I think Tammy Abraham is yet another situation where you need a strong sporting director who can put his foot down and tell the manager to work with what he's got. That's what Edu should have done this summer when Arteta asked for more centrebacks too.
You either find actual, proven top quality or you cop on with what you have. Huge outlays on youth and promising talent represents the worst kind of transfer business. Only amateurs who end up sinking their clubs buy like that.
We used to operate on the principle that we'd make great players ourselves, since we couldn't compete from a purely financial perspective, and we made sure we had the best people available to both find and develop them. We signed players after thorough scouting who fit Wenger's specific vision and we knew exactly how he wanted to develop them. And if they didn't make it we tried again, because the overhead was usually so small. We had more chances to get it right in addition to a higher competence across the board.
Since then we've moved from the low-cost, high reward business into the high-cost, unknown reward market because not only do we no longer have a manager who is the best in the business at player development; we also rely on agents, big-book contacts and other vermin instead of tailor-made scouting to get hold of talent.
This shift happened before incompetent morons like Arteta, Edu and Raul grabbed power in fairness, but it's the exact moment where we lost our way as a club. You can literally pinpoint it to the summer where we brought in Xhaka and Mustafi for a combined £80 million or so.
Since then we've only made it worse every season by signing at least one player for huge money whose contributions on the pitch have never reflected their fee, whether it's Lacazette or Pepé (who does have a much higher ceiling than all of them and does look like he's finally about to explode, bless him) or even Saliba - three years on we haven't got a single minute on the pitch out of those £30 million, and we've probably managed to alienate the player in the process.
I'm a fan of Ben White's potential but it's easy to see how he fits into this trend too.
The thinking for some time seems to have been to bridge the gap between readymade player and youthful potential with experience, and every single time it has backfired and made us so much worse. Mkhitaryan, Luiz, Cedric, Willian... What we saved in transfer outlays we, without fault, wasted on wages and flakey footballers, and since none of them had any future potential we gained nothing in a longterm perspective either.
We're about do to repeat this mistake again with Xhaka now if the rumours about us offering him a new and improved longterm contract are accurate.
We've gone from getting the most value per cent in the league to getting the least (or thereabouts). The only big money signings that have been successful are the guys who were already de facto top class when we bought them, like Özil, Aubameyang and Sanchez. And the only talents that are currently successful are the ones that didn't cost us anything, because we raised them within the club where we could control and influence their development.
