Yes, they fucked up badly by spending £65 million on Havertz. A proper No.9 would have got them the league title this season. You love to criticise our club when we don't make the right signing, but for some reason praise other clubs for doing the same mistake. Funny "fan" base we have ...
FWIW I don’t think we as a club have made many mistakes in the market in terms of who we’ve brought in. They’re all good players and I have full faith they’ll all pan out. Our biggest mistakes over the most recent windows have been putting all of our eggs in one basket and ending up with egg all of our face. Quite why that’s happened I’ve no idea. We’ve all read the quotes over the years, how Edwards said agent relationships were a huge part of the job, maybe we lost some of that when he left because the drawn out pursuits of Tchouameni and Bellingham were both naive and costly. We thankfully had options after Bellingham and still landed a world class player in Mac Allister, that summer still felt bizarre, how we pursued Caicedo and Lavia all summer only to walk away empty-handed I’ll never know. Gravenberch at the death was a nice consolation prize who I’m probably more optimistic on than most, I think there’s another Gini in there just waiting to be unlocked, he probably needed a couple of years at a mid table club first but I can still see him being brilliant.
If you don’t think Arsenal have signed well in the market then fair enough, each to their own. I felt like for a while we set the standard in the transfer market, we signed players who consistently exceeded expectations and their price tag, it allowed us to push City as much as we did despite spending much smaller sums. That’s essentially what Arsenal have been doing now and I think they deserve credit for it. In a world where so many clubs are competing for signings, they have their strategy and profile of player absolutely nailed, something we used to do and something City have always done with their endless funds. I expect us to return to those levels now a clear structure is in place and there’s now an opportunity for the whole club to reset post Jurgen/Gordon. I’ve said in here a few times I still think the biggest improvement we can make next season will be our existing players improving, there’s so much potential in this team and potential always takes time to be reached. Jurgen might not have got the fairytale ending, but I do think he’s left a really exciting group of players who really could be special in a couple of years.
