Quote Originally Posted by Synti Claus View Post
The question you should be asking is - how many high profile players walk out on a free? We're a special case so there won't by any empirical evidence to look at. The closest situations I can remember is Gareth Bale but somehow Tottenham got him to sign anyway. Every other club seems to either sell in time or pay their players what they want. But we dont operate like that. It has happened a few times before where we've let the contracts of key players go down to a year. When you operate like we do, alarm bells have to be ringing when there are 2 years left. You sell at any cost or you give the player what you want. Failing that, you bully them into signing. You can't play hard ball when there's 6 months left because the player holds all the power. When he has 2 years left that's the time to freeze them out. Wenger had the right idea but just did it too late. Obviously we all prefer to sort ourselves out and start paying players more, but if we're going to operate in a retarded way, grebbo's plan is the best plan out of the other retarded plans available.
Yep, this.The fault lies with Arsenal and we are pretty unique in the sense that we let our stars run down their contracts, does this happen at Man United or Spurs? No it doesn't, you either pay the player the market rate or you lose...in our case we're losing.

We've been relatively lucky in the case of "Nasri", not so much with "RVP", but whatever we could have got for him wouldn't have made a difference because we wouldn't have spent it sufficiently.We're totally and utterly screwed with Theo, we either lose a 20mill + player on the cheap or more embarrassingly lose him for nothing.You have people like Gazidis, PHW & Arsene boasting about the club being financially prudent and sufficiently run yet we have "marketable" star players walking away for next to nothing and a bench full of flops who command circa 70k per week.Truly laughable, our business model sucks.