theHotHead wrote:As much as I hate to admit it things have gotten worse since Wenger !! But its the transition we all should have expected to happen but secretly feared, no band aid is gonna fix this we need to cauterise the cancer Wenger left and rebuild.
I beg to disagree.
Wenger didn't leave us in any mess, as unpopular as it may sound here. If his final, horrible season amounts to a League Cup Final, a UEL SF that we lost because of a Kosc blunder and no Auba or Alexis in it, or the second best home record in the Prem behind champions City, it wasn't that bad.
What was bad was Arsenal directors begging Wenger to stay for one more season after 16/17 because nobody was competent enough to include a proper football admin team within Arsenal until 17/18.
Wenger should have been moved upstairs after 15/16, or should have been let go after that FA Cup win in '17.
Our recruitment has been worse off since Wenger let go of his iron fist on transfers. Allegedly, the likes of Xhaka and Mustafi were Gazidis-sanctioned transfers. Ozil's £350k was on Gazidis. The only positive thing he did was sign Lacazette. Auba, Torreira, 'Douzi, and the likes were on Mislintat more than on Gazidis.
The problem at Arsenal is at directorial level. Gazidis and Sanllehi hired Unai when Conte was available. We've splashed over £200m since Wenger.
Dare I say, Wenger has gone from being revered to being criminally underrated. He spent his prime years here, '03 until '11 under financial austerity. When we did spend a bit, like the Ozil transfer, we were still operating on a net spend of £30m that season.
It wasn't until 2014 where we actually splashed the cash—spending nearly £100m in the summer of 2014. By then, Wenger should have been DoF at Arsenal. We still won the FA Cup that season.
15/16 was really it. If we had capable people at board level, Wenger wouldn't have survived that season. We didn't. And we still don't. I don't rate Sanllehi.
Basically, we have 4 people doing the job Wenger did by himself for nearly a decade at Arsenal. And, we aren't better off. We're worse.
Not only are we less impressive, we don't play the attractive brand of football that we did under Wenger either. We can't blame Wenger for the board's incompetence.
I do hope and pray Arteta can change this come next season. But then again.. We don't have an ambitious or strategic board.