Quote Originally Posted by mastermind84 View Post
Clichy was very good and a successful player from our youth scheme. He was good for us and we sold him for a lot more than we bought him for. Vela, not so much but the club turned a big profit on him as well.

And you cannot ignore what happened with City and Chelsea entering the fray being a big reason why we cannot compete. But here is the truth that many of us never want to accept, Arsenal is and have always been a 2nd tier team. We have never competed with United, Madrid, Bayern, Barca, and only started doing it on a small scale because Wenger and co discovered undervalued player markets. Now everyone else has caught up, and City and Chelsea can spend more than everyone, and surpassed us there so we need to find another undervalued market.


I type all of this not to defend the board, but its not as easy as fans want it to be. I just hope FFP works, but I have my doubts because a)I dont think its enforceable b)if it is enforceable, Arsenal will still be behind United and the other true elite clubs like Bayern and Madrid because the principles of FFP favors the already big clubs.
I don't think anyone has a problem accepting that fact. We're not Liverpool supporters here. But, the fact is, we've been told the stadium would get us up to that level to compete and now we're here, we're being told it's sponsorship money like when we were at Highbury. Before we know it, they'll be talking about stadium capacity again. A constant cycle.

Chelsea and City are a factor but that doesn't explain why we haven't won a single trophy in years. Carling Cup, FA Cup or Champs League.

As for the transfer market, City and Chelsea have been a factor but it doesn't explain or excuse everything. There have always been undervalued players on the market and there still are now, otherwise we'd have never been able to buy Arteta, Poldoski, Merts and Cazrola. We can go back further and look at Nasri, Rosicky, Ade, Eduardo, Sagna, Vermaelen and Hleb as examples. All players that cost no more than £15m I believe. We abandoned our old strategy and went for younger players because Wenger thought he'd be able to have a line up of world superstars because he's always known about players like Ronaldo and Ronaldinho, but could never get them. With the boards backing, they trusted him to bring in and breed a new line up of stars because he was great at identifying undervalued players like Henry, Vieira and Pires.

We don't need to find a new undervalued market, we tried to do with the youth project, that flopped and now we're going back to what we know as seen over the last few windows. These undervalued players have always been there but we abandoned it. The Chelsea's and Man City's go after the players that are on everyone's shopping list and we've never been able to get those sort of players anyway.