Lol...Neymar you find ever more ingenious ways to excuse Wenger and Arsenal's failings. Good job Poch will have you to defend him if necessary in the near future eh...
its levy who is responsible for where we are at now. shame half our fanbase is too blinkered to realise this. levy and wenger are so underated by general football fans. its a shame, because managers who dont even deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as those two get more credit simply because they were managers of Emirates Marketing Project or chelsea and invariably happened to win something. unfortunately football fans' analysis of a manager's performance ends at sporting results, so the overall management jobs that wenger and levy have done go unrecognised.
The unwillingness to make 100m losses every year, is that the reason why year after year they are counter-attacked like on Saturday from their own corners (often with all their layers in the opposition half so their can be no offside)?
thats probably more down to their way of playing and the players that have been selected. unfortunately for wenger, counter-attacks such as the one you have mentioned is going to be one of the negative outcomes from his choices. however, there are other benefits that come these decisions.
The unwillingness to make 100m losses every year, was that the reason that they have choked continuously in key games often against teams with less budgets than them until last year's FA Cup final? Was that the reason they lost the 2011 carling cup final vs Birmingham - a team that got relegated? Look at all their FA Cup exits, can you say each time it was due to being beaten by an Oil-baron sponsored side? Remember Blackburn and Bradford?
the unwillingness to make 100m losses every year is why they choke more frequently than those who are willing to make those losses. but they choke less frequently than teams who spend less than themselves hence they finish top 4 more often than the rest, and have been in multiple cup finals and semi-finals over the past decade.
last year, wigan beat Emirates Marketing Project in the cup quater final. thats just football. you sometimes lose to weaker teams, and sometimes beat better teams.
The main benefit of Wenger to Arsenal is that (until recently) he has kept them in the top 4 so that their board could collect their CL money and not spend much to maintain it. Gooner fans used to get more; after all when they were winning titles, they weren't the top spenders then, so the fact that they aren't shouldn't, in itself, shouldn't excuse their hapless play now.
when they were winning titles only man utd seriously outspent them. and liverpool marginally spent more too. today, there are 3 teams in another financial bracket. therefore they need 3 vteams to have "off-seasons", rather than just the one. in the past few years, arsenal have finished above city, chelsea, utd (and liverpool) individually. but the task of finishing above all of them in one year has proven too hard. i think wenger can be forgiven for not doing this, especially as he has always maintained a top 4 position, and no-one else has been able to break the utd, chelsea, city title monopoly either.
Wenger's spending has now gone through the roof in relative terms, whilst their play is getting worse. Make no mistake if they miss out of CL, silent Stan will start to get closer to the trigger as the excuses wll not be there anymore, no matter how hard even you try ;-)
i agree that "Wenger's spending has gone through the roof", but its not like he was spending little before. nor is it like us or lpool are spending little. we've both spent 100m in one window for example. our's, arsenal's and lpool's spending may have gone through the roof, but city, utd and chelsea cant even see us from their roofs.
P.S. - I agree with your comments about Mourinho, but like Wenger, soon his coaching limitations will be laid bare and not camouflaged by 'net spend' theses...
glad we can agree on something
but can you give me an example a manager who has consistently performed beyond his resources through great coaching?
