Our club is run by charlatans, and was only tenuously held together by a single man who was rapidly becoming irrelevant. Subsequently, we lurched through a period of extreme turmoil in an attempt to get the club back on track after a decade of stagnation, resulting in total collapse, multiple managers, multiple executive teams, and a squad ravaged by high wages, a nightmarish dressing room, toxic culture, etc. We can't just pretend that none of that happened/is happening. 6th, 8th, 10th, it's irrelevant. The club is a shambles and there is no savior, no messiah, no silver bullet, and no real way to fix it bar a massive shift in operations from the top down. We might have a fluke season or a decent cup run, but when you've got Aston Villa at the top of the owner-investment table, there's only so much you can do with a Kroenke in charge. The spending last summer is always cited entirely out of context - we still barely have a squad and are still cutting costs. Transfer fees are flashy and all, but they are far from the main economic factor in recruitment. And before I hear about how high our wage bill was, that was a problem - not a boon. It was being devoured by layabouts who had settled into the Colney Spa life and had no intention of performing to their highest standard, and players who never were of the required standard to begin with.
Just because it's theoretically possible to win more doesn't make it even remotely probable. This forum vastly overrates our young players and their capacity to carry a club like Arsenal - it's not realistic to have this level of expectation at this stage in their development, and with such a thin squad. Suggestions that Wenger "walks" the league to 4th place...smh. Times have changed, it's time to accept it.
All that said, Arteta should have been sacked at least twice now, probably thrice, and we could be working the margins better, but I honestly don't think we'd be that much better off in the table, if at all. That he hasn't been let go is not a sign of Arteta's failings, but literally everyone else's, and I'd argue it's not even their greatest failing. That Edu seems secure in his job suggests to me that these failures are driven by the ownership first and foremost.
I've said it before: sustained investment, window after window, is the only way to make consistent progress in this sport. I don't see our ownership ever delivering on that front, and so my expectations are never going to be that high until they're gone, regardless of the manager.
