Oompa your post shows you to be a classic example of someone that’s become accepting of the mediocrity surrounding the club then.
Finishing a distant 2nd in the league (3rd but for Tottenham’s implosion anyway) is not a cause for optimism just because it breaks a streak of 3rd/4th/3rd/4th, moreso because of the circumstances. Ridiculous.
In general I think that is the case. It is just the amounts of discussions here on OA that is consumed by the crying that annoys me. I loved this (the old) place for years, the discussions were good, which is why I bother personally. The trend lately is that every thread is within hours consumed by complaints over Wenger. And I am fed up not with the opinion, but how it consumes the forums and even topics which have nothing to do with it, which I personally have an interest in.
Because it is not reasonable to expect a team full of £5-10 million players to add 3 players and -demand- a win. Why would it be. Chelsea and City and United all spend way above £500m on their current squads that we are competing against. Why do we demand that a team full of scrubs add 3 players should beat that? Because Leicester did it? As far as Arsenal is concerned we beat them both home and away even with the silly Vardy penalty. And it wasn’t even close in the 5-2 bashing. Take it to the extreme, how do you expect any team to beat team #2 if the other 18 teams concede seven goals to them every game? You don’t. They win. And there is nothing you can do about it. It is not only up to us.
Comparing points between seasons is useless, old and crap argument of poor logic. You can’t all underperform in a closed group as the trophy isn’t given out with regards to how teams performed last season or 20 years ago. Performance within a closed group is perfectly relative. The conditions are set during the transfer window (roughly), and after that it is all just relative performance. Again 8 clubs in the top 20 spending clubs in Europe could explain the spread. Back in the 50’s you’d play 42 games yet teams would win it with 60 points. Who cares, no one because it is not the same thing. You all play each other home and away, there is zero difference.
Nah bra, just understanding the situation, that is all. Do you “accept the mediocrity surrounding” a guy who broke his leg and just started running? Expecting a club that hasn’t spent a dime in a decade to beat everybody comfortably after buying 3 players is idiocy. Expecting it will take years to close the money gap, after which we are on -relatively even terms- in squad potential meaning you still wouldn’t statistically win it more than once every handful of years or w/e, is however reasonable. And it helps keep you sane. What’s ridiculous here is you lot for not understanding that, and not seeing it coming ten years ago. My post shows me to be a classic example of someone who understands the bigger picture and has no reason to cry. That’s all.
Ah, you’re one of those that is of the opinion the club was financially hamstrung all the way through to the Ozil deal in summer 2013, rather than the club being mired deep in the Wenger vanity project at the time.
Fair enough, there’s no concrete evidence outside of the club available for any of us to determine either way*. I’m done arguing about Wenger thesedays tbh, I just support the team on the pitch.
*well there is, it’s in a well known book to which there is universal access, but numbers and detailed financial breakdowns are for boring people right
You’re trying to ridicule but he should have bought more players and we might have won it. You say that we got second without buying an outfield player as if that is an achievement we should be lauding, instead of reaching the obvious conclusion that signing an outfield player or two could clearly have led to us doing better. It’s not like we had an 02/03 squad last summer, one that you could only add a goalkeeper to and then reasonably expect to challenge for the highest honours. We had a flawed squad that needed work doing to it, that we then finished second by only adding a goalkeeper only illustrates that it was our best opportunity to win the league in many years.
I feel like the part of your post I’ve highlighted comes off as being unambitious and a bit of a small time mentality.
But then again United Spent £250m on they squad and ended up in Europa, adding players just because everyone is doesn’t equate to racking up more points. We have to accept that some of our players just lost it after Christmas; if anything that is what we need to sort out the most why do we fall off after Christmas after being top two seasons in a row.
Hope so. Mustafi is also still young. He can stay here for many years.
Ahhhh the old “poor little Arsenal” routine…the pint sized punchers from the grove, the caped crusaders of football purity battling against all odds against the evil forces of oil money, the mountain stream of football, pure as the morning dew on the grass at our massive all-seater stadium with naming rights granted to an Arabic airline that in no way has ties to the oil money of the Chavs and Man Shitty.
I’ll give Wenger and Kroenke credit they’ve played their hand nicely but they’re just military recruiters, sucking the weak minded in to their product with false enemies and promises of all kinds of glory and then turn you straight back round to fight on the front lines and take all the casualties while they smoke cigars and drink wine back at HQ.
It’s not about demanding and expecting, it’s about blowing a huge opportunity and what that says about this manager/club. When the odds are massively in our favour we/he still can’t pull it over the line. Is he going to do it when other clubs are doing what they’re supposed? Probably not. Hence the statements we’re bottlers and Wenger is probably never going to win the PL ever again.
There’s a hierarchy in this League. How much people want to believe it’s an open and competitive League. Clubs often enough finish around the same position season after season. When Chelsea and/or United fail to make top four and City comes in at 4th after being 1st, 2nd, 1st and 2nd the 4 years before that one can state they were underperforming.
About the spending; that argument and how the League is more competitive because of it, is also a somewhat flawed argument. It’s not like City/Chelsea/United/Arsenal are excluded from the television deal and other clubs edge closer to the top four because of it. We are also earning more money and there still is a certain gap between the modern top 4 and other teams in the League. There isn’t a trend of the PL being more competitive, not yet at least.
Not really, I am a 4th year astrophysics student, numbers don’t scare or bore me much, in fact I’d say I’m surprisingly good at them. I am not of the opinon that the club was financially hamstrung to the extent some argue, I am saying Wenger was (Kroenke being the missing variable) -when you take responsibility in account- meaning you can’t load your last save in FM if you accidentally piss away £100m. Which our competitors could, and did, and still do. Man U do. Chelsea last season. Tottenham after Bale. Liverpool for a good while under Benitez. City for the first few years. Or to put it straight: The worst poker player in history sit in no limit and try to hard ball opponents with near infinite resources. Especially when it is your savings and house mortgage on the stake.
See the “could” there? Ofc I can’t say you’re wrong. Would it help? Probably. Barca barely won the league year with Messi Suarez and Neymar. Do you take responsibility for what happens if we spend and the signings that don’t pay off? Do you actually know the inner workings of transfers? I don’t but it probably isn’t that easy to sign world class players with 8-10 clubs in Europe being “top spenders” and we’re just trying to be one out of many. The fact that Giroud didn’t score for 15 games in a row is probably a more relevant factor. What team wins the league with a main striker like that? “buy a better striker then” yep but If we knew for a fact he would hit that slump I’m sure we would have. Had he scored a goal 10/15 games there we would have won the league, another “if”. I can’t argue with your imagined scenario and you can’t argue with mine, but we certainly should aim higher than the shit fest that has been going on for years here now, don’t you agree? What happened to the knee jerk thread? It’s useless now that every thread is the daily knee jerk thread?
Ahhhh the old Morris routine and I stopped reading.
The idea that Wenger doesn’t “want to spend” or has “vanity projects” must be the football fan equivalent of thinking we never landed on the moon. What the shite is wrong with you. He knows as well as anybody else that success is how he’ll be remembered, he doesn’t get to pocket any money he doesn’t spend and he isn’t lauded as one of the best managers in the world by managers and players alike because “they don’t get it” and “you do”.
If you think his 70 min subs and weird weakness for midfielders is bad then that stuff is fine, I agree and I wish we could debate it without the topic being polluted by the same repetitive shite on here. But the “greedy” argument is some dumb arse tin foil crap. Not to mention that there are another 5 top of the art managers in the same league as us with more money to spend, that battle is between the Mansours and Kroenke and the likes, not Pep and Wenger and their equivalents. Do you think Pep would even come if Mansours said “no more money, you want to buy you sell now”. Fat chance.
You’re not deluded nor do you have rose tinted glasses on because you’re not taking every opportunity crying your behind out in public over the same shit concerning Arsenal day in and out for years. And to read that the players are the ones with a weak mentality? Chuckle.
Your whole money argument is poor logic mate. Ofc the difference is smaller when everyone gets more money. Do you get the relativity in what I wrote last time? That is the exact reason that when City spent £80m and we spent £20m in a window they spent four times as much as us and we correctly and responsibly didn’t try to hard ball but took what we could get, but when they can spend £150m and we can spend £90m (this window’s figures, net) they’re spending less than twice as much as us yet it’s the same £60m discrepancy, but the relative difference is shrinking, this is what we planned for and what is different since 2013 and this is how we’re closing the gap, and it is showing in what players we can buy, that we won trophies albeit not the biggest ones, and we’re finishing in our best league position in a decade, above the lot of them. But it takes more than a couple of windows to refresh your entire squad, surely everyone must understand that? And to just say everyone else is bad is pointless. We will -never- spend as much as say City as long as it’s a rich kid’s toy. Or you’d have to mail Kroenke and tell him to take the battle with the Mansours. It has NOTHING to do with Wenger.
The sixth or seventh placed team in the PL could afford a £50m world class player from Real Madrid nowadays, assuming he’d like to come. And if you apply that trend to the whole league and consider that Aston Villa and Newcastle were in the top 20 spenders in Europe last window and they both got relegated you have to conclude that r relative differences in spending shrinks, the league is more normalised and it becomes more difficult to get 90+ points, yet the winner is still the best in the bunch because the trophy is given to the relatively best team over the season.
It is the exact same reason English players are so ridiculously overpriced due to the home grown quota. Raheem Sterling wasn’t worth £50m abroad. He is here, and City atm need to ship out 2 foreign players to be able to register their whole squad as of today. It is all from the same source, the money distribution. So yes, they are all in fact edging closer.
Of course anything can happen, City can win it this year with 90 points, it is not outside a normal distribution anyway but this whole thing is a plan set in motion by us in 2006 and we’re fairly on course I think, and it is down to us being responsible about the whole thing. I was never deluded enough to think that one funny FM transfer window and we’d win everything from being a team full of over-performing shitty kids. It takes time, competition is fiercer than ever.
After Giroud had an patch of scoring well I remember Bilal saying that he could get thirty goals. I tried to dampen his expectations by saying that we all know Giroud is quite streaky. He’ll post great numbers for ten games and at another point in the season he won’t score for ten games. If we hadn’t switched sites I’d find the exact post and quote it here. That’s not bigging myself up, at the time I felt I was stating the obvious, because Giroud’s nature was common knowledge.
I didn’t expect fifteen games without a goal, because that is truly appalling, but it is no secret that Giroud can go on an extended run without scoring. We already knew this, but you’re making out like we couldn’t have predicted Giroud would go on a shit streak, which isn’t true.
I just have two questions for you, because I feel like this is going nowhere otherwise:
Don’t you think that when the clubs (City, United, Chelsea) above us in the pecking order, of who either one of them normally wins the League, all are dropping the ball, we are the ones who HAVE to take advantage of their failings by winning the League?
Aren’t our performances in that regard the manager’s responsibility?
That Giroud drought last season is solely down poor squad preparation and Management from Wenger. It could have been avoided with proper rotation and half decent competition being brought in
Exactly.
The lack of decent competition lead to complacency.
It didn’t help that Welbeck was injured, but Wenger knew that going in to the season and should have strengthened that position, rather than waiting until this season.
It’s hard to believe how many seasons we go into where we have an injury crisis before the first game.
Other clubs seem more prepared than us going into a season but we are still buying players after it has started, and are nearly always the least prepared of the top clubs.
Not down to the player at all then?
All well and good to write dissertations analyzing all of this to death, but at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter why IBM or Apple or Facebook missed their targets - their CEO gets massive heat and boards and CEO’s heads roll after a few years. You either use your resources aggressively to succeed or you get criticized for not succeeding, and I’m not even talking about tactical or other managerial blunders.
For as much as I love the guy you can’t really expect him to do a proper job when he has no fear of competition and he isn’t rotated effectively to prevent fatigue. He has his limitations, he’s isn’t good enough as undisputed CF for a club like Arsenal over a sustained long season.
He’s one of those guys who needs to be kept on his feet mentally or else he gets lazy.
We knew, I assumed, I have always said we needed better than Giroud to win the league. I don’t know the reasons behind why Wenger didn’t, I’m guessing that the transfer market is far more complicated than most believe, Wenger might have expected him to score between Jan and May derp, but I don’t know. We got Perez now and I have a feeling it is not simply down to Welbeck being out. I expect Wenger to say exactly that if asked in the media though since he would never shit-talk his own players because what good would that do, and I expect a good five people here on OA spaz over it if he does lol
1: depends on how you define have to. You don’t press the “try harder” button on your pc game, part of my response here would be the above stuff to Jakey, I don’t think Giroud was good enough ever, I HOPED he would be, I’d be lyrical if he turned out to be but I wasn’t feeling good about it. I’d like to know the actual details of how we “take advantage” in say… Jan-Feb of 2016 when we notice that they lot of them are underperforming badly and they seem to be out of it. What practical things should we actually have done there.
2: Partly, absolutely. No problem with that. My problem lies with the idea that bob and his uncle would’ve won the league with this squad, a squad with 3-4 players out of 25 that any other top team would let into their starting eleven. It takes time to build a winning squad for us. I disagree with plenty of things Wenger does but there is some reason to it and have no problem with other people’s criticism of some things he does. Full pardon is and has never been my agenda.
skim through it. 2 have us as winners, Chelsea the most likely candidate. Leicester favourites to go down. United mounting a Challenge. West Ham being relegated. And most of us felt pretty much the same before the season started. We ended up 10 points behind Leicester. If we had gotten closer, say 2-3 points off, it is not like the criticism had been any milder towards him. Why? Because there is and was never any argument based on how well he does. The arguments are based on completely different things, and that, when that consumes every topic here, annoys me 
Cool, so I expect all the pointless crying to stop here then, it makes no difference analysing that to death either, since our spending comes from above our heads, and above Wenger’s head, no matter what anyone here thinks. And that amount of money that should be “used aggressively” worked out for those three companies you listed. Now list all the companies during the same time that it didn’t work for. And the current status of their families. Or fill a couple of text files with them as it would include millions of names, and shift-delete it. Responsible growth is what us at the club below Kroenke are limited to, that seems to be a common misconception here. Aggressively spend, none of the companies you listed aggressively spent and had heads roll when they were building the company. That’s how it works when you’re at the top trying to stay there. That analogy would work for Real Madrid, and it does, to the point, that’s exactly how they run their club. We’re not them, nor are we of their stature, nor is that the way to get there.
What we should have done? Not bottle it. For example; not giving leads away against WBA or Norwich in November. The 3-3 against Liverpool comes to mind when we conceded a late goal. Or crumble under pressure by after beating Leicester going on a streak of losing points in three consecutive games.
Because of the special circumstances (City, Chelsea and United all failing) that squad should have been good enough to win the League. I don’t know how I can make that any clearer for you too understand. It wasn’t about what people thought about that squad at the start of the season. It was about how we didn’t make the most of the opportunity given, like I said before.
The whole point is that we’ve seemed to have crumbled under pressure. And yes that squad should have and could have performed better. F.e. the 79 points in 13/14, wouldn’t have won the League, but there was far more potential in that squad that we came up with. Which is the manager’s responsibility of not making the most of.
Because of that. If he can’t make the most of a situation where everything works in our favour as far as the competition goes, how on earth is he going to win the League when the competition is playing/performing well?
(Wtf, there’s football on today)