When Was The Damage Done?

[AberGooner]

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.)

Debuchy was actually playing quite good as well I thought till Arnautovic ****ed it for him.

 

[A_G]

Damage for me was done when Wenger got a bit too hung up on the idea of top quality or nothing. Hear me out, it’s a great idea in principle but in practice it really killed us.

Yeah, the club missed the boat on incremental improvements like Wijnaldum at Liverpool.

 

[Trilly]

Yeah, the club missed the boat on incremental improvements like Wijnaldum at Liverpool.

Wijnaldum is nothing like Cazorla but if we had him waiting, maybe that would have been enough? Our replacement for Cazorla was Flamini/Elneny.

Absolute bottom of the barrel stuff. That drop in quality was horrible.

 

[Camus]

We've been in decline since the move to the Emirates, but certain events have had a sharper dip on our decline than others. The Fabregas, RvP and Nasri sales in 2011-12 and the disgraceful "replacements" were a particular big dip.

But for me the biggest is 15/16-16/17 when we only signed Cech in the summer of 2016 instead of any outfield players, persisted with that ****ing clown Giroud and that enabled Leicester to win the PL when it was all but gift wrapped for us to win it. Then further compounded in 2016/17 by eventually wasting the money we should have spent the previous season on wastes of space like Xhaka and Mustafi who didn't only not reach the levels required, they actually contributed to demise more profoundly.

 

[Yousif Arsenal]

2014: Signed deadwood like Ospina and Debuchy when there were cheaper options in the league. Didn’t sell Joel Campbell when we could.

2013: Signed Özil but spent all summer d*cking about trying to find someone and only ended up with Viviano and Flamini.

2012: Signed Giroud, Podolski and Cazorla. Two great signings but Podolski was a head scratcher.

2011: Pretty awful window. Loading up on dross like Park and Andre Santos which took years to get rid of.

2010: Chamakh after a couple of goals in Ligue 1.

Agree but i think you can excuse these years when club was still fighting debt and we still making top 4 but when the cash is finally available we just spend it like stupid c**ts. we have to reset next summer alot of players are out of contract and 1 year left in their contract time to get more smart with signings.

 

[GLITCH]

Extending Wenger's contract when Klopp was available.

 

[hydrofluoric acid]

Damage for me was done when Wenger got a bit too hung up on the idea of top quality or nothing. Hear me out, it’s a great idea in principle but in practice it really killed us.

Things were looking good, we’d just gotten spending power (Wenger himself has confirmed that [to an extent] he never had an issue with asking the club for funds, remember that 90M bid for Mbappe?) and after two windows in a row of Özil and Sanchez, we were all well and truly on the ‘top quality or nothing’ wagon.

(There’s also a little bit of going for top quality over what the club actually needed but I’m not too mad at that, can never have too many WC players)

We’ve just won an fa cup and finished top four, all our rivals are in crisis and Wenger is looking to make it three years in a row of top quality signings. This year we can’t find one and all we do is sign Petr Cech. I think we messed up big time there.

People commonly point to Giroud as the main reason Leicester pipped us to the league that year but that was just one of many reasons. What would have happened if Wenger had realised he couldn’t sign a WC player and instead decided to solidify our strength in depth, or sign somebody to push Giroud? Maybe Cazorla’s injury doesn’t cripple us, maybe Giroud’s competition steps in during his 10 game goal drought and pushes us over the edge.

Did we really need to only sign WC players or could we have tried to sign someone with Wc potential at least? Weren’t there any squad building/depth signings we could have made in the mean time? Football clubs are constantly in flux, you miss one or two windows and you’re immediately playing catch-up.

Op mentions the horrendous 15-16 transfer window but that’s what happens when you basically sacrifice the previous summer transfer window and your chicks come home to roost. We had to spend 100M on a CF, CM and CB in summer 16. Spine signings aren’t cheap.

If we had signed a CB or CM in the 14-15 window then we would have gone into 15-16 needing one player less but still having 100M to spend. Maybe Xhaka becomes a Fabinho, maybe Mustafi becomes a Laporte when you can spend an extra 20M on each position. Maybe we sacrifice one of those and just sign a 100M player instead (VVD?).

There have been loads of bad decisions before and after but summer 15 was the one.

Honestly, in recent windows, I wish we signed fewer players and more quality. It has been absolutely horseshit in recent windows.

It's hard to be excited about Partey and Gabriel when we signed also Willian, Rúnarsson, Cedric, and Mari who are not even Brighton quality players.

I also don't know why we are so scared of trying to find a value in PL or Championship. Almost all the teams around us do it every window with decent success. Liverpool, Chelsea, Leicester, etc, etc.

Our scouting system has been diminished. We basically have Edu, Kia, Arteta and our GK coach scanning the market for players.

 

[2Smokeyy]

I remember that same window with Gilberto and Flamini departing and then we missed out on Xabi Alonso for 18m which was criminal. He was literally begging to join us after Rafa was trying to bring in Gareth Barry.

Xabi Alonso and Cesc in the same team at that time would have been stuff of dreams for any striker.

 

[A_G]

2014: Signed deadwood like Ospina and Debuchy when there were cheaper options in the league. Didn’t sell Joel Campbell when we could.

This window gets a lot of stick but I actually don't think it was that bad. The real issue was losing Debuchy, Koscielny, Arteta, Ramsey, Özil and Giroud with long-term injuries at the same time that season. I'm not sure any business in that summer could've improved the season. Regardless, when Wenger had a full-strength team to pick from he won at the Etihad/Old Trafford and battered Liverpool at the Emirates.

It was the following summer where they didn't build on that momentum as a club.

 

[Heskey]

2010: Chamakh after a couple of goals in Ligue 1.

If only I had been a visionary like you and gotten a shirt with him while there was still a chance to...

 

[Ash10]

When we got a owner who has zero ambition how to win and only care about the value of the stocks in the club.

He actually has ambitions, just not for us. LA Rams are pretty good

 

[DanielVale]

When we moved from Highbury was the big turning point, then when we bottled the league in 07/08 was when I think it really started spreading into our DNA. If we had won the league then, I genuinely think we would not be in this hell hole we find ourselves in now.

I can't remember who said it on here, it might have been allboots about 12 years ago, but it was an ancient mariner quote of "we shot an albatross over the Emirates" back in 2007.

After that, it's been one wallpaper job over another - and finally, it's all come back to bite us hard. We can blame Wenger, the board, Emery, Freddie, Mikel--but ultimately, it's a combination of so many factors at board level, managerial and the players themselves.

With that said, I said after the FA Cup in 2014 that we were going to have the snowball effect. How wrong I was.

With the exception of a handful of players, for the first time since the 90's, there is literally nothing I can think of that's positive for us right now.

I don't think we will get relegated, but stranger things have happened.

It's been years since I've posted and I won't be the last to point all this out, but this club is beyond repair. If we actually got relegated (25/1 right now), I genuinely think people will then realise how bad the situation has gotten.

 

[Makingtrax]

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.

 

[Makingtrax]

But for me the biggest is 15/16-16/17 when we only signed Cech in the summer of 2016 instead of any outfield players, persisted with that ****ing clown Giroud and that enabled Leicester to win the PL when it was all but gift wrapped for us to win it.

You could say that about any club anytime. It’s meaningless bro. If City had bought Messi last year, Liverpool might not have won the league.

Giroud had been a consistent goal scorer and was backed by goals from Sanchez, Ramsey, Walcott etc. Currently if Auba doesn’t score we’re sunk. But no one knew that Giroud would have a bad dry spell early 2016. Much more meaningful for our league campaign was having the most injuries in the league, and in particular the loss of Cazorla to an injury at Norwich so early on.

 

[MutableEarth]

My most unpopular opinion - the damage started when we abandoned Project Youth. We got a few FA Cups out of it but our decline has been steady. We had the right model, the difference is we perhaps tried to build around keeping players for 10+ years rather than just around 5 - we should have been focused on flipping them for profit - something we have the opportunity to do now with an ever-improving Hale End. We would have made far more money and had more to spend to make a gradual improvement in fortunes. Our recruitment has steadily become worse and worse, and even our dabbling in using data analysis in our recruitment has been poor given we have analysts who are incapable of using a database as vast as StatDNAs.

It all stems from abandoning Project Youth IMO.

 

[Fewtch]

In 2016 when the fan campaign of boycotts, planes, protests and social media rants put intolerable pressure on the team and management causing us to decline. It was no coincidence that Wenger dropped out of the top 4 for the first time in 20 years when all that started.

This but unironically

 

[Makingtrax]

Damage for me was done when Wenger got a bit too hung up on the idea of top quality or nothing. Hear me out, it’s a great idea in principle but in practice it really killed us.

Things were looking good, we’d just gotten spending power (Wenger himself has confirmed that [to an extent] he never had an issue with asking the club for funds, remember that 90M bid for Mbappe?) and after two windows in a row of Özil and Sanchez, we were all well and truly on the ‘top quality or nothing’ wagon.

(There’s also a little bit of going for top quality over what the club actually needed but I’m not too mad at that, can never have too many WC players)

We’ve just won an fa cup and finished top four, all our rivals are in crisis and Wenger is looking to make it three years in a row of top quality signings. This year we can’t find one and all we do is sign Petr Cech. I think we messed up big time there.

People commonly point to Giroud as the main reason Leicester pipped us to the league that year but that was just one of many reasons. What would have happened if Wenger had realised he couldn’t sign a WC player and instead decided to solidify our strength in depth, or sign somebody to push Giroud? Maybe Cazorla’s injury doesn’t cripple us, maybe Giroud’s competition steps in during his 10 game goal drought and pushes us over the edge.

Did we really need to only sign WC players or could we have tried to sign someone with Wc potential at least? Weren’t there any squad building/depth signings we could have made in the mean time? Football clubs are constantly in flux, you miss one or two windows and you’re immediately playing catch-up.

Op mentions the horrendous 15-16 transfer window but that’s what happens when you basically sacrifice the previous summer transfer window and your chicks come home to roost. We had to spend 100M on a CF, CM and CB in summer 16. Spine signings aren’t cheap.

If we had signed a CB or CM in the 14-15 window then we would have gone into 15-16 needing one player less but still having 100M to spend. Maybe Xhaka becomes a Fabinho, maybe Mustafi becomes a Laporte when you can spend an extra 20M on each position. Maybe we sacrifice one of those and just sign a 100M player instead (VVD?).

There have been loads of bad decisions before and after but summer 15 was the one.

Per and Kos made a great partnership in 15/16. We had the best Squawka defensive stats for clearances, blocks and tackles, the most clean sheets, the second least goals against and a superb CG against. We didn’t need a CB that year. Our problems weren’t with defence.

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.

I know it was popular rant on AFTV, ‘We’ve only bought Czech ffs’. But they were saying any old angry sh!t to get at Wenger, I never believed a word they said.

 

[Mo Britain]

Per and Kos made a great partnership in 15/16. We had the best Squawka defensive stats for clearances, blocks and tackles, the most clean sheets, the second least goals against and a superb CG against. We didn’t need a CB that year. Our problems weren’t with defence.

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.

I know it was popular rant on AFTV, ‘We’ve only bought Czech ffs’. But they were saying any old angry sh!t to get at Wenger, I never believed a word they said.

We've still got Arteta!

 

[Makingtrax]

I'd say a few major events:

• 2007 - David Dein leaves Arsenal.
• 2008 - Kroenke buys Arsenal.
• 2008 - Gazidis is hired as CEO.
• 2012 - StatDNA is purchased.
  Spoiler: More on this:

  How much influence it had and whether it was succesful or not I suppose is still debatable, but some reports have been less than stellar about the influence it had on our transfers.

• 2016 - Growing unrest around the club games.
  
• Spoiler: More on this

  This got worse and definitely had some impact the following 2 season where we dropped out of Top4 for the first time in Arsène's reign. Say what you want, if you have your own supporters turn against the squad and the managers as strongly as happened in that period, in media, at games etc. that will have an impact. If you were being shouted at by people who're supposed to be supporting you everyday that would likely impact you on your day job too, and players are - however much we might forget it at times - humans too, and can be influenced. I'm not saying we weren't going to fall out of Top4 if that hadn't happened, I'm saying that the unrest didn't exactly heigthen our chances of succes.
• 2017 - Sven Mislintat is hired but leaves just 1 year and 3 months later after reported differences with board+Raul Sanllehi. I think few wouldn't rather it had been opposite.
• 2018 - Raul Sanllehi enters and leaves in 2020.
• 2018 - Arsène Wenger leaves.
• 2019 - Edu Gaspar is hired a Technical Director with a glorious reputation from being Team Coordinator for Brazil in 3 years, Advisor for Iran for 1 month, and Team Manager for Corinthians for 5 years.
• There's quite a few other major events in the very recent time as well tbh..

And I don't think we can completely get around the awkward timing of planning and securing funding (loans) for the construction of Emirates in 03/04 where from this year and going forward oil money changed football radically. Combine a crippled economy with an owner who wanted to limit costs (invested nothing in Arsenal for transfers) and mistakes made on various areas and you have a recipe for disaster.

Nothing else needs to be said, this sums it perfectly. Lock it before anymore of AFTV BS stinks up the thread.

 

[Makingtrax]

We've still got Arteta!

:rofl: