Summer Transfer Misery 2017/18

[Letters]

Is it the logical thing to player Liverpool with Giroud and Lacazette on the bench and Welbeck up front?
I increasingly don't get him either but I don't believe for one moment that his failure in the CL doesn't bother him.

[Herbert_Chapman's_Zombie]

Why wouldn't you say your bothered, it's the logical thing surely to say yes it's it something I think about as I would like to win it once in my career (standard fair for a manager at a big club).

Sometimes I just don't get the guy, well quite often actually.

As for his interest in Mbappe, it's as concrete as his interest in all those other worldies we "could have signed".

Because he's at the end of his career and he probably knows he will never win it.

What's the point of admitting a regret you realise you will never be able to rectify.

[GP]

Is it the logical thing to player Liverpool with Giroud and Lacazette on the bench and Welbeck up front?
I increasingly don't get him either but I don't believe for one moment that his failure in the CL doesn't bother him.

Even defeat or setback bothers him. You can see him growing visibly frustrated because there's nothing he can do about it.

[Özim]

It is a fair question and I've already given my take on that. Quite simply, he has got older, he hasn't been able or willing to adapt as the game has changed around him.
But that doesn't mean that he wasn't, in the early days, a revolutionary who transformed the club.

It's like watching the original 1933 King Kong film now and saying "The effects are crap!". Well, sure, they look pretty crappy NOW, because things have moved on and we are used to better. But at the time they were thought amazing. If a director kept making films using those techniques then they would look increasingly bad compared with films made using modern techniques. And that's where Wenger has failed, his once revolutionary ideas about fitness, diet and training are no longer revolutionary. His once revolutionary knowledge of the worldwide game which meant he could cherry pick talent before other clubs even knew about players is no longer revolutionary. The other clubs have caught up and arguably surpassed us in these areas.

I think it's too simplistic to say that it's been 7 years of success and 13 of failure. In the middle phase of the 3 I outlined above I think he did pretty well when money was fairly tight and the billionaires were running amok to keep us relatively competitive. He failed to land another title, maybe without the Eduardo leg break he would have, we will never know. But I don't regard those years as an abject failure. I think he deserved a chance when the money became available to use it to try and compete again. The signings of Ozil, Cech and Sanchez did seem to indicate a change of direction, the FA Cup was a welcome relief after so many trophyless years. But he has failed to push us on and it's increasingly clear he can't.

Wenger is a man making stop motion films in a world of CGI. But back in the day his stop-motion films were brilliant, he was brilliant. He had flaws, sure, every manager does. And I don't believe you or anyone else was particularly prescient about those, his failure as a tactician is not new news. But comments about him being the worst manager Arsenal have had are pretty silly.

I don't think your comparison works as one is technology based and cannot change, whereas the other is a human being (supposedly a very intelligent one) who has a brain and can think and adapt to his environment.

Wenger should be able to adapt, in fact he'd probably only need to look at the winning formula he had before and apply some of those principles to get closer certainly, there's not real reason we can't be successful as we have the resources, problem is the man continues with failed methods he never even used when he was sucessful, this is small weak players, 5 yard passing football, no leaders, lots of deadwood, no real desire on the pitch and no discipline.

These aren't things that were prevalent when we were winning at all, quite the opposite, these are things he's brought in after that, when none of the leadership he inherited was there anymore (he'd sold or got rid of all of those). In that sense did the fact he had Adams, Keown, Seaman, Bergkamp and the fact they could pass on their knowledge to the likes of Vieira, Toure etc play a major part in his success (i.e essentially an outside influence), we know his knowledge of the French market obviously also played a part, but this wasn't a skill as such, that was just the fact he was French and followed the French league very closely, more closely than others.

[Özim]

Because he's at the end of his career and he probably knows he will never win it.

What's the point of admitting a regret you realise you will never be able to rectify.

He could win it if he tried hard enough and did the right things, the fact he would think he can't suggest he should know he shouldn't even be here. We should be aiming to win the league and/or the CL, if we have a manager who doesn't believe he can surely that's a problem, maybe not to our club having said that.

[Özim]

Is it the logical thing to player Liverpool with Giroud and Lacazette on the bench and Welbeck up front?
I increasingly don't get him either but I don't believe for one moment that his failure in the CL doesn't bother him.

His decisions are without a doubt quite often odd, but IMO in the last 10 years everything he's said and done suggests he's a man that doesn't put winning at the top of the agenda, finances seem to be foremost in his thinking, there's plenty of example of him failing to give us the best chance to win trophies, examples you'd probably not see many other managers are top clubs make, examples that show a lack of ambition and drive to win IMO.

[Herbert_Chapman's_Zombie]

He could win it if he tried hard enough and did the right things, the fact he would think he can't suggest he should know he shouldn't even be here. We should be aiming to win the league and/or the CL, if we have a manager who doesn't believe he can surely that's a problem, maybe not to our club having said that.

He is 68 in October, at best we won't even be in the competition for a year

And there are many, many coaches who are currently better than Wenger who haven't won it. And some may not come close to it.

The winners this year are going to come from a very narrow group.

That Wenger hasn't learned from his myriad mistakes in Europe is kind of incidental. I think Wenger could completely change his ways in coaching, player recruitment etc and realistically we'd be no significantly closer to winning the competition.

Real Madrid and Barcelona have won six of the last nine between them.

[Herbert_Chapman's_Zombie]

His decisions are without a doubt quite often odd, but IMO in the last 10 years everything he's said and done suggests he's a man that doesn't put winning at the top of the agenda, finances seem to be foremost in his thinking, there's plenty of example of him failing to give us the best chance to win trophies, examples you'd probably not see many other managers are top clubs make, examples that show a lack of ambition and drive to win IMO.

Again I think if finances were at the top of his agenda we wouldn't be running such a massive wage bill

Wenger is obsessed with proving that he can do it without spending loads. And the irony is that he's failed so badly at that, that another club (Leicester City) managed to adopt his blueprint sucessfully.

I think being given more power over the day to day running of the football club than any other manager has at any other club has made him hyper sensitive to financial considerations, simply because he has been lauded as someone who has achieved great things on very little spend.

He does things constrained by a set of rules only he understands which he frequently bends anyway. He is obsessed with this total football model, you saw the article by Keown where he refused to show a player defensive mistakes he was making because it might interfere with the technical aspects of his game.

[Niall_Quinn]

I'm not actually arguing his past successes do mitigate what he's doing right now.
I'm just arguing against the assertion that he was never that good in the first place.
Zim questions how someone supposedly so good can now be so bad and his conclusion is that maybe he was never that good in the first place.
My take is that Wenger has simply stood still while all around him has changed. If the champion high jumper before the Fosby Flop was popularised refused to adopt the new technique then he would start to get beaten by younger athletes whose technique allows them to jump higher. That doesn't mean he wasn't a great jumper back in the day though. Neither does it mitigate his failure to adopt the new technique.

Wenger has certainly not been standing still. Stan bought his shares for 500 million and he just recently turned down a bid approaching 1.5 billion. That's why Wenger still has a job. He delivers where it counts for this owner and this board and all the rest is total bullshit. We know this to be the case because nothing ever changes at this club. Or, you could look at that another way and say everything always stays the same. Stan's valuation continues to rise, the execs including Wenger continued to get paid and on the pitch we continue to fail to be competitive at the top level. If you look past all the smoke it's actually pretty easy to see what is happening at this club and where the focus and priorities lie. Judge them by their actions, not their words and certainly not their promises.

[Power n Glory]

He is 68 in October, at best we won't even be in the competition for a year

And there are many, many coaches who are currently better than Wenger who haven't won it. And some may not come close to it.

The winners this year are going to come from a very narrow group.

That Wenger hasn't learned from his myriad mistakes in Europe is kind of incidental. I think Wenger could completely change his ways in coaching, player recruitment etc and realistically we'd be no significantly closer to winning the competition.

Real Madrid and Barcelona have won six of the last nine between them.

There is not one coach that has had a chance to build team after team with one of the top European clubs and not won the Champs League. We're talking two decades with Arsenal and he's only ever progressed beyond the last 16 on a handful of occasions. He's in a league of his own for this one.