Platform for his successors? other than a nice Stadium he left a massive turd on the desk before leaving. Squad rotten to the core with old, shite and overpaid players not capable of being coached and drilled into any other system than Papa Wengs feel good football.
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To be fair, Hitler loved dogs but that doesn’t mean we have to hate them. 
We were and continued to be one of the biggest spending teams and he left the squad with a top Auba. Its fair to criticize his other signings (the last 10 looks pretty grim other than Auba), but we were primed for a surge back up to top 4 within a couple of years given the kind of money we were throwing around. Point is, he took all the financial hits during his tenure and left the club in a phenomenal position - yes, the squad was a bit of shambles but we were still top 6… we went backwards afterwards in terms of league position despite spending like crazy.
Damage was done and there was big improvements at the top points wise and challenging teams became bigger in numbers. We should never allowed this to happen. Not adapting on and off the field to the changing nature of the sport killed us.
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Fitting we’re talking about Arteta the player with our opponents being United. After he joined (Post 8-2), we didn’t beat the Mancs once until 2015-16, then we embarrassed ourselves in the return fixture losing to van Gaal’s B Team. Average players achieving average results that squad.
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Yeah no question Arsene should have been moved along a few years earlier, but the platform he laid out for long-term success was still there… if you look at the change to netspend, it is insane over the last 10 years compared to previous 10 before it. At the end of the day, we needed to get into different tier financially and Arsene was big part of getting us there.
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Stfu and give me ur nominations for the OAscars, shitter 
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This is the correct way to see it, in my opinion, and it could be common ground for Arsenal fans to unite, but for some reason a section of fans won’t give Arsene much credit at all and fallaciously blame him for the last few years, an intellectually broken argument because Emery finished 5th in his first season,and should have finished Top 4 without a crazy late season collapse. The damage was done spunking 100m on Pepe and Saliba, neither being ready-now players.
If Arsenal fans can all find common ground to give Arsene Wenger due credit and goodwill it would of course help with his pathway back to the Emirates, moybe in a club ambassadorial role.
Im a last minute kinda guy. When is deadline? #WengerOut
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I haven’t seen much blaming Wenger for the last few years post his departure. Just the last years of his management which has been romanticised when it really wasn’t all that.
Why can’t we give Wenger due credit for his amazing work with the club during his first decade and then acknowledge that the second decade was a mixed bag and that he made some terrible decisions toward the end that really hurt the club?
Spending 100m on Pepe and Saliba was terrible business. But what do we call letting all your best players run down their deals, buying Xhaka and Mustafi in 2016, buying Lacazette for 50m in summer 2017 then buying another striker for another 50m six months later who can’t play with Lacazette, refusing to take 50m for Sanchez in summer 2017 then swapping him for Mkhi five months later, and giving Ozil 350k per week? All while refusing to cede power to a real DoF until the very very end, ensuring that the club would have no viable structure of football organization in place when he was gone.
Wenger’s last two years in charge were a complete horror show from a squad building perspective. They did much more damage to the squad than Fat Raul ever did. And the reality is that the decisions weren’t just bad, they were also ones in which Wenger consistently prioritized his short term goal of getting back into the CL over the club’s long term health. Maybe he had earned the right to be selfish due to everything else he had done for the club. But we certainly paid the price for it. We’re still paying the price in a lot of ways.
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The key is your last sentence, i.e. “we are still paying the price”. Is there really any argument against when it comes to Arsene Wenger overall being a massive net positive for Arsenal as a football club? Isn’t that something we can all agree on, over and above going into minor details and some negatives in his later years which I will not dispute?
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Minor details. Ffs mate.
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Minor details in the overall weigh up of a long list of positives and negatives.
Do you dispute that in terms of net overall impact Arsene Wenger was a massive positive for Arsenal Football Club, and that’s how his legacy should be framed by his eventual statue outside the Emirates, etc.?
I definitely agree on the net positive overall, but I would not call the decisions in his last couple years only minor details.
You’d think it was last season Wenger left, I just wonder how long would people look at some of the decisions that took place after, that has potentially left stagnant or regressing.
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Overall positive sure, but the Highbury days were 15 years ago. No disrespect to the historians but how long we hanging on this?
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Yes to raising the brand of the club. I have no issue with a statue but no the legacy is very debatable territory.
Anyway, this forum isn’t so bad with Arsene Wenger, truth be told, and many commenters here rightly have George Graham as a legend also, even if his end at Arsenal was not pretty either. I used to be at Arsenal Mania, where some there were transparently attacking Wenger’s legacy mainly to defend Arteta, which was pretty ridiculous, and somewhat hypocritical.
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Disappointing that you won’t credit him for giving Arsenal the ability to step it up a level in the spending leagues, even if much of the money spent over the last few years has been badly spent. That’s a permanent legacy when it comes to AW as I see it, and when we next win PL/CL trophies he will share credit as far as I am concerned. This is all before getting to what he did with Colney, etc.