I feel like I’ve been saying next season for the last 8 seasons
We are officially the holders of “The club that has been in transition the longest” trophy, since we moved to the Emirates.
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I’m just worried the investments should’ve come 10 years ago. We’re struggling to get back into top 4 because of a lack of investments a decade ago and going foward imo. For most clubs your squad looks like what you’ve done the past decade, not the past transfer window. We just last window got rid of 10 of those Sanogos and Debuchys and the likes, and we didn’t stack those up because someone prefered them over world class players that went for £40-50m at the time, it’s because that’s what we could afford and perhaps we believed the FFP sham was actually going to be a thing. Our transfer record was something like £16m when we signed Özil in 13/14. That’s the 25 man squad we had to work with at that point in time.
Sure we can turn it around and I believe we will eventually. I just think it was poor decision making, I even think that while Kroenke++ secured a stable profit he will have ended up losing out on even more profit had he relieved us from some of the pressure of the stadium throughout so that we could’ve bought proper players continuously throughout.
Oh well. Maybe Emery settles for a formation or two eventually and gets some wide players in and gets his own defensive coaches in or w/e might be the issue in that department, and we get back in it. Who knows.
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I think a big part of it is down to mentality. Liverpool are playing out of their skins, having a near perfect season and they’re still not top (granted, they have a game in hand on Man City, but that game is at Old Trafford!)
We can sign Emery’s players. Kroenke may even give us a cash injection. Pigs might fly, but we just don’t have the stomach to win the league, in my opinion
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Yeah of course a team can get better, to put it bluntly. But the last time Liverpool did anything of notice was right when we did, they had CL finals back to back around (?) our CL finals. Since then they’ve been worse off than us. They had a 2nd place in the league I think? that’s it? So did we. We at least have 3 FA cups. And probably with less money spent. So while Klopp has great momentum and struck gold with Salah, they haven’t done much better than we have right up until now. We also beat them in the league most of the time since the mid 2000s I think, just from a gut feeling.
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Every successful club needs a few genuine world class players and we have arguably just Aubameyang.
Realistically we have very few players, or manager, that would get into any of our rivals first teams and until that happens we aren’t going to challenger for the PL.
So unless we start splashing around 200m on three or four top quality players, which obviously isn’t going to happen, the Europa League is the level of our ambition.
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Both teams suffered round the same time in a way. Arsenal with the stadium move and Liverpool with the Gillette and Hicks ownership. That landed them in a pretty big mess.
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Although all this is true, the one thing they have done is not sit around waiting for something to happen.
They have been pro active in the transfer market and, if things aren’t going right, they change things around almost immediately, which is something we don’t do.
They have a level of ambition and urgency that we completely lack.
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I think its more of a board having formulated a plan after a few failings. We are waiting for a visionary who has OUR plan forward.
I agree.
We used to have someone like that with David Dein who was not only ambitious and good at his job, he was also an Arsenal supporter and did the best he could do for the club.
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Yeah, we had a great record against them before Klopp. Since 2001, I reckon they’ve only beaten us about 7 times in the league.
2004 liverpool 2-1 arsenal
2006 liverpool 1-0 arsenal
2009 liverpool 4- 1 arsenal
2010 arsenal 0-2 liverpool
2014 liverpool 5-1 arsenal
2015 arsenal 3-4 liverpool
2016 liverpool 3-1 arsenal
2017 liverpool 4-0 arsenal
2018 liverpool 5-1 arsenal
(I think thats it! Just off memory alone)
Beg your pardon. 9 league defeats. Can’t think of any others. We’ve beaten them in the FA Cup three times and the league cup once in this time span, theyve.cheated us out of a CL semi final space once in 2008.
A good-ish record against them but recently gone to shit as we cant seem.to beat them. Theyve also scored looooooads of last min equalisers against us in the same time span, which have felt like defeats
Would take a minimum of four - five seasons and that’s if Kroenke and co had their shit together along with the right manager which they evidently do not.
It pains to say but winning the league is so, so far off right now, we simply need to concentrate on building a squad for the long term that is cohesive, consistent and also plays very good football.
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Oh yeah no that was poor wording by me, sorry, I meant as in beat them in final league positions. As far as individual games go my gut feeling would’ve said we just drew all the time up until recently.
Same feelings mate. I mean, I’ll always be an Arsenal fan, couldn’t imagine supporting any other club. But Football doesn’t quite have the same appeal like it once did. I don’t know if it’s because money’s corrupted the game, or now that we’re older, you don’t really tend to look up to many players anymore. It’s very social media focused now, where’s 20 years ago, so many players felt like heroes, gods.
But even when we hadn’t won a trophy for ages, there was still some fun and enjoyment to be had supporting Arsenal, so many fun personalities in and around the club during the majority of the 10s. Not saying there isn’t now, but I don’t feel a strong attachment to the current squad.
These days, I get far more enjoyment just coming onto OA and having fun and interacting with all you guys. If we get the results, then great but I feel like I care about the community on here more than the Football itself, probably as I’ve invested so much of my life on here, some of you are almost like family now…well almost :giroud: . I guess it also helps Football is not exactly my sole interest, as you well know, so it’s quite easy to switch off mentality when it’s a bit meh like it is now.
I guess if you’re a young fan growing up now, you won’t know any different, but certainly some of the charm has disappeared in recent times.
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I get about 90% of my football news/opinion tbh haha. I’ve largely stopped reading sports columns now, and typically get the rest from twitter. I still enjoy shows like Goals on Sunday but the tribal aspect of the game is increasingly becoming irrelevant to me
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One thing I’ll say is I found the sport a lot more enjoyable in the late 90s early 2000s before all the stupid transfer fees came along, even up to the last 5 years. In the last 5 years the game has become stupid with transfer fees and wages.
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I think it can happen faster than people realize… margins seem larger when things are really good or really bad and we are still kind of in our nadir that started with last year and the year before. Biggest worry is that our squad value is low and aging, so refreshing it is going to be more painful.
Spurs and Pool are in a moment of ascendancy and Chelsea are a bit on the wane… Utd hard to read… City is likely a force with their money plus Pep - see them as perennial top 2-3 and maybe the only super-reliable one until Utd climb back to their rightful financial perch.
I’d say next year is impossible and probably the year after that… but to me, if we do smart business and Emery gets his act together OR we fire him and get a different manager, 2021-2022 could be a year we have a chance to challenge for title. I think we can be relevant to top 4 convo all these years, but title is a tough ask with City the way they are and an ascendant Pool and Spurs (who will both fade at some point, at least a little bit).
I still love it, but yeah I agree the obsessive desire to get up 6 or 7am on a Saturday morning isn’t quite there any more… I think its the dramatic acceleration and pollution of financial doping that has taken the shine off of it. If a team like ManCity, who basically were a perennial mid-table club without significant revenues can become a global force in a few years basically by spending insane amounts year after year (and it is an absolute joke anyone who argues “but they are doing it the right way, investing in this and investing in that” - yeah what they are saying about business is basically that you can generate ROI and profits simply by throwing money at things that don’t have the basic, structural potential to generate those said ROIs - if it was that easy then there wouldn’t be gigantic industries tied to generating alpha and trying to significantly beat long-term stock-market returns of ~10-12%).
FFP, salary caps, revenue sharing, something needs to be done to try to rebalance (which is really hard to do in a legit, fair, non-arbitrary way I acknowledge) or the gulfs between the rich and poor teams will only get more and more pronounced.
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I dont think that it helps that 3 of todays greatest players Messi, CR7 and Neymar all having been found guilty on tax fraud exactly helps.
Regardless of talent their greedy people and probably suns up were the games is actually at.
Its easy to pour scorn on the Blatters of this world, but these are the shining lights of the sport.
You aren’t that big of a fan of this because u trashed Wenger and he gave his entire life to Arsenal, lol hypocrite 