Originally Posted by
Letters
I looked into this before. Over those 2 seasons when we signed Ozil and Sanchez I think City spent a lot more than us but no-one else did.
From memory I think it was Chelsea (or possibly Utd, one of the two) who also outspent us but only marginally. No-one else in England did.
Those years would be cherry picked only if I picked 2 random years in the last 10 years. But our financial position changed radically 2 years ago when the new financial deals were in place. And then our spending changed. Comparing our spending before then and after is ridiculous and simplistic. A lot of the last 10 years we've had the stadium debt and (relatively) poor commercial deals, and we had the billionaires running amock inflating the market.
Could we have spent more in that period? Probably we could, yes. Wenger erred on the side of caution and in the short term maybe that hurt us. In the long term it's left us in a very healthy place to compete and when Wenger felt the money was there he started spending it. The lack of a striker in the summer was a disappointment and on Wenger's head be it if that hurts us, we seem to be doing ok so far, after a shaky start. The CL games have been a balls up but we're 2nd in the league, we just beat the team who were top comfortably - a team we regularly messed up against. I'll reserve judgement till May but I don't things are going so bad right now, we're looking like a side that can challenge which is what we all want, isn't it?
