When Was The Damage Done?

[Dennis_Bergkamp_10]

I'd say it has been a long time coming. You have the external factors: we were short of funds after our Emirates move (compared to other teams at least), and hadn't expected the likes of City to pump so much cash in their team. Then the explosion of transfer fees in ten-fifteen years time, and the uprising of what used to be pub teams (i.e. Wolves). I'm not a fan of excuses but we've had our fair share of injuries as well, imagine a VAR when Wilshere was nearly killed by that Man Utd ****.

Then the things we ****ed up ourselves, mainly recruitment. Our team was very good up until 2015-2016 I think. That was the time we shifted away from technical players, buying the likes of Xhaka who are still detrimental to our team now. And now we have a ****show on our hands and it will take a lot to get back. It will take time and luck on investments, like Salah for Liverpool. Because we aren't United or City who can replace half their starters in two windows.

 

[Makingtrax]

One other point. The success of the oligarch clubs goes to show having a billionaire owner who is actually willing to spend whatever it takes is a surefire way to success. Stan rather than Usmanov had a massive impact on this club, as did the stadium build. I believe Wenger would've smashed this league with Dein remaining by his side and unlimited cash to spend, instead of becoming the focus of AFTVs rants.

 

[Red London]

This has been festering since Kroenke came in and Dein left.

We just didn't see it this badly until recently, where the PL has become more competitive and more 'average' sides could compete with us, especially with clever running of the club (e.g. Leciester, Wolves, Sp**s even Liverpool).

We have not been resourceful with our finances and assets for ages now, we have lost value on so many top players and we have been playing catch up for a decade now. Leaking money away constantly.

 

[morpho]

From a norwegian news paper. Translated through google

Https://tblqdl3jboymtcnm5m46mabrii-...sport/derfor-har-arsenal-kollapset-1.15301834

 

[Oxeki]

Our rate of decline from 2006-2015 is not that great. Infact you could argue it is negligible and it was mostly due to external factors like oil money and Gulf states dabbling into football.

But our decline from 2015- to present time is actually self made. It was mostly our fault. Incompetence at the highest level.

Well-run clubs make mistakes sometimes. But for a club to continue to make mistakes after mistakes year on year is absolutely unforgivable and very embarrassing.

 

[Sanchez11]

2006

 

[Camus]

You could say that about any club anytime. It’s meaningless bro.

You could say about "any club" at "anytime" that they should have signed outfield players when they didn't? What are you on about? How many times can you honestly name in which a club did not sign a single outfield player during the summer transfer window? It's an extremely unique situation.

If City had bought Messi last year, Liverpool might not have won the league.

What on earth? I'd call this a strawman but even that would be generous. Man City spent €159million on players last summer. They signed Cancelo for €65million and Rodri for €62million.

Giroud had been a consistent goal scorer

Giroud stats

2012/13: 11 PL goals in 2327 PL minutes. Goal every 212 minutes. Went a spell of 17 games where he only scored 4 PL. Went another spell where he scored 2 in 10

2013/14: 16 PL goals in 3038 PL minutes. Goal every 190 minutes (marginal improvement). Went a spell of 14 games where he scored 4 goals. Went another spell of 3 goals in 9 games.

2014/15 (his best season for us): 14 PL goals in 1865 minutes. Goal every 133 minutes. Had a solitary spell where he scored 9 in 11. Followed it up with no goals in 7 straight games.

2015/16 (his best season for us): 16 PL goals in 2435 minutes. Goal every 152 minutes. Went that now infamous spell of 15 straight PL games (nearly half the season ffs) where he scored ZERO.

So where is this "consistent goal scorer " you're speaking about? I didn't even want to have to pull up stats since I assumed we'd all suffered through 5.5 years of Giroud enough to know how objectively inconsistent he was, and at times outright dreadful. But I guess not.

and was backed by goals from Sanchez, Ramsey, Walcott etc.

Fair enough Sanchez chipped in with a few goals from the wing, about as much as you'd expect from a wide player. But Ramsey and Walcott?

Walcott was permanently crocked for the previous two seasons. Played just 1300 minutes. That's a pathetic 19% of available PL minutes across those two seasons. It's no surprise in 2015/16 he scored 5 in 1373 minutes and went a spell of 15 games with a solitary goal. Yeah he really "backed" us goals scoring wise.

Ramsey had 1 fluky season in 13/14 that was it. In the season prior to that he scored ONE GOAL in 36 games. In the season after his fluke he scored 6 in 29 and in the 2015/16 he scored 5 in 31. So where exactly is the "backing"?

Currently if Auba doesn’t score we’re sunk. But no one knew that Giroud would have a bad dry spell early 2016.

Yes they did. Maybe you didn't but objective reality demonstrably showed that he had a consistent history of multiple dry spells and an overall not up to standard scoring rate in general.

Much more meaningful for our league campaign was having the most injuries in the league

Ah yes, maybe if we'd signed some quality outfield players we could have alleviated that issue, I'm sure someone suggested just that????

and in particular the loss of Cazorla to an injury at Norwich so early on.

If your entire season rests on the fitness of ONE SINGLE player, then maybe it's a good idea to buy some adequate cover for him, don't you think? But nah that's "meaningless bro"....

 

[PressResistance]

2 transfers come to my mind:

Letting Thierry go to Barca, but that one wasn't that bad.

Not resigning RVP and then selling him to a direct rival ensuring their title.

I have no logical, thought out argument why that is, however it screams a club that deserves to be relegated, bad vibes all around.

 

[Melquiades]

I’ve challenged anybody to come up with an actual metric of decline, that stands up to scrutiny, up to us finishing 2nd in 2015/16.

So far nobody has, even though endless people give opinions about it happening before.

Absolutely.

Obviously the team wasn't quite at the level from 2005-2016 that we were at from 1997-2004, but we were consistently at the top end of the league and were able to finish ahead of every team in 2016 save the fluke Leicester season. Mistakes had been made during that period, but you can't say anything had 'gone wrong' in a significant and permanent sense.

Then came that 2016 offseason and 82 million spent on Xhaka/Mustafi/Perez (and Gnabry leaving). And it's been backed up by terrible offseasons every year since as the club has spent a spectacular amount of money replacing the top-end players from that 15-16 team as they aged out or suffered injury woes with a string of poor signings of mediocre players that looks like a roll call for Newcastle. And things behind the scenes have descended into chaos at the same time.

 

[Lidl_Reed]

August 2004.

We could have told Wenger thank you for the Invincibles and the memories, but there's this new hotshot manager at Chelsea

 

[Jae]

That transfer window when we were the only team in Europe not to sign an outfield player. A couple of big signings and we pop Leicester to the league that coming season easily.

 

[Lidl_Reed]

We wanted to make sure we didn't "kill" Bellerin, that's why we signed Debuchy over someone younger to replace Sagna...Debuchy was a decent Prem prove player and Hector was a high potential youngster, think we made the right choice at the time (as no one could predict Hector's decline back then.)

Hard disagree here.

Debuchy at the time was starting for France over Sagna. He was very solid for NUFC, and then that pubber broke his shoulder and he was never the same again

 

[Pop Tart]

Not getting klopp during his sabbatical after leaving Dortmund.

 

[RacingPhoton]

As others have pointed out, such things do not happen overnight. It's hard to pinpoint a single event. It's a combination of many.
* Oil money for big clubs. But even these big money clubs had to spend some years to stabilise, adapt and optimise so that all the money eventually results in trophy. That was 2015/16 season. It's like once in a century astronomical event which we definitely had to make the best out of and win the trophy. But we decided to buy only Cech for the season. Rest is history.
* TV money and more sponsors strengthening other teams which means that no fixture is easy fixture and there is no scope to **** around.
* The 2015 and 2016 transfer window. One resulted in losing a long last opportunity to win the league and another that paralysed our defence and midfield for years to come.
* Selling RVP and Cesc for peanuts. This is something I would never forgive that bald **** Ivan for. Clubs always lose good players. But if you lose, you need to make the best out of it. Selling golden boot winner to a PL rival for 22M and Cesc to Barca for 30M were criminal. They were worth lot more.
* After we sold all the players who cared for the club, we managed to build a squad full of divas who are here for a vacation and we bend over to them by giving them big money contracts.

Considering all the above, I would say the process started around 2012 with Ivan/Wenger not understanding and hence failing to make use of transfer market, resulting in us making the big mistakes in 2015 and 2016 transfer windows, the chain reaction leading to hiring of some idiots at the top(Raul/Vinai/Edu) and rotting of squad culture. All this while rest of the teams in PL were making huge strides forward.

Right now, we have a squad filled with players who don't give a ****, upper management who don't give a damn and a manager who doesn't have a clue.

 

[juice man]

The continued pursuit of alternative recruitment methods, which I believe are Kroenke initiatives with the intent of minimizing costs, have ultimately lead to underperformance in the transfer market. Its clear from the sequence of events over the past 10-12 years (investment in StatDNA, reducing Wenger's role in transfers, Mislintat fallout, Kia's increasing involvement, etc...) that we've attempted to build the club around these recruitment philosophies. However, its been a resounding failure - the further we head in this direction, the worse the results are.

I'm left wondering at what point the board wakes up and realizes that we need to cut bait with these types of strategies? The longer we head down this path, the worse the outlook of the club looks. You've gotta believe that as a businessman, Kroenke will soon (hopefully) realize that KSE is not the right ownership group for Arsenal.

 

[GDeep™]

August 2004.

We could have told Wenger thank you for the Invincibles and the memories, but there's this new hotshot manager at Chelsea

No manager could’ve turned down Roman and his unlimited funds.

Damage started when Stan came and the running of the club went to pot. Just look at last summer, Raul getting sacked for his horrendous running of the club.

 

[GDeep™]

When did our decline as a top four began?

I'd say In 2016. That year we shelled out 100m (including add-ons) on three of our worst signings ever (Xhaka, Mustafi and Perez).

Since then we've never recovered.

Just seen your post. Top 4? I’ll say when we hired Raul and allowed him to waste money.

Under Wenger, and just after Wenger, we are just out of the CL places, and still in touching distance, Emery should’ve got it.

We only FELL OFF when Raul signed crap. That’s not up for debate at all.

 

[Trilly]

We didn’t need a CB that year. Our problems weren’t with defence.

Who was their backup? We didn’t suddenly need Mustafi the following summer. If we couldn’t find the top quality Wenger wanted then we should have started looking to the future. Doing nothing was the worst possible option.

And our midfield was top drawer compared to the dross we have now. Cazorla, Coq, Ramsey, Arteta, Flamini, Ox, Özil, Wilshere was mean’t to be returning too until his set back.

You listed all of our midfielders but who was there when Cazorla got injured? Flamini and Coq. Again begs the point, we couldn’t do our WC player business so why didn’t we look at making our squad deeper?

You can never defend the summer of only Cech. The only way to defend that would have been to win the league and we didn’t do it.

 

[Tir Na Nog]

It's an accumulation of signing too much dross and not properly replacing the man who was keeping the ship afloat on his own for so long.

 

[DanDare]

Philosophically I'm a determinist so don't believe things could have been different but. The thing that feels intuitively like a real fork in the road is the year Leicester won the league.

We beat Leicester home and away but capitulated against small teams. If we win the league that year it really feels like our trajectory would be very different.

Not really an answer to the question. The decline started long before then, that was just a symptom