Arsenal Thread

What we saw on the derby was a real team, knowing what they're doing and how to do it, against a bunch of headless chicken, some playing for themselves, others who couldn't be bothered giving their 50% effort... and a clueless manager experimenting with Monreal at CB and playing Gibbs (after ages) on a derby.

But for all the "Wenger out" shouts, I think first and foremost we should be worried about something else: we clearly have the club on the wrong people's hands. Even if we change Wenger, but keep Kroenke and Gazidis in charge, we're fucked for the foreseeable future.

Kroenke's teams in the USA are all mediocre at best. Ask anyone who follow American sports (I think his NFL franchise had the worst record anyone's had in the last decade or something). So don't think he would treat Arsenal differently.

Also, not mentioning what will happen after the season is the ultimate lack of respect to fans. Nobody knows whether Wenger stays or goes (probably not even themselves, they'd be improvising!) as it seems it depends on the FA Cup... but what will one game change for us? Gazidis recently opened his mouth (finally) to say something about the next Emirates Cup?! WTF. There's something fundamentally wrong with the club, and Wenger (the only football person among those suits at the top) is the lesser problem IMO.
 
Well, I think that's it. I don't see Arsenal making top 4 for at least 3-4 years (barring one of the other top clubs absolutely implode).

City, Liverpool, Chelsea, United, Spurs are all pushing relentlessly to go to that next level.

With the state of Arsenal right now, neither the board nor the coach have the ambition and mentality to fight out of this predicament and close the gap between the other competitors. We're not Man U, where we can expect the board to throw loads of cash to try & close the quality gap, or even implement an aggresive plan like Liverpool or Spurs.

And with no CL football and no proper vision/ambition, it's gonna be basically impossible to attract top class talent & hold on to what we got. If Alexis leaves, it will be the last nail in the coffin.

We're talking about a mentality that stood by and watched this gradual decline year after year, with no resolve to reverse the trend, when in fact, it is obvious to everyone and their mother what was going on and what actions to take.

Like I said, barring a massive injury plague/Real Madrid Raid/absolute implotion by 2 of our competitors, I don't see us making it for a looong while. And there is an absolute risk (or I should say reality) of the gap increasing every year, as our competitors continue to make CL money and attract CL level players.
 
That is rather pessimistic.
In terms of finances Arsenal should still be miles ahead of Liverpool and Spurs.
The problem for Spurs will be to keep this team together. Walker is already on his way out and Alderweireld still does have a new contract. Delle Alli, Kane and Eriksen are wanted by some very big clubs.

Both Manchester teams have proven that you can buy succes to a certain degree, but that nothing is guaranteed. They weren't exactly world beaters last season. Still thin United is a shadow of the club they were under Ferguson.

I can only see Chelsea being well ahead of Arsenal, but they will also start building a new stadium...so that may hamper them too.

The big question is what will happen after Wenger leaves. His succesor will have a very tough time and he will have to be cunning, strong and Lucky not to have the same fate as Moyes...

You'll see things will go better than you think.
 
Spurs (Wembley), Chelsea (Europe) and Liverpool (Europe) could be be worse off this season.

With that said, if/when Sanchez leaves, so will Arsenal, unless they buy well​
 
Spurs have proven that if you got team spirit, you don't need a superstar like Alexis Sanchez.
If was Arsenal i would let go both Özil and Sanchez and build a real team.
The problem is that lots of fans expect instant success.

As a Spurs fan, i'm really, really satisfied with the way they build this current team. Will they win silverware? To be honest i don't think so, but we have seen beautifull football for two seasons now and that is more important to me.

That very good football was the unique selling proposition of Arsenal, that is gone for some seasons now...the team with Fabregas and Song in central midfield may not have won much, but there football was outrageously good.

I might be a weirdo, but silverware isn't everything in football if it sin't done in style.
 
Oh and about Sanchez, he seriously let his team down this season, he thinks he's bigger than the club. No player ever is.
 
But it was the superstar from Chelsea (Hazard) which made the difference. Swap Son (a good player) and Hazard and you'd be champions right now

I agree tho that the ideal is trophies won by brilliant football. The great teams people still talk about are those that did both.
Even Keegan's Newcastle are still remembered and part of that was because of the football they played - admittedly it's also b/c they bottled it big time

Sanchez threw his toys out of his pram but I can't blame him. It's not like he doesn't work his arse off for the team. I completely agreed with him being frustrated at Arsenal players celebrating an equaliser away at Bournemouth when there was time for a winner.
 
The problem is there is nothing that shows me this board and coach have the ability to create a real team.

Does the board really wanted to win the EPL? Or do they only care about sustainable money and making Top 4?

Does Wenger really want to win the EPL? Is he really crushed to see year after year his CL and EPL runs crushed already in March year after year? Is he completely deluded to why his team is not succesful and gradually getting weaker and weaker?
 
Here we go again :D

Bundesliga Left Wing Back of the year, but we're playing Bellerin there :D And last week, we had Ox there.

We passed up on Matic...Can someone explain me why? Now he's organized Man Utd's midfield, and freed up Pogba.
 
And there goes the season...

You can't have a midfield of Ramsey-Xhaka-Ozil...There is no physical presence.

We needed a Matic. Go and get William Carvalho.

Why is Nacho playing CB. Go and get VVD.
 
I wonder why this place's so dead now :LOL:
Come on guys, cheer up!

Just when we've given a pay rise to the manager and extended his contract for 2 more years, after a season where we failed to qualify for the CL after 20 years, to which our response in the transfer market was to take a £30m profit from our squad.

No biggie, is it? :P

I don't even know where to begin to go on about this clusterfuck going down at our club.
Wenger dismissed the idea of having a Director of Football working with him last season, implying that set up would have a few players forced upon him, players he didn't know or didn't want. So he wants to keep full control. So this is why we have the likes of Joel Campbell (6 loan spells) and Lucas Perez (barely used, now back on loan to Deportivo) and Mustafi (a £35m rated defender who they've just tried to shift on loan to Inter Milan after only 1 year). All of which are players he personaly chose, and wasted transfer and wages budget on.

About yesterday: after spending the whole summer saying Alexis wasn't for sale and would stay, they had accepted a deadline day bid of £60m for him... on the condition that Thomas Lemar would sign. So they put in a bid of 100m euros which Monaco accepted, but couldn't agree terms with the player. NO WONDER! The guy was about to enter the pitch for a WC Qualifier against Holland. All they had was 3 months to sort this shit out, FFS!

You can't make that shit up. And Arsene Wenger was in Paris, too. Maybe Dick Law missed another flight, so he decided to go talk to Lemar himself. I don't know... but the truth is, Lemar will play CL football with Monaco, and he wouldn't with us. It's over, Arsenal's and Wenger's appeal to top players has come to an end.

The only piece of good businness was shifting Ox for £40m (but we know only Kroenke will be happy about that, it won't make a difference to us).

Now we're left with a disgruntled star player for at least 6 more months, and let's not forget Özil is on his last year too, I'm thinking he won't sign a new deal either.

Now, on to football issues: Wenger committed the most basic mistake of man management last Sunday. He simply played 2 contract rebels against Liverpool, didn't he? By playing Alexis ahead of new signing Lacazette and Giroud, he made the dressing room environment even more toxic, letting down players who still want to play for him and leaving them to rot on the bench so that Alexis would play ahead of them. That sends out a bad message to the outside too, as it makes Arsenal look even weaker, overly dependent on Alexis.
The other contract rebel, Ox, was even more strange. Why play this guy at all? When his mind was elsewhere and especially considering all the compromises he had to make with team selection just to accommodate Ox on the right! We had Bellerin shifted to the left... all of this while Sead Kolasinac, that beast of a left back who shows such promise, was sitting on the bench, raring to go.
Just look at what Klopp did with Coutinho. That's the way to go about this business. Not only Coutinho wasn't hurt, he really caught the eye playing for Brazil yesterday. But when it comes to the club, he only gets to play if he's committed.

This is man management 101 really, which Wenger seems to overlook.
I won't even go on about the rest of the team, I think the pedestrian performance speaks for itself. The way those players behaved on the pitch is an absolute disgrace, they've let Wenger down big time, but Wenger isn't helping himself either.

I really don't know what will happen from now on, but one thing is certain: that idea that Wenger himself is the man to get the club out of this mess is becoming more laughable by the minute.
 
Think we'll come back in for Sanchez in January

Apparently the reason you couldn't buy anyone else is because your wage bill is messed up.
PL rules state you can't increase it by more than £7m per season. 2 years ago Arsenal "inflated" their wage bill (paying the wages of players on loan etc) on purpose to give them more room to manoeuvre last summer when you signed a few players. It has backfired now tho because you've struggled to shift enough wages out and you've been holding some back (to offer to Ozil, Sanchez, Ox and some of the players who go into their last year next season - quite a few players - like Giroud, Ramsey, Walcott, Welbeck, Monreal, Ospina, Cech)

Basically you've made a right balls up of your contracts
 
Didn't know our situation regarding wages was so bad. But it does make sense, cause it looks as though Arsenal are in dire need of shifting dead wood, players like Gabriel, Szczesny, Lucas Perez, Joel Campbell, Gibbs... which they did now, although some on loan only.

David Ornstein from BBC has described with the details the complete bollocks that this transfer window has been from an Arsenal point of view:
http://news.arseblog.com/2017/09/revealed-arsenals-crazy-summer-business-and-how-it-all-went-down/

It's an interesting read, since it sheds some light on the Mustafi situation and Bellerin, which I didn't even know. Both of them wanted out apparently. It seems Wenger has really lost most of the dressing room.

Again, it's really annoying to read that "Arsenal didn't have money left for major signings" even though we were in profit from transfers. Also the bit about not letting Alexis go all summer, only to do a U-turn on this and then leaving it to the very last minute to put in a proper bid and contract offer for Lemar.
It looks as though they're making it up as they go, no real plan whatsoever. What an utter embarrassment.

I think the people behind that 40,000,001 bid for Suarez are still working for Arsenal...
 
The rules on wages are you have 2 options
1. Only increase wage by £7m from the previous year
or
2. Only increase by 19m from the wage bill you had in 2013 (when the rules came in)

Arsenal's wage bill has increased the most, I read, since 2013 so they can't use that option.
Funnily enough, City's wage bill was at its highest ever in 2013, in part thanks to the sacking of Mancini et al., at around £233m, so we could increase our wage bill up to £252m without running foul of the rules.
So in effect whilst Arsenal could only increase their wage bill by 7m this summer we could have increased it by around £50m! We actually ended up lowering it by my calculation but it shows the quirk of the rules.

Reported today that you're opening contract negotiations with the likes of Ramsey, Walcott, Welbeck, Monreal.
Strange that Bellerin wants to leave. He only signed a new contract recently and the Barca links were around then too.
 
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This rule seems anything but reasonable, IMO.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but £7m is pocket change in modern football, in terms of salary?

Let's suppose a new player signs on a £200k a week salary (which unfortunatelly isn't anything groundbreaking for today's standards - Ox got offered 180, and refused!).
So 200,000 x 52 (weeks in a calendar year) = £10,400,000
So that's it, then? One player on £200k a week could be the drop in the bucket?
One couldn't add such a player to their roster without letting someone go to free up at least £3,400,000 of salary budget.

In this scenario I think the big spenders will be better off, because the amount they spent was already inflated before.
But a club like Arsenal, which tried to keep costs down for a long time, gets punished for its past efforts...
Not to mention clubs on the rise, getting more income than ever with the new broadcasting deals, but not being able to really invest to try and level the play field?

All of this looks batshit crazy to me...
 
You can go beyond the 7m but it has to be made up via external sources such as player sales, ticket money or commercial money, rather than PL funds - TV/prize money.
Dropping into the Europa didn't help you in this regard as you lost money there

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Hi Jonney, how are you, my friend?
I honestly think Stan Kroenke is the problem, his American sports aren't doing very good either.
Arsenal need a new owner and a new manager.

Wenger was great, but he is past it now. Too nice with the players to.
Don't give up on Arsenal they are a massive club, they won champioships with lots of managers (do you know how much managers won a title with Man Utd? Only 3. Busby, Ferguson and a guy in the 20's. Arsenal is the most consistent big club in England, they will be great again).

A Spurs fan comforting an Arsenal fan...pretty bizar, isn't it?

Take care my friend.
 
Congratulations on a well deserved derby win. Arsenal were the stronger team. Very good performances by the central defenders and the midfield. Özil was immense for Arsenal. I also saw one fantastic pass from Ramsey in the first half (to Bellerin?). That was outstanding. Spurs were not good enough to win, so i will not mention the first goal (oops).

On another note, Usamanov wants to buy Anderlecht...so he wants a second club. Fortunately there are Belgian candidates for a takeover.
 
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