Not Emery. He didn’t leave a lasting mark in either direction, Gazidis the shiny bald prick is the one I hate the most. Sanellhi up there with the dodgy deals and Kia obsession.
Wenger actually was worse in the market when he started trying to spend more money given our desperation. I’m not convinced he wanted mustafi in the slightest but now has to die on that 35m pound hill.
Auba was a decent deal
Laca served a purpose but should’ve been 35-40m at most, we were desperate for a striker though.
Mustafi shite value
Xhaka redeemed himself in the end
Chambers wasn’t terrible value at the time, looked promising and we gambled.
Ozil and Alexis were the truly great signings we spent big on.
The real waste was the combo of Lucas perez and Danny Welbeck for almost a Higuain/Suarez fee.
People forget that some of the signings in the end weren’t even deals Wenger had much input.
Didn’t we buy Stat DNA or something and made some stat driven transfers? Wenger went on record to say that dudes like Mavropanos he didn’t know before they arrived.
Might not seem like much to people but Wenger used to be all over any transfers in the past, whether it was senior players or youngsters.
As much as I like him, Perez is never an Arsene player. They brought him in for 20m out of nowhere, Wenger didn’t even rate him and as a result didn’t use him.
Arsene made it a goal in the summer of 2017 to poach Kylian. Meanwhile, we wanted Lacazette and Lemar. Our business looked conflicted as fuck and a lot of it didn’t make sense. Remember we made that 90m offer for Lemar on deadline day.
I would say in the last 2 years of Arsene’s time at Arsenal, there was real power struggle. The management above wanted to take more ownership of operations and start prepping for the time after Arsene.
We know from Martin Keown himself that the club even tried to remove Wenger’s image in the end because of a psychologist’s suggestion. Clearly the relationship between Arsene and Arsenal was broken.
One of the first things Arteta did was bring back image and spirit of Arsene within Colney and he was pushing for Arsene closer to Arsenal again.
The man has been drooling every time he’s had to speak about Arsene and you can tell how much he looked up to him.
I bet you Arteta had an influence in the statue Arsene received too.
Yup, Hard to tell at what point transfer activities started becoming combination of StatDNA pushed.
Wenger had a good record in terms of big-money signings with Ozil, Debuchy & Sanchez, and even Xhaka, for that matter.
I don’t think Laca, Auba and signing in the last 2-3 seasons were Arsene-driven.
My problem with this Wenger bashing is that people will blast what Wenger did in financially lean days compared to what Teta is doing with a 700m transfer budget, and when you point it out, they immediately fall back on a handful of big-money signings in the last 3-4 seasons.
You can’t use Wenger’s spending pattern for 20 seasons in your initial point and, when countered, rely on limited behaviour in the last 2-3 seasons.
The amount of financial luxury Teta enjoys now is built on Wenger’s back and he should be thoroughly grateful that financial might allows him to outcast likes of 70m Pepe, 60m Auba, 35m Ramsdale, 15m Guendounzi and not to mention the likes of Cedric, Mari, Runnarsson etc.
Klopp doesn’t have as much a say on transfers as people think. He’s publicly admitted that he didn’t want to sign Salah and was pressured by the scouting department. He wanted Brandt instead.
