We didn’t finish top 4 (2021/22)

I think more to the exact point
Will Arsenal ever win the league again ?

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Not until we get someone in charge who really loves the club and knows football and isn’t just here to make some money and take all these pensioners we have on the board to the cleaners.

Best thing the club could do is bring back Arsene to lead the rebuild.

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I really don’t mind being wrong about this. :grinning:

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No way to Wenger coming back . He’s partially to blame for this mess . He didn’t exactly leave the club in an ambitious winning mentality.

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I think I remember reading something like he (Wenger) was the one who helped convince the board to sell up to Kroenke and not Usmanov back in the day. Which would make sense as to why he was kept for so long and given so much power. Kind of feels like he made a deal with them to stay on, not demand any money and get them top four.

Wenger was and is a legend but not spending when he could of spent, the bullshit wage structure he had in place, and reliance of mediocre players is what led to us being where we are. People can say whatever they want about the board, but we’ve been one of the leagues highest spenders and have one of the largest wage budgets.

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It’s difficult to know how much of Wenger’s resistance to spending was actually down to him, and how much of it was him publicly taking the arrows for the board who were keeping the shackles on him. On one hand we know that he was very stubborn and particular about the players he wanted to buy and would often miss deals because he was wasting time contemplating, but I also don’t believe for one second that there weren’t crucial times where he would’ve wanted to dip into the market and he simply wasn’t allowed. I refuse to believe for instance that in the summer of 2015 he really thought all we needed to add to that squad was Cech despite him saying as much publicly.

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I agree that if he had the choice to strengthen other positions other than just GK, he would have done.

There were also several seasons where the title was thrown away because we lacked the squad depth and he refused to make a couple of decent signings.

But if it was the board that was not giving him the backing it means Wenger was not only complicit, he was also lying repeatedly in every transfer window to the supporters that pay his massive wages.

On the other hand, if it was Wenger who was refusing to spend and insisting the players he had were good enough, then the board are at fault for keeping him for so long.

Either way, it’s the supporters who have had to put up with the dross that’s been served up to them.

The way this club has been run is an absolute disgrace and no other club in Europe, with the resources we have, is run so badly.

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Which wasn’t a bad decision the Kroenkes dont reach into their own pocket but the tools are there to make it happen, the board just keep stumbling over their own dicks trying to get things right.

So u really wanna believe, and all Wenger conspiracy theorists want to believe, that he purposely handicapped the team and didn’t want to buy good players just because…y tho? To give himself a challenge cuz he shit so hard on everyone when he had a top team?? Lmaooo :joy::joy:
No, reality is that we couldn’t spend because the stadium move, it’s the most logical reason and Arsene has confirmed it multiple times…

This simply isn’t true. The truth about it is that between 07 - 12 we had a net gain in transfers of 50m. So no we weren’t spending big, we had to sell.

As far as the wage budget let’s use some common sense. We were a champions league team. We needed champions league level players to get us top 4 every year, and at least get us out of the group stages. You don’t get those types of players by not paying decent wages lol cmon.

Here’s the difference in what we were doing. Take 2010 for example. City and lolpool spent big in transfer fees, but do u think those transfers they brought in played for free? No there was transfer outlay and also wage outlay. We couldn’t spend much so our money goes to paying doods like Clichy, Nasri, Wilshere ect decent wages because if we don’t we lose them and don’t have money to replace them properly.

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‘Arsène Wenger has categorically ruled out the prospect of Samir Nasri leaving this summer, going so far as to suggest that Arsenal could not be considered a “big club” if they lost both the France midfielder and Cesc Fábregas.’

This comment summed up the lack of clarity from the club for me. How do you even make sense of this? Did he genuinely believe they would stay? The way that summer panned out it was as if them leaving that late in the window was completely unexpected and it caught the club totally between the eyes, when anyone with a brain could see those departures coming from a mile off. This was a terribly ill-advised comment, because you either make good on it and keep the players or you don’t say it at all if they’re on the way out.

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To be fair, our squad is more than enough to secure top 4.
Managed properly that is. As long as didn’t do dumb shit like playing goalkeepers in midfield or attackers in midfield, or say strikers on the wings.

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It’s not a lie tho Arsene didn’t want to sell Nasri or Fabregas, they both forced their way out, and in Nasri’s case wouldn’t sign a new contract. Same thing happened with RVP. You can criticize us for not trying to sell them sooner and get more money out of the deal, but Wenger was trying to compete with what he had, we weren’t there to develop doods and sell them to make the club a profit.

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Wenger didn’t just say this sort of thing in this window either.
Almost every season he said “the players we have are good enough,” “we aren’t afraid to spend” or "we aren’t a selling club.
He would say other things like “we will only buy super quality,” and then go and buy a dross player or no one at all.

He was either very naive or a liar because everyone knew that players like Cesc, Nasri, RVP, etc, were leaving, despite him saying the opposite.
Just as, after almost every window, he would say “we tried” or “the player didn’t meet with our valuation,” after losing out to a world class player.

If he was taking the criticism because he was defending the board, he is a liar.
If he genuinely could have bought all the top quality players he claimed he could have but failed miserably, because he himself chose not to, he is not only a liar but an incompetent manager.

Either way, Wenger and the board were habitual liars.

@Ashgooner1 I’ve wondered for some time if I’ll ever see Arsenal win the league again in my lifetime.

@BigWeng_4LYFE having KSE involved in the club in hindsight you’d have to say was a disastrous decision when you look at the trajectory since 2007.

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This is not at you, but no matter how many times Wenger says it it’s unbelievable to comprehend. This strategy where we need to finance the stadium move by consistently being in the CL while selling top players every year is a dumb risky strategy that should’ve failed.

Not to mention many of those top players went to our rivals. I’m suppose to buy this was a legitimate strategy of the club?

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I dunno man, it’s bad in a sense because under perfect circumstances you’d like someone in charge who understands the game well and has a passion for the sport. I do think if that was the case we’d not have languished so long after Arsene. But, has their ownership not given us the financial side of it at least? 35m on Xhaka, 35m on Mustafi, 72m on Pepe, 50m on Partey. We have the money to contend, we just are whiffing badly because the ppl making decisions are God awful at their job. Also the managers we’ve hired have been head scratchers to be nice about it, absolutely shocking judgement by the ppl making these decisions.

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Yeah true agree with all that in a sense, as I pointed out in the Arsenal vs Liverpool thread the team we put out that played like a league 1 side was about 300 million of talent.

I wasn’t so much referring to the financial side of things with KSE, we have a hefty wage bill and do spend money these days. Was referring more about the off field structures in place etc etc.

The overall net result is though, it’s 2021 and we’ve nearly lost all respect we did gain in the 90s and early 2000s as a well respected and feared club to come up against.

It’s just a fucking mess man :sob:

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Yeah I’m not suggesting that he could’ve waved a magic wand and kept them all together, I’m more just referring to the fact that in that period of time we often got quotes from him that were completely contradictory to everything we were actually seeing in the operations of the club. And I don’t believe that was entirely his fault of course, often he was hung out to try by a board that clearly wanted him to take the brunt of the criticism. I just wish that between them, they had been clearer about many things.

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Back on track!! :joy::joy:

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I think we might get St Totteringham’s Day, but every time there’s a glimpse of that, we lose the next game and Spurs win theirs.

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We’d probably need to win 6 of our last 7 for that, doubt we have the consistency despite our run home being rather easy on paper, all games really should be wins Chelsea aside.

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