Soldato
Arsenal are being mismanaged, but that was Wenger and Wenger alone really. He makes calls on contracts, he was going through various stages of trying to prove Arsenal could compete, at one point several years back he got frustrated and started spending a lot more on individual players but his scouting team/ability to judge players has been completely lost compared to whoever was doing it back in the first 6-7 years at Arsenal. More recently he started trying to offer huge wages to keep the wrong players.
Also this whole crap about, I keep seeing as an excuse for Ozil being told that we couldn't lost Sanchez and Ozil because the fans would be outraged. We sold Sanchez to our biggest rivals (yeah we suck and oooo, derbies, but the reality is Arsenal v Utd became a thing from 96-04 that establishes them as our main rival) and.... I forgot about all those riots, all the screaming, the crying all the ... wait, nope, nothing.
The Sun and other tabloid tripe say stuff about fans being outraged, but even the few times they are, nothing happens, it's entirely irrelevant. Yet fans constantly bring up this "we had to do A because if we'd done B everyone would have been outraged". Anyone managing on such a basis should be fired. You do what's best for the team, outrage if there is any which there usually isn't, is temporary, the right decisions help your club for years and the wrong decisions hurt your club for years. Ozil should have been gotten rid of. We made him the second best paid player in the league despite being average in most games for 4 years and he's continued to be mostly ineffective. 1-2 excellent games, usually against weaker opposition, 3-4 pretty good games and a dozen terrible games from him. So sticking us with a 350k a week contract on a useless player who was always lacking physicality and motivation and is only now doing that while getting older and having more injuries... it's as bad as giving Rooney huge money when he was obviously in his decline already.
Kroenke has nothing to do with the poor decisions at Arsenal except that he should have fired Wenger 5 years earlier. Spurs are achieving FAR more on significantly less spending while also saving up to secure a larger stadium that costs a lot more. Yet Wenger's excuse for years was "oh the stadium", despite it helping Arsenal financially since day one of moving in, debt was always, at every stage, less than we brought in from extra revenue (absolute biggest year as 33million debt repayments as it was two years in one go, it's mostly around 18mil, we brought in ~50mil increased revenue almost immediately and the massive majority was from ticket sales so 95% of that is extra profit).
Wenger stopped improving players as he did early on, he stopped being able to judge a diamond in the rough and he stopped getting great deals on youngsters. We got Fabregas for next to nothing, we spent 15ml + on Walcott, AOC, etc, and then he kept throwing more money at them when neither were improving or being useful to the team.
THe problem is Kroenke couldn't fire Wenger, because the fans overwhelmingly supported him even while Wenger was making bad decision after bad decision with players such that the owner maybe even felt he couldn't fire Wenger if he wanted to but the fans left him little reason to want to fire Wenger.
Arsenal should have given Sanchez a new deal a year earlier than they offered and failing that should have sold him for 60mil in the summer... though arguably he's such a bad deal for Utd it hurts them so badly it still works out for us. We should have sold Ozil last summer and should have said in Jan, take 150k a week or find a new club this window. I honestly think he would have signed for 150k because unlike Sanchez who was playing well and got offers from three clubs.... no one actually bid for Ozil, no one actually wanted Ozil because every single other club that could provide 150k or more a week, saw him the same as I do, capable of brilliance but performs at that level so rarely he's more harm to the team than good.
Wenger kept players and threw out more wages to players who had one epic game a year thinking he could make those players perform like their one epic game all year long. Other top managers buy players based on their average performance, not a short run of form or a one off game. That is why Arsenal are insanely inconsistent compared to other teams.
Poch disagrees
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/46787600
https://imgur.com/a/oCdlcNw
