Yeah, the wage structure is only part of the problem, the most poignant fact is that we lose our best players because we're unable to compete for the league or CL.
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Yeah, the wage structure is only part of the problem, the most poignant fact is that we lose our best players because we're unable to compete for the league or CL.
Forget about what the players want - we've been through it too many times and it's impossible to answer. An easier question: what does the club want? With Van Persie (even for this one season) we have a great shot at the title or a domestic cup. Now, not so much. So the £24m that the club gained from the Van Persie transfer could well be the cost of a title. So if no titles and CL win is part of the reason the top players don't stick around, then the club had a good opportunity to end that this time by telling Van Persie to see out his contract. They didn't. So who are really the 'money grabbing ****s'? Answer: Everyone.
Is competing enough to convince players to stay?
Maybe once upon a time when bigger clubs could only offer a modest wage increase.
But when some are offering to double or triple a players wages, you are effectively boned.
The vast majority of players would still leave.
"The club is moving toward a less equitable pay structure as the AST acknowledged", according to the Cultured Left Foot blog. We need those re-negotiated commercial deals to stay on top of the balooning wage bill as it is. Maybe then selling our highest earner/most valuable player every year won't look quite as attractive.
My point was, that all we kept hearing is RVP wanting to leave to win things, so giving him £200K plus would not have made him to stay. Yes we could have kept him and maybe we would have had a better chance on winning the league. However even with him, we'd still have need more quality. The clubs problem is that were too weak when it comes to transfers and cave in to quickly. Wenger lets himself get caught up in the emotions of his players. Weould have told Barca £60 mill for cesc or piss off. Just like the mancs did with CR7.
My point is - if RVP wants to win things then forcing him to see out this year might've been the year where we win things. I don't think Wenger got 'caught up in the emotions' of Van Persie. The club wanted to make the sale and he let them because they keep stuffing money in his mouth.
And FoL - you're right. You need both but having a lot of cash to throw around also helps you to win things so being loaded doesn't just correlate with success but cause it.
I think with Wenger being a long-time admirer, the bargain of Cazorla would've been too good to pass up. I think it's more likely we wouldn't have bought Giroud instead. That doesn't make up all the Van Persie money but that's exactly what I'm arguing - the club don't have their priorities right if it's true that it's not a disaster to take a one-off hit of an extra £15-20m. There are no guarantees of a title but that's the risk the club don't want to take.
The same criticism holds from my POV. Suppose we had passed up the opportunity to buy Cazorla - then that £15m is potentially the cost of the title that the club aren't prepared to pay for, knowing, as you say, that it could help to partly prevent top players from wanting to leave. The sale of Van Persie just makes it more transparent - that we had the quality of a title-winning side and then we handed the best player to Man Utd.