I dont necessarily agree with that, hes only given what he can to spend on players. If the board doesnt give him say £30mill to spend on a player then sadly there isnt much Wenger can do in all honesty, all he can do is stamp his feet and say to the board i need this much money to sign this player.
I have a feeling that its the Arsenal board that is the real major issue, they dont like spending too much money on a player and Wenger has to do his best by buying players who are cheap on transfer fees and wages as well. Considering we keep qualifying for CL football every year, id say Wenger has done a pretty decent job so far. But really the board needs to get it through their skulls that world class players are not cheap to buy. If we really want to start winning trophies and keeping our best players then we need to stop being so stingy on transfer fees especially over a few million.
Wenger chooses to keep this daft wage structure(that from what I can recall essentially no other club in the world runs in a similar way), Wenger chooses most of the players, we've got a stonkingly huge wage bill and we're making very little profit currently.
There is no reason to believe Wenger doesn't have the ultimate say in who we buy or how much we spend. Considering the board have publically stated how much we've had to spend and Wenger has never come close, if the board were lying for a decade Wenger, or someone else would have said so. When other boards stretch the truth and make the manager look bad, the manager is rarely quiet about it, the fact that Wenger hasn't once defended himself of blamed the board suggests that Wenger can choose to spend the money he's allocated however he likes.
AS for good players costing money, nope. People were getting 2million bargains 10 years ago while other clubs were spending 30-50million on players, and last year clubs were getting bargains at 2mil while other clubs were spending 30-50mil on players. Lets not forget the list of 20mil + purchases that have been complete flops and not worth the money, Nasri, Adebayor, Kaka, Torres, Kesman, and 38 other players at Chelsea, Coentrao, Marcelo, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc. 25-30mil doesn't make certain of a top notch player, nor make certain a pretty damn good player won't go crap, adapt poorly, hit poor form. Its nonsense, the RIGHT players is the ONLY thing that matters, and with a ridiculously large number of players to choose from there are fantastic purchases every single season, in every single league, in every single price range.
There is ALWAYS a new cheap player who is excellent who hasn't established himself yet. Wenger issue is he used to buy excellent players of that type AND a few senior players and mix them well, today he's buying established not at all good enough players. We used to spend 10mil on a quality Gilberto type, today its 14mil on a Gervinho... someone who isn't very young and can plainly already be seen isn't good enough.
Wenger chose him, Wenger massively overspent on him, and Wenger gave him a long contract on a big wage that no one else is going to match and Gervinho isn't close to the first player Wenger has screwed up on lately.
The board has ZERO blame for Wenger's woeful choices, terrible management decisions from renewing contracts, putting faith in the wrong players, casting aside top notch players who end up leaving angrily(this started way back when with Pires who was a stunningly good player who was forced out by Wenger in favour of the utterly hopeless Hleb... we lost a player we had with us who won us titles, to favour a guy we spent 10mil on who was just awful). The board didn't force Hleb on us nor force Wenger to drop Pires and Reyes in favour of a hopeless player. The board didn't force Wenger to play an injury plagued Cesc against a physical Stoke the game before our first final in years.
You don't have to spend 30mil to get a good player, and Wenger has been peeing away money on crap players and their wages for years that could all have gone towards better players.
However the Higuain thing is just media horse crap, who knows why the deal hasn't finished, the fact that preseason is only just starting and most of the summer transfer business won't be done till late July through end of August, I have no idea why people are expecting instant fast business to be done.
