A) Sure. Levy keeps purposefully lying to his managers/head coaches knowing that he will be found out on it mere months later. This is the relationship our chairman has with our footballing men that's seen us fairly consistently over-perform in terms of league position compared to wages/budget.
B) Dead link. Headline seems to say that Wenger also wanted Schneiderlin. Seems that we both failed to get him then? Perhaps there were limits to how many players Southampton wanted to sell? Perhaps our budget was constrained by the fact that we also needed strengthening in other areas? Perhaps, just perhaps, even for Poch there was a limit to how much he wanted us to spend on Schneiderlin?
Levy is operating within the financial constraints of the club. If you want big net spends and investments call out Lewis, if you really think that's fair to expect. Levy has obviously prioritized the new stadium, new training ground and the academy, whilst re-investing everything we've made in the transfer market into new first team signings. There have been frustrating times in the past when people have complained about this strategy and at least their complaining has made sense to me, now this strategy seems to be paying off and I don't get what Levy is supposed to do.
Was brought up in the Redknapp thread over in general football. Levy is just about the only chairman that has managed to control Redknapp and where Redknapp hasn't left the club in a financial mess. That's what his approach has been getting us. But go ahead, wish for someone else... Ignore the financial mess so many clubs finds themselves in, ignore the struggles at clubs like Villa, Saudi Sportswashing Machine, Liverpool and Everton - never mind the clubs that have been really messed up by financial problems. Ignore the fact that essentially the only clubs that have managed to achieve the aims we've set in the last decade and a half (to become a consistent top 4 team) have had massive injections of oil money. And keep blaming Levy based on newspaper speculations and opinions of managers we've sacked, managers that obviously have no bias or reason to distort the truth.
A) Previous managers have said so. And one manager having a bias I can understand, maybe two. But Ramos, Redknapp and Villas-Boas have all come out with much the same thing: promises were made that weren't kept, ambitious talk was replaced with the cheap option, etcetera. Now all of them might conceivably also be biased, but I'll take the testimony of three men over the testimony of one, especially when that one person has also shown much the same behaviour with our newest manager as well. So yes, that is the relationship Levy has had with our managers, who have achieved in spite of him rather than because of him, a situation that has been in evidence from about the summer of 2010 onwards.
B) Not a dead link anymore, I checked. (The problem with linking anything with 'Arsenal' in the web address is that it gets the 's' and 'l' replaced by 5 and 1 automatically, but I think milo's fixed that
). However, for convenience's sake:
"Southampton turned down a £10 million bid from Tottenham last summer and, although the player initially wanted to leave, club directors decided that they would refuse all offers. Spurs, though, never actually improved on a single £10 million bid which Schneiderlin had wrongly thought would trigger a release clause. Relations between Tottenham and Southampton had also become strained earlier in the summer by the departure of Mauricio Pochettino and his coaching staff."
Like I said before: did we even try before scarpering away in glee because we as a club wouldn't have to put our money where our mouth was? We made another profit in the window, as per usual, which has rapidly overtaken everything else in terms of paramount importance to this club. And then you're surprised when our managers blast the chairman for lying to them about ambition? (As an aside, I agree Lewis is as much to blame as Levy: again, you know this given how I often I harp on about it. But Levy is the point-man that our managers seem to dislike, so he's the obvious target.)
We have none: our ambition is to tread water until ENIC can gain their massive profit from selling up. What drive we had to climb up the table evaporated about five years ago, and now we're the proverbial 'flash' lads - wowing managers and players alike with promises of backing and ambition, and then revealing the ugly truth once they've signed on. And yes, Redknapp did get himself reined in by Levy - to the extent where he asked for Cahill, Samba, Tevez or someone and was given (repeat after me
) Saha and Nelsen on free transfers, a move which utterly derailed a promising season where we could have been title contenders and turned it into a horror show.
Please don't conflate our basement buy approach with strategy, ambition or backing the manager in charge, braine: it is none of those things. I'm glad we've found a seemingly brilliant manager who seems to be able to surmount all the obstacles Levy (advertently or otherwise) tosses casually into his path, but that doesn't excuse our glorious leader, not at all.