Arsène Wenger

“Looking at the Leicester model” :joy::joy:

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Arsenal want to be like Leicester? I’m gonna have to let that one sink in for a bit.

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Wow. The entire club needs a clear out. This is fucking terrible.

No money but offer £180000 to Chambo as well :arteta:

We moved stadiums to be like Leicester?! :arteta:

I don’t really care if Kroenke doesn’t put his own money into the club, we got enough ourselves. We just never spend it cos everyone running the show is a cunt.

Usmanov backed hit squads to take out our board please.

In any case, it has become clear that someone should come in and relieve Wenger of any transfer duties, beyond identifying players. He is hopeless at this shite and needs power taken away from him. Where is the promised DoF.

Also a point worth remembering. Abramovich doesn’t put any money into Chelsea anymore and they have similar financial power to us. Yet look at the difference.

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I know Ornstein is just paid to report the information he gets, but if you read through that bullet to bullet, there’s huge gaps/it’s pretty incoherent. How do you go from having more than the £100m spent in the summer of 2016, to making a net profit on transfers, offloading wages, and suddenly “not having money available for top class signings” on deadline day?

I’m not a tin foil hat guy and believe that the club wants to spend what they deem financially prudent to spend–even if that is sometimes far too conservative–so I am having trouble making sense of this. Perhaps leaking this bit about not having money to spend on top class signings on deadline day was a change of strategy meant to protect Wenger and deflect criticism from him? Only coherent explanation I can come up with…

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Based on my rough estimates, I do not think the club was lying when they spread the message that they did not have money to spend. However, this does not absolve the club of any wrong doing.

Wouldn’t a more accurate statement, then, have been that they didn’t have room to maneuver re: wages? That part was always believable to me, but that is different from not having money to spend, in terms of money in the transfer kitty.

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Doesn’t he say in the third bullet point we needed to make space on the wage bill?

Wow, just read that Ornstein piece

What an absolute mess!

How the fuck can they still think the current model will bring us the league title? We are falling further and further behind ffs

This club is only going one way with Kroenke and Wenger imo, and thats not winning the league

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Yeah, it’s the part about money in the kitty that had me confused, but I suppose when they refer to money available they are just referring to the wage issue.

It’s all very well saying we need to make space on the wage bill.
But who is paying so many players, so much money, and why?

It’s not as if we are a club stacked full with world class players in all positions.
We have two world class players and the rest is average at best.

They’re are trying to shift the blame and not take responsibility for what are their mistakes.
This is an accumulation of seasons of neglect and complacency and waiting too long to sort the mess out.

Considering our size, stature and wealth, is there a worse run club in Europe?

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Yes. AC Milan and Internazionale. But the former have been bought by other owners and Inter finally hired a proper manager. That title might solely be ours during the course of this season.

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Very depressing. Soon we’ll have the boss and the owner talking up the “Spurs Model” as our pathway to success.

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If the “spurs model” includes getting a manager as good as Pochettino, I’m all for it.

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If Wenger is saying he can’t compete with Chelsea while paying £50m+ for players and reportedly offering two players £250k+ a week and now mediocre players up to £180k a week then he really is stuck in the past.

I really hope I’m wrong, but I can’t help but read “safeguard going forward” to be signs of “we need to cover CL revenue loss”.

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Thank god Ox turned down that contract, he’s become a cult hero in my eyes for that.

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What is the wage rule that is limiting us?

Bingo

Wenger says we can’t compete with Man City, Chelsea and Man U, but we can.
It’s not like they buy all the best players.
There are plenty left over for rich clubs like us.

He also doesn’t mention Liverpool, Leicester, spurs and Everton who have either finished above us, or who are very close.
They don’t have the money we have, or the most experienced manager in the PL, but they certainly can compete with us.

These are just more pathetic excuses that the supporters don’t believe, because they have heard them too often before.

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I’m still trying to figure out this Premier League rule - all I can work out is that it limits our INCREASE in total wages year on year to 7 million, without additional increases (EXCLUDING PL broadcast monies, where so much of our revenue increase across the league has been recently)…

So this means you have to micromanage salary cap like a f*ing control freak (very much like the USA NFL) - frankly, I had no idea about this rule until this summer. It is a freaking massively important thing to be on top of… seriously, how are all the rest of the clubs (unless they are using the one time bump up to the minimum) adding players of higher calibre staying under this?

It also puts us at disadvantage relative to other leagues in Europe (unless they have similar)… in theory FFP should handle it similarly, but that seems a bit toothless atm with teams like PSG. Our rule also seems a bit odd b/c it doesn’t account for transfers - so it could potentially encourage overpaying and underselling transfers b/c those amounts don’t go toward wages (exception being sign-on). The whole thing sounds well-intentioned but poorly constructed, but I guess we don’t know all the details.

I don’t understand how we haven’t planned better against this… it beggars belief frankly… of all the other nonsense we have gone through as a club re: transfers, budgets, cash balances, etc. - there was always some shred of respectability and sensibility and intelligence that I hoped was behind it, but getting so askew of this rule is just a shambles, especially with the state of our squad.

Once again, we massively misplayed the evolving market in the last 5-6 years - I mean like epically.

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That makes for some sobering reading. Beyond the financials not adding up and the wage issues (desperately need the new contract guy to sort those out), the “Leicester model” line irks me the most. Unless I’m wrong, Leicester caught lightning in a bottle–career seasons from a few key players, a manager maximizing what he had and several top clubs in complete disarray. In what year will the Chavs, Manure and Citeh be in disarray and/or not care? And throw in not having to worry about mid-week games as well.

Surely, the top clubs being poor on the pitch had a lot more to do with Leicester’s “model” than a scouting/development network. Didn’t Arsenal hire that guy? If so, what has he done.

Last concern is that Wenger is losing the players out there. He seems oblivious. That’s a lot of players wanting out in a short time. What a mess.

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