Well he’s made on the deal. So he should be thankful.
Does sitting on a bench count as playing at the top level though?
The thing is he cites 2016 as when Arsenal wanted to sign him. He signed a new contract in 2016
It’s probably a mixture of we didn’t offer him enough to get it over the line and his agent not playing hard ball
I wish we signed Vardy more. The guy would have been better than Aubamayang for us.
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Wenger said we could have had Mahrez, Vardy and Kante but they didn’t quite meet with our valuation.
So he bought Xhaka, Mustafi and Perez for 90m instead, who presumably did meet with our valuation.
Wenger, what a great guy, as well as a great economist.
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Well no, we made an offer for Vardy which met his release clause and he subsequently decided to stay with Leicester. By all accounts Mahrez was blocked from leaving Leicester by their obvious outlandish valuation of him.
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Vardy rejected us, probably because he could see we were soft and banter as fuck.
I can’t believe it’s looking like he might have made the right decision.
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I feel like you’ve completely made this up mate lol
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So in hindsight it went like this:
- Mahrez was done but Leicester blocked the move
- Vardy was done but then decided to stay at Leicester
- Kante was approached but Chelsea offered him way better wages so he chose them
It surely could be argued that if Arsenal offered more money they could’ve gotten their men(seems to me the primary targets). Instead we went for secondary (or even worse) options and got burned.
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Not really.
He said we could afford any player and also said he tried to sign all of them.
In fact we were close to signing Kante and Mahrez but wouldn’t pay what Leicester wanted and we bid for Vardy but it was about 20m, which was insult to their intelligence.
So yeah, you have made it up haha.
If not, apologies. It should be fairly easy to provide links to those statements.
No it wasn’t. It was his release clause. Vardy rejected us.
You’re making this all up.
Or we didn’t try hard enough.
Just like every other top quality player Wenger said “we tried” to get.
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First it was “our offer insulted Leicester” then when it is pointed out that we met the release clause and didn’t insult Leicester with our offer, you just change tack and find a new angle to try to justify your opinion that we did something wrong here.
You might as well just admit that you are going to blame the club regardless of the facts of the situation lol. The club fucked up lots of stuff over the years, particularly when it comes to transfers and the surrounding talk about “valuations”, but that doesn’t mean it is always an applicable criticism. I’m less sure about the Mahrez situation, but Vardy rejected us after we made an appropriate bid and in the case of Kante, the chatter seemed to suggest that he preferred to join Chelsea over us, rather than it being the case that our offer to Leicester was insufficient/derisory/insulting.
Not every transfer that didn’t go through has to be blamed on the club, or Wenger specifically.
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To be fair, I think we can blame the club for Kante. According to the man himself, he chose Chelsea over us because we didn’t try hard enough. He said our interest in him wasn’t as big as the interest from Chelsea so he opted to go there. To use a quote from an Arsenal legend, “they wanted it more”.
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Kanté is a fantastic player but tbh of all the transfers that we’ve missed out on over the years it’s probably one of the ones that stings the least. I can totally understand Arsène having doubts about spending top dollar for him. Suárez Yaya and Sancho being the ones that sting the most.
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I’ve never seen him say that, I’d be interested to read those comments.
You may have a point, but I’d also take his comments with a pinch of salt too (though I would want to read them first) as we need to think about what he would and would not be willing to say in public. I mean, he’s not likely to say “Arsenal are a pretty banter club, I can’t see them ever winning the league again any time soon. Plus Chelsea are offering far better wages”, whereas it is really easy to just say something totally uninteresting like “Chelsea gave me the sense that they were much more committed to signing me, and that’s what swung it in the end”
Why rock the boat and risk upsetting people when you could just come out with a generic platitude?
Wenger seemed to intimate that Chelsea outdid us on wages, and I’d take that with a pinch of salt too, just like I would Kante’s comments (which again, I haven’t read lol).
Anyway, the original point was that Wenger said that we could have had Mahrez, Vardy and Kante but they didn’t meet our valuation. It doesn’t sound like the comments you are referring to help support that argument at all, but cause I don’t think he ever said that lol
In all fairness though, we have supposedly nearly signed every footballer under the earth. 
But he cost less than Xhaka 
(yes I’m ignoring possible difference in wage demands)