So what do we do to improve our prospects of mounting a challenge for the league and other competitions.

[IBK]

Good thread and reasoning, GB

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management

Personally, I don't think I have too much of a problem with this. AW fecked up in last Summer's transfer window, and was punished for it. It was the start of the season that killed us, not the end. Our team shape has looked flakey recently because of key injuries, not because we've been playing any different. Its easy to forget that we were all commenting mid-season on how nice it was to see players wanting to play for each other again, and Wenger turned things around in this respect this season. We might have been well off the pace, but 3rd is no mean achievement - and I don't think another manager could have retrieved things like Wenger did.

-tactics

We need to play the opposition more, IMO. Otherwise again, I think we are over critical of our team.

Players/approach to investment

The club is at acrossroads. We need 15% less caution in investing in proven players that we need. Arteta/Mertesaker is going inthe right direction, but we need at least one other player of the stature of Podolski to come in in DM - and we need to break the bank to keep RVP, if he will stay.

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competition prioritisation

This is a difficult one. I don't think we threw the cups this year as we have done in previous years. You have to rotate these days. Our issue IMO is not wrong prioritisation, its carrying too many players who are just not good enough - see above.

-salary structure-

IMHO the biggest problem at our club is that we take too many 'punts' on players who aren't proven. And reward them to a degree that makes it difficult to move them on when they fail to shine. I think our salary structure needs to be looked at. We need to pay our best players what they are worth, and cut down on our £50/60M dross to fund it.

star player retention

As Flavs says, ain't a great deal we can do about this. With RVP, for example, provided that we offer him £150K pw, the club will have done everything it can realistically do to to keep him - automatic CL qualification plus genuinely offering as much as it can afford. He may well choose to go to a club with bigger resources than our, and short of going cap in hand to Usmanov, there is simply nothing we can do about this. Our club has been around for 126 years. If we think of it in these terms, depending on an oligarch/petro dollars is not IMO the way to roll.