Quote Originally Posted by LDG View Post
It's all relative though. We've done what we can financially as the game has moved on. That has been enough to keep us in the top four. And without the stadium, the inflation in the market wouldn't allowed us to spend the top wages you state. The players that earned first team money in the end, were the ones who made the first team....they may not have been the required quality, but they must have been to keep us top four

Ozil and Sanchez may well have happened outside of a doped market, with lower sponsorship revenue.

We may have gotten away with a couple more years at Highbury, but the point is this. We spend within our means, from our own profits, and still compete. Without the stadium, we wouldn't be able to, AND maintain competetive. Full stop.
No, go back a step. I didn’t say they weren’t the required quality to keep us Top 4. They weren’t the required quality to win us silverware and that was my original comparison. We didn’t replace the Invincibles and went from Henry, Pires and Vieria to Ade, Hleb and Denilson/Cesc. It was a drop in quality but they earned around the same amount the Invincibles did and maybe more. The stadium boosted our revenue but it’s not as if we used that boost in revenue to upgrade or even maintain the standard we had back in Highbury.

I’m not saying the move wasn’t necessary, just questioning why people think we’d have dropped out of the Top 4. I think we’d have survived in Highbury more than a couple of seasons because there was nobody below us to worry about. Spurs, Everton…those teams weren’t even close to us without the stadium so why do you think we needed a significant boost in finances to compete for Top 4? That’s what I don’t get. There hasn’t been a team in the league to be consistently on our heels to challenge us for that spot. Not one. This season and last are the only two seasons where I think we could be in serious trouble because we now have 5 top teams with a history and record of finishing in the Top 5. But, we’re in a very good position because of the sponsors and stadium. It’s almost been 10 years since the move, so it’s been a strategic and case of long term planning. It wasn’t something we needed immediately or we’d have been blown out the water by teams like Spurs and Everton.

If those smaller teams manage to build a bigger and better stadium than ours, do you think they’ll immediately catapult to our level?