imagine this

[Olivier's xmas twist]

imagine if in 2002-2004 seasons we had sold Henry,Bergkamp, Pires,freddie ljungberg in their prime. People on this forum would have gone mental at the time if that had happened. And now we are basically doing that, selling Song, Nasri, RVP and Fabregas. Our transfer policy just seems so absurd now. It just seems weird that wenger seems less determined to get players in, in his first season here he got Inamoto, Sol Campbell etc. now he seems a lot more restricted.

Yeah but we'd have never have done that. We have no new staduims to worry about and all the players we had were winners. heck even the cheap players we brought in looked good. Even if we lost players then you still knew top players wanted to come or we get quality replacments even if we spent less.

Those days spending £20 mill was a huge deal, you get all the best players for that. Now you have to spend £50 mill to get the best.

Don't think Wenger has changed his spending pattern since then, only diffrence is cheap now is cheap and you can tell.

[Letters]

Football was different then. Top quality players could be bought for relatively little, billionaires hadn't come in and distorted the transfer fees and wages to ridiculous levels. And we were a successful club, top players wanted to come to us, now they want to leave to win things.

Selling Nasri and RvP wasn't because of a transfer policy, Nasri chased the money, RvP wanted success and questioned the club's ambition. If a player wants to leave then it is quite hard to keep them. We could have kept RvP for one more season, we arguably should have. But it would only have delayed the inevitable.

[-Xs-]

Whilst that is true Letts, teams have always been able to outspend us, although, the options in the PL were fewer.
When we were an ambitious team, we were the 2nd most desirable PL team to join, sometimes the 1st. But I don't think that was ever about the money. Yes, the billionaires muddy'd the field, but is that the sole reason we aim now for 4th not 1st? And could that play on the minds of prospective ambitious 'super quality' players?

[Olivier's xmas twist]

Football was different then. Top quality players could be bought for relatively little, billionaires hadn't come in and distorted the transfer fees and wages to ridiculous levels. And we were a successful club, top players wanted to come to us, now they want to leave to win things.

Selling Nasri and RvP wasn't because of a transfer policy, Nasri chased the money, RvP wanted success and questioned the club's ambition. If a player wants to leave then it is quite hard to keep them. We could have kept RvP for one more season, we arguably should have. But it would only have delayed the inevitable.

Spot on.

[Olivier's xmas twist]

Whilst that is true Letts, teams have always been able to outspend us, although, the options in the PL were fewer.
When we were an ambitious team, we were the 2nd most desirable PL team to join, sometimes the 1st. But I don't think that was ever about the money. Yes, the billionaires muddy'd the field, but is that the sole reason we aim now for 4th not 1st? And could that play on the minds of prospective ambitious 'super quality' players?

The Billionaire has nothing to do why we aim for 4th. Yes the club complain about it but its a seperate issue. The reaason why the lowest they accept is 4th. Is so when the FFP comes into play we'd be ok and self sustaining. In the days you mentiond, yes we may have been out spent, but it was not all crazy wages people playing for money etc.

Heck with us we did not need to spend big cause finding those players worked for us. Which the likes of Anelka proved.

[RomfordPele]

Obvious point but people wouldn't have minded selling the invincible era stars as long as we replaced them with quality and carried on winning. We lost massive players in the early wenger years - overmars and anelka in particular - but we bought substantial replacements that made the team better.

Yes, of course, football HAS changed - it's now tough or impossible to get the very biggest names - but look at the players we supposedly passed up (alonso, mata and cahill spring to mind) because we wouldn't stump up relatively modest transfer fees, and you can see the we could have done the same in 2006-10, that we did in 1999-2003: i.e. sell well, buy well and thrive.

We didn't do it. We ARE now a club in decline, no doubt about it, and my fear is that's bound to influence the players we can attract and keep in the future. After all good players want to go to clubs that are on the ascent rather than on the wane. Mercenaries and mediocrities are attracted to the latter. It's natural.

In those circumstances, declining clubs can easily and quickly going into free fall - look at newcastle a few years back. A big stadium and a proud history does not somehow make Arsenal immune from the same fate. We need to tread very carefully.

[Xhaka Can’t]

The one positive we can take out of this is that we are no longer stagnating.

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