Quote Originally Posted by Letters View Post
Because in order to determine whether the club is heading in the right direction the most relevant comparison is to the previous season.
Do you think that any football manager in the history of football, no matter how good, has year on year built better and better sides?
That team 10 years ago was just about the best team I've ever seen, if you thought we were going to stay at that level or just get better and better then you were being extremely naive. I think most of us realised we were being spoilt and were just enjoying it while it lasted.



Not. For several reasons. One I've mentioned above, no team just gets better and better. Secondly, the move necessarily meant a period of belt tightening, I think most of us here agree Wenger was too cautious and possibly remains so, but there was always going to be a time when we were going to be less competitive and needed to think longer term. Thirdly, the move was around the time that the billionaires started coming into the game and pumping silly amounts of money into clubs. If City win their game in hand then the top two will be two clubs bankrolled by billionaires. Co-incidence? New stadium or not, it'a always going to be difficult to compete with sides who can assemble squads with a blank cheque book.

If you want to talk about the stadium move then riddle me this: would we be better off were we still at Highbury and our income was significantly less than it is now? If you're frustrated at our failure to win trophies over the last 9 years then many of us share that frustration but I'd be interested to know how you think we could have better competed back at Highbury. The new sponsorship deals we have signed should now give us more financial muscle, the Ozil signing was hopefully the first sign of that. Was it enough? No, but it's a start and the results this year so far indicate we're heading in the right direction again. Whether we maintain that remains to be seen but I'm not going to pre-emptively moan about how bad things are based on what our position 'could' be in a month or so's time. Let's get there and then see where we are.
Not really - how you can compare 1 season when you've spent £42 mill on a world class player against the previous.
The comparison should be against what we were promised " A new stadium for us to become the best in Europe ". 10 years ago. We're not even the best in London.
This year we have tightened up at the back but are still shitting ourselves against the better clubs, even Everton. We have never been humiliated by Liverpool or by Man City, so I would actually suggest we have regressed against top opposition.

As I've posted before. The stadium is wonderful & gives us the future we need - no doubt. But go back to all the interviews you can find when Danny Fitz came up with this move backed by Wenger. Find one where they warned about "tightening our belts".
You won't, they told us the extra capacity would increase our revenue to enable us to compete for top signings WHILST paying off stadium debt. How many years did you hear the press or AST ask Wenger & the board did we have money to spend, it always came back with "Yes, but we need to find the right quality". It was only a couple of years ago when we heard that the financial constraints of the stadium were nearly over & money was in the bin.
Its bloody obvious Wenger & Fits weren't going to sell us the move out of Highbury by saying " oh, by the way after all the recent success, this new stadium will mean we'll win fuck all for 10 years & we'll have to regularly sell our best players. However like it or not that was exactly what happened. Even with £80 mill to spend last year Wenger tried to get away with spending nothing in the summer, he bought Ozil to save his job especially after the Villa result. If we have been lied to an the shareholders have amassed their profits whilst multiplying Arsenal's worth at our expense - is it not right that after 10 years we get what we were promised. If it is obvious Wenger can't deliver that in modern football, someone needs to have the balls to get rid & stop treating him like he is a mesiah. His legacy will be the stadium but his legacy has turned us from regular title contenders into regular 4th place contenders & champions league finalists into last 16 cannon fodder. Unless he changes his transfer ideals, he will be remembered as the manager who got worse as his time went on.