Angelito wrote:theHotHead wrote:Angelito wrote: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.
Dude, Wenger and Wenger alone is responsible for eroding the squad's quality!! While at the same time our wage bill was increasing at a rate it had no right to - with the calibre of players we were buying. It had nothing to do with the Emirates move, it was Wenger's naivety, stupidity and arrogance that caused us to slip back, nothing else.
I won't get into the dets because, frankly, I don't have the energy. But here's a question: did Wenger own Arsenal? If we're disenchanted that we'd fallen from a title challenger to a top-4 team to a EL side, it's down to those who run Arsenal, not down to Wenger who worked near miracles until 2011 at least.
We should be blaming those who run Arsenal, not the man who was a manager, and later a coach.
Agreed, anyone saying different is over passionate about speculation, there is no hard proof either way to blame anyone, i just find it a bit strange that Arsene would build multiple amazing teams and win the title 3x in 6 years and cups, then think, f**k it...'i'm gonna have a laugh here'
The best way to answer really is that it was a combination of things, including stadium move, new board, Dein Leaving, lack of funds so worse players/to many young players.
Its way to easy to blame the guy in the public eye (who did a f***ing excellent job of keeping the clubs business private.
Wenger was in for players like Kante etc and basically said himself the reason he got Xhaka was because the board would not pay Kantes wages (not exactly like that but it was obvious), sounds like a man by the balls.
When asked why Kante joined Chelsea not Arsenal, Wenger said it was “obvious” given his eventual destination, implying that it owed to Roman Abramovich's side's financial firepower.
https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/foo ... 60856.html