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Arsenal Yet To Recover?


By Hippogunner
March 4 2020

The recent defeat by Olympiacos got regular poster Hippogunner thinking about what exactly has gone wrong with this club of ours. His personal view follows below:

Two major events that this club has yet to recover from. Firstly, and most importantly, the buying of Ozil. This was a gesture made out of desperation by a manager who felt he had to make a point to a disgruntled fan base. We needed a marquee signing and Ozil was the only low hanging fruit of any quality to pluck at the time. Never mind that he was not what we needed, an expensive DM would have been better. This was a player who functions at his best surrounded by world class players. He’s not a leader, he’s a follower. We needed the former. We see his ambition too; any ambitious player would have wanted out of this club some years ago. It’s money first with him.

Second item we still feel some effect from is the Suarez incident. This is when we see that we are only a big club on paper. Yes we’re one of the richest clubs in the world but our mentality is not equal to that. Liverpool were no better than us when we tried to buy Suarez. A really big club would have offered another 10 million and secured him but Wenger faltered.

In doing so he affirmed our natural pecking order in the league, behind Liverpool, a club who had never won the PL. Liverpool have the mentality of a big club, built on foundations from European success, an arena in which we’ve consistently failed. Liverpool laughed at us over Suarez because despite the evidence of our success in the league, they never thought we were bigger than them. And by failing to get Suarez we accepted our inferiority, and we’re still wallowing in it now.

Every now and then we flex our imaginary muscles and make a statement, like spending 72 million on Pepe. These odd moments of posturing are infrequent and usually self-defeating. In the last decade how many clubs of the ilk of Leicester or Southampton have found players they’ve paid a fraction of Pepe’s price and then sold for a healthy profit. Arsenal are absolutely useless at finding talent at a reasonable price, possibly because what is a necessity for smaller clubs is merely a choice for the Gunners. Arsenal have the finances to go big so they do every now and then but often make a complete hash of it. The lack of direction reflects what sort of club we have, neither big nor small, functioning in some hinterland between the two.

This may be a rather insufficient summing up of the club but it's as succinct as I can sum up our problems; they are certainly more complex than I've stated.    More discussion here 

 

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