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I’d take anything Wenger says with a pinch of salt, especially a softball interview from his employers. He’s been known to be slightly disingenuous when retelling his own version of events
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we make LC look like paupers in both xfer net and wages when you look at last 10 or so years… sadly, this is equally true with Spurs and everyone else is miles behind us with only Pool and Chelsea (between slightly behind us to slightly over us at times when you average out) and the lone cowboys of spending ManU and City who can basically chuck away cash for fun.
TBF i haven’t refreshed this for a year +, but when i did analysis on just ins and outs in terms of reported transfer fees, when you looked at last 7 years combined (granted some has shifted in last 18 months), the average netspend between us, Pool, and Chelsea ranged between 37 and 47 million (we were in middle, Pool low)… next closest was Everton at 30… Spurs were ranked 20th on this metric (included about 23 teams).
Only City and ManU dwarfed us really at 87 and 95 million on average.
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You’re not wrong, but it’s also as close as an answer we’re gotten so far about that period.
I subscribe to the belief the board and Wenger were all in on it. Despite conflicting reports at the time. David Dein and Wenger were a big part of the football operation, then it became Wenger. None of them had the direction, nous or vision to grapple with Wenger on any footballing matter and just let him handle it instead. He was supported on his ‘youth project’ and his methods.
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