yes, really - not so much just about trophies but he has been coasting along achieving the bare minimum for the last 500 games or so, scraping 4th over a team whose wage bill they dwarf.
Firstly, I would hardly call pipping teams like us and Liverpool to a top 4 spot after a number of hard-fought seasons; “coasting”. And at times they were finishing above teams like Chelsea too, whilst never dropping below 4th spot.
You may say a top 4 spot is the “bare minimum”. But surely there is an argument to say that a top 4 spot is the “absolute maximum” given that there are a number of teams who can absolutely crush arsenal’s spending potential.
And they may “dwarf” our wage bill now. But that’s credit to wenger in my opinion, for putting arsenal into a position whereby they can do that. Because wenger has continually gotten arsenal into a champions league position, they have been able to do this. Lets not forget however, arsenal have regularly finished above Liverpool in the past decade despite Liverpool being on an equal or stronger financial plain.
he has tied his arms behind his back by introducing the wage structure which saw players like Bendntner earn 60k a week whilst not being able to offer his better players more money and restricting the level of players they could attract. It was a failed system and had they gone for a more traditional approach to player wages they would have been closer to challenging for the title than they were fighting for 4th without spending more money than they did.
Bendtner on 60k a week is not nearly as bad as some in the media have made it out to be (and I suspect in reality, he is on slightly less than that). When he got that contract, he was about 23 years old if I remember correctly. And had racked up around 100 appearances for arsenal. A team that is one of the elite of Europe. You would find it hard to find another attacking player with credentials such as his who was on significantly less than his reported salary. In addition, the secret footballer mentions that when Bendtner was at Birmingham, people including himself (tsf) were comparing him to Zlatan Ibrahimovic.
Next, even if we are to admit that Bendtner on a 60k contract is a massive mistake, its nothing too unusual. Every manager and club makes these kind of mistakes. Adebayor on 100k here surely could be argued as one. Torres on 250k at Chelsea could be another one. Rooney on 300k could prove to be one. The list is be endless. Football is not an exact science, and so clubs must account for these types of errors. If anything, Wenger is very very good at making these types of decisions.
And finally, I don’t believe any realistic savings made in this area would have had arsenal in any significantly better position. As I have mentioned before, its pretty obvious an exponential increase in spend is needed by arsenal to really propel them. They need to be able to spend 100’s of millions every couple of years and be able to have write offs like Torres. Giving the likes of Bendtner 40k instead of 60k wouldn’t change much.
they outspend us to the tune of 50m every season on player wages and are much closer to those above them in that respect than we are to them, yet who have they been finishing closest to over this time period? simply put he has wasted a vast amount of money over the past 6 or 7 years.
Again that makes perfect sense, because the higher you want to go in the league, the exponentially higher the costs become. Arsenal are financially miles off being able to compete will Sheik Mansour’s Emirates Marketing Project and Abramovic’s Chelsea.
so it's clear to me that Wenger has mishandled the money available to him (35m a year more than us on wages and transfers combined)
you are entitled to that opinion. But others would no doubt disagree. Including the directors and board of arsenal who are well-versed in the finances of arsenal and also run successful businesses worth billions of pounds.
Arsenal are one of the only clubs to be financially profitable year in year out. If they have been mishandled financially, I don’t know what that says about the rest of the league.
And you mention that arsenal/wenger spend more in wages than they do in transfer fees (relative to other clubs). For me this shows the genius of the man. He has realised that to keep top players, you need to give them top money. Arsenal cannot spend top money both in transfer fees and in wages, and therefore he has decided to grow youngsters (purchased for nominal fees in many cases) and so cut out large transfer fees. Paying top players top wages is compulsory as players go into a strop and demand to leave if you don’t pay them this.
By doing this he has managed to maintain a top top team that is in the elite of Europe whilst spending less than his counterparts overall.
