With just 24hrs to the opening of the 2013/14 English Premiership season, and another two weeks before the transfer window closes, Arsene Wenger and his Arsenal team appears to have been caught pants down and looks like a team not yet ready for the new season. With Frenchman Yaya Sanago as its solitary signing, the club has had to watch other clubs get busy in the market and at the same time watch as players targeted snub the club. It appears the club is no longer able attract top players or how else can one describe the latest story about Brazilian Luis Gustavo snubbing Arsenal to sign for mid-table German side Wolfsburg...... That summed up the club's woes in the current transfer market . But since when did Arsenal became such an ordinary club in the eyes of these players?
The answer perhaps lies in the club's failure to spend in previous transfer markets while at the same time losing its best players. While there's no doubting the club's image as a rare profit making club among clubs all around the world, such achievement at the expense of winning trophies is where the club appeared to have derailed in the last few years.
When Arsenal last won a trophy (the league cup in 2005), it had players like Ashley Cole, Viera, Fabregas, Silva, Pires, Reyes, Bergkamp, van Persie and Ljumberg. Players who were at the top of their games. Names that were enough attraction for other players to want to join Arsenal. Now fast forward eight years and what do you get? Aside Carzola and Wilshere, most of the players currently at the club are at best either average or over-hyped players. Names that any ambitious top player wouldn't consider as capable of winning trophies.
Arsene Wenger's excuse for not bringing in Top quality players had always been the inflated price of the market hence his decision to stick with his academy products, sprinkled with some bargain buys. Year in, year out, he referred to his team as young and developing only to see the development scuppered by the loss of one or a couple of the best among them. You'd expected a team that was too shrewd to buy players in the market to at least hold on to its players but that wasn't the case and so began the gradual decline in the quality of the team. The result - a lack of success in the sporting field, meaning settling for top-4 finish was all the club could hope for season after season.
Shame that when Arsenal are now ready to spend big, the appeal the club once had is no longer there. Why and how it took Wenger and the club Directors all of eight years to realise the simple basics of economics, that the market price of any commodity is determined by the law of demand and supply, one will never understand. It is clearer to them now that, yes, the market is inflated, but as long as there are buyers out there willing to pay over the odds for these players, that market price becomes the value of the player and not Wenger or Arsenal's valuation.
With Arsenal's 'Buy one, let four Go' transfer system, they are about to pay a heavy price for it this season. With Arshavin, Santos, Scuillaci, Denilson, Charmakh and Gervinho all allowed to leave despite no replacement, the team is so thin that it is barely able to raise a complete bench for Saturday's opener against Aston Villa. This is a game that should be a banker but any injury or card to one of the starting players puts the team into trouble. A team already crippled by injuries to Vermaelen, Sagna, Nacho Monreal, Arteta and Sanogo could be forced to play a tired Carzola who just came back from South America with the National team.
For a team whose fans pay the highest in the whole of Europe for tickets, those fans deserve better than a hopeful top-4 finish and their realistic hopes of winning trophies should be restored
