Yup, can't say I'm a fan of the guy, like too many of the board he just wants to line his own pockets but tries to come across in statements as a football man when he's nothing but a money man.
It doesn't matter how much he talks about it, we're forever hearing that Arsenal have significant funds if needed, where are they exactly? Season after season we sell our most prized assets and replace them with much lesser players. He pointed out that we've just spent £40,000,000 over the last season on players but failed to point out the fact that we sold one of the best players on the globe in the process.
Fabregas was a little different as I always felt and it always looked like he would return home one day, but with RVP I feel like we could have retained him for longer if we'd used some of our supposed war chest to bring in some good players and convince him we had ambition. Instead we let players slip through our fingers because the club are too tight to actually splash out without selling first.
We have the funds, Wenger doesn't spend it, there was talk at least 2-3 years ago of RVP wanting to leave and offers behind the scenes but another one of Wenger's magically "stay a bit longer, we'll buy, you'll see" type speeches.
RVP was out, because he wanted out, because he didn't believe that Wenger would win anything, it had nothing to do with the board, or spending, he didn't think Wenger could win anything.
We couldn't have done anything to make RVP stay, we could have held him to the last year of his contract and lost out on £23mil, which would have been stupid.
Players leave, players have left Utd, Real, Barca, Bayern, Chelsea while those teams have won titles, players move on, who cares. The issue is the replacements and the quality. Losing 60mil of players and buying 60mil of players, even if they were identical.... when the wasn't any where near good enough originally, is a sideways step at best, in our case its a backwards step as we couldn't find people of equal quality to replace Cesc or RVP.
The issue is, 3 years ago with Cesc and RVP in the team, we needed to replace Song, Diaby, Denilson, Sagna, Djourou, Squillaci, Walcott and the likes with better players, instead we've replaced our best players with less good ones. The guys we've bought in the past couple of years, if that was the quality of player we were replacing Diaby, Sagna, Ramsey with, we'd have a top team, more competitive and RVP might have stayed, this didn't happen because as always, Wenger genuinely believes that Diaby and co are great players who will win a title for Arsenal, he's simply wrong.
