"The journey continues" - Mikel signs extension until 2025: Page 59 - The Arsenal discussion community: One More in the Tolly

"The journey continues" - Mikel signs extension until 2025

RocktheCasbah

Bring Back Kerrea Gilbert eurgh. I remember being bent over (ooer) Jo's bed listening to the 5 Live coverage of injury time. It seems to me now, I somehow knew we weren't gonna hold on and the commentary was like having a gun being held to your head, waiting for it to go off.

Claudius

That’s our lowest moment in my 25 odd years as a fan. Seeing that man broken and then the capitulation that ensued

Clrnc

Claudius 2008 is probably the season I have most regrets about. Not only the league, we were absolutely robbed in the UCL. I was convinced if we held on at Anfield we would have gone on to lift the trophy

SimplyThePest

Clrnc I think we’d have copped it from Chelsea in the semi if we’d held on against Liverpool. We were flagging at that point, too many injuries and lack of depth a bridge too far...

est

Clrnc
Fuck me, that made me remember that Kuyt blatant pull on Hleb. Now I want us to beat these cunts even more.

Clrnc

Bring Back Kerrea Gilbert Are you Tourbillion?

Bring Back Kerrea Gilbert

Clrnc Yeah!

Burnwinter

I remember a million threads about Martin Taylor and about Gallas's character that seemed to telescope in time and go for several years after that. Truly a collective trauma response looking back, we didn't cope too well.

Clrnc

SimplyThePest maybe, but we generally played well in big occasions that season and the players had bottle for most part of the season. The way we absolutely outplayed Liverpool and Milan was something else. In the first leg Liverpool could have been 4 or 5 goals down

Claudius

The story of Wenger in Europe. Too much shoulda coulda woulda. We had the best team in Europe for a year or two. And were otherwise a top 6 team. We just didn’t make it count

Bring Back Kerrea Gilbert

Claudius He just did not continually invest in the squad. Ever.

Claudius

Bring Back Kerrea Gilbert he did early on. Reyes was such a useful buy, for example. And that invincible team was around 14 deep with real quality. It’s Emirates Wenger that was too stingy

Clrnc

Claudius one of the missed great buys we often didn't talk was Ribery in 2006. Would have been a game changer buying him instead of bloody Nasri 2 years later. Was just 1 or 2 million off the valuation and Wenger bailed out ffs

goon

Claudius I wonder if he thinks back to that post Emirates-pre Ozil era and regrets how he went about certain things.

I don’t get the impression he ever went to the board or the owners and said to them ‘I need this or we need that’. It’s not like we’re talking about hundreds of millions, often it was just an extra £5m here, 10m there or a bit more flexibility with the wage structure.

Allowing that 07/08 team to break up was absolutely criminal.

daredevil

Are people still questioning our frugality during the Emirates years? Really? Wenger spent money before the stadium and spent it again when the purse strings loosened. Our tightness was obviously a result of financial constraints, due to, herp derp, the Emirates Stadium.

The fans were wrong (again) about the manager choosing not to spend when it was obvious that our budget simply didn't allow it.

goon

daredevil I used to make the same argument back then but there’s levels to frugality.

We were making profits in the tens of millions during that period and were one of the wealthiest clubs in Europe. We could have spend more than we did fairly easily.

Even if you buy the idea that it was a highly restrictive bank loan, which I don’t, it could have easily been renegotiated.

But I suspect Wenger and the club had no desire to even approach the limits, never mind push it.

Burnwinter

daredevil Our tightness was obviously a result of financial constraints, due to, herp derp, the Emirates Stadium.

I've come to believe this is likely untrue or not the main underlying rationale for the slow spending. In my opinion, the "sustainable model" rhetoric was driven by KSE, who decided to put downward pressure on the value of Arsenal stock while they collected it all.

Since the Kroenkes bought Usmanov's 30% stake for £550m in August 2018, their behaviour, and the directness of their involvement in the club has changed like night and day. Usmanov obtained a very healthy price to fuck off.

Even if not cause and effect, it's not by chance 2018 is also when Wenger and Gazidis left Arsenal.

I still think the endgame is getting hold of the step value change that'll be out there if Arsenal becomes part of another major restructure of the most elite level of the sport, whether it's a breakaway ESL or something else.

Clrnc

goon I can't remember where I read it, probably one of Wengers former aide or Swiss Rambles but we had money during the Emirates era. Wenger often either chose not to spend it or deemed the player not worth that little bit of extra. Frustrating really

Claudius

We had tons of money and were always well above bank imposed liquidity requirements. What caused financial problems for Ardsenal was purely dropping out of the Champions League for an extended period. Which Wenger caused by his lack of reinvestment in the squad as rivals increased.

What is really sad as well is that in the period we really neglected the team, English teams started absolutely dominating the Champions League, making regular finals appearances. And we were left out of this.

Claudius

Burnwinter
Agree on the downward pressure, Burns.
It’s neither party has a benefit in investing unilaterally or jointly in the club becoming more valuable raises the value of the buyout for each party. And they played this poker game for years at our expense. It goes back to Dein. The fucker introduced too many jokers to this club and cashed out

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