REASONS TO RE-BELIEVE
This was originally supposed to go out first thing this morning, but some big stuff happened, so it’s dropping now.
There are some things you have to accept when you are a fan of the goodest team in the land, Arsenal FC.
Transfers deals are cut from finite funds.
Decisions on transfers are made as a braintrust, so we can’t pin all the problems on Arteta (RIP Edu, gone too soon).
Risks were analyzed this season regarding the squad, and some of them were maybe definitely underestimated.
Arsenal is now a club that doesn’t make decisions on transfers in the heat of emotion (me with Ivan Toney); they build profiles of who they want and sign them when they can (smart, however you want to cut it).
When you’re trying to understand where we are as a club right now, you have to consider all those factors.
You might not like them. You might want to punch the screen. But this is football, and we’re not Man City or Chelsea. The club closest to Arsenal in operational methods is Liverpool. They exited Klopp, hired a new manager, and he signed no one of note in the summer. They are top of the league right now, everyone is a genius, but when things go wrong, they’ll have their fans pointing to a lack of signings, and they’ll call Michael Edwards a fraud.
The best-run clubs in the world want to win trophies, but that is an output, not a strategy for success. People running these clubs know that the job to be done is to be in the mixer every season, and then they hope that the decisions they make around the squad come together to give the team the edge (and luck) they need to haul trophies. Sometimes spending helps (City), sometimes it fails in the short term (Chelsea), occasionally it can damage something that has been winning (Madrid), it can also be bypassed and a club can still deliver (Liverpool right this second). As fans, spending is the only input that can deliver a trophy-laden output. The issue with this is the people judging that won’t apologize if they’re wrong at the end of the season.