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Originally Posted by thenry
you do not have to spends billions to compete. in our case its spending within means and also getting the most from spend. we have a huge wage bill. last season we finished 19pts behind Utd and City. Utds wage bill is 12% higher than ours i think? we finished 19pts behind utilising half a squad? not only that but we finished 19pts behind having a manager hell bent over his formation and some average players. what if Wenger was able to get the most out of the full squad or close to it, theres always a couple that dont pan out but half a squad not performing? ontop of that a formation that was too strong for our performers as we were and still are picked off.
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I think you do need quite significant spending to compete. I haven't seen many examples in football where a team has managed to compete with someone that has a much higher budget. Here that would be Manchester City and Chelsea, in Spain it's Barcelona and Real Madrid. Germany is better but that's largely because they do not have juggernauts spending billions on their squads.
In England however the trend towards high spending has been the case since in the inception of the Premier League. Only one club outside the high earners have won the league in 20 years, that was Blackburn, and that was because they were financed for that title challenge by Jack Walker.
So it's not clear to me that you can compete on the field when you cannot compete in the transfer market. It just hasn't be done in the last 20 years. All the clubs that have won the Premier League have managed to compete with their rival clubs in the transfer market. That trend has only got more pronounced with the arrival of Chelsea.
If it was possible to build a title winning team without spending big other clubs would have done it by now. Especially us.
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its not in hindsight. previous seasons we needed a player or 2 extra. it wasnt done. we were crying out for it. may be not you but a vast amount of fans were. Wenger persisted. hes got himself in this because hes clearly in two places. at board level and pitched side. Wenger can be pitch side as well as aiding the boardroom and our forward motto but he cannot do it properly until he changes which he isnt going to do. i wish he would. Wenger himself is worth 100mil each window. if only he changed and dominated which he and we could.
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People always cry out for more players. Sometimes they will be correct, other times they won't. I agree that in 2008 we should have had better squad depth but we didn't and that was that. It's worth remembering all the other things the fans said we should do that would have been mistakes, remember the outcry for M'Vila? Now M'Vila's career is descending rapidly down the pan. The problem is the fans forget when they're wrong but remember when the manager is wrong for the next 10 years.
Arsenal won't be able to dominate. I don't understand that logic at all. We may one season make a heroic bid for the title but, unless the football climate changes, we won't ever dominate and we never really have since Chapman. United or Liverpool were always there.
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we are not meeting expectations. minimum requirement which is qaulifying for the CL isnt expectations being met. a title charge is.
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A title charge is an unrealistic expectation given the resources available. Even if we spent all the money in the bank our squad wouldn't match Manchester City's one. Given wages a player like Hazard would almost wipe it out.
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getting the most out of the squad is. going to our rivals places and giving a good account of ourselves is. not being picked off like schoolboys is. not having blind faith in average crap. not buying average crap where theres other options. not buying to aid a flawed formation which in fact is played with average players that get caught out then the rest of the squad have to bear the chaos. not having stars leave because their fed up. etc. etc.
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The stars leave because they can double their contracts elsewhere. Wenger doesn't want to buy 'average crap' but each transfer is a risk. Clubs everywhere make bad decisions when buying players. It isn't easy. I trust Wenger more than I trust fans when it comes to judging a players quality.
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Wengers performing against his own crap. hes getting into the CL using half a squad and that star or two surrounded by average. he is not performing above expectations or above resources available.
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Well he is matching expectations and sometimes slightly above what is available. We have the 4th/5th largest wage bill and finished 3rd. We have one of the lowest net transfer spends in the league and we finished 3rd. These aren't bad numbers. 3rd/4th is about where we are...behind City/Chelsea/United.