Doc Cursed? nah, a mixture of things. Under Wenger, we sold starts for nothing as Wenger was just a very nice guy. Instead of telling Van Persie, Fabregas and the rest to fuck off, as you do with pricks...he let them leave for nothing.
Then under Edu, Raul, it was just that they were shit at their jobs and probably a little corrupt.
I saw a post somewhere, that I could not believe, but if you trust capology & transfermakt then it's true. Zinchenko was on 20k per week at City, at one point they extended that, and gave him...20k. He came here, 140 per week. Ok, I expect a bump, as he was a main guy here for a while, but 7 times more?
Looked up Jesus at City was on 85k per week, he signed an extension he went to 100k. He came here on 270k per week. Ok, again, I expect a higher salary as he was the main guy here, and great at the start to be fair to him. But that's a huge jump. Ok, maybe the argument is that players stay at City on the bench, on lower money as it's a winning trophies hack, where at Arsenal you never win anything. And of course Pep is the best manager out there, much better then Arteta.
But then if you think about it, we do that for every player, even from our own squad. Arteta played Nelson for 202 MINUTES in the PL in 2022-2023, not even 3 games !!! At the end of the season, we signed him up on a new deal. He was on 60k before 2023(why?, he was less important to us then Zinchenko at City yet he made 3 times more) we gave him 100k. After this salary increase we played him for 257 minutes. I mean...just a shit call. Good luck selling Nelson. If we kept him on 60k, or you know, gave him what he was worth, probably 20k, that's an easy sell, a good profit.
Think about Jesus, at City was a good PL player, he was on 85k, we gave Eddie 100k to be a sub here and let's be real he was never as good as Jesus, he went to Palace and signed for less money !!!
Same for Lokonga, paid 21 mil for him, almost tripled his salary, never played him. Good luck.
Fabio Vieira was even worse, he was getting like 10k per week at Porto, and we gave him 84k, who does that? The most he played for us was his first season, a grand total of 540 minutes.
I mean, cursed? Don't even get me into Havertz, who went to Chelsea, flopped, they sold on a loss, but somehow we managed to pay him more then Chelsea....or Nicolas Pepe, who we paid 14 times more then what he was making at Lille 🙂.
Ok, sometimes you can have bad luck, as a player gets injured, or is amazing somewhere and for whatever reason they don t get going here...but in general, this is all man made. Just horrible scouting like Lokonga & Vieira or brain fart calls by Arteta like extending Nelson but never using him. Arteta tends to do that, tank value of players for no reason at all by not playing them but keeping them around.
Now look at this:
Bournemouth close to signing Ben Doak from Liverpool in £25m deal
Got him for free in 2022, sold him for 25 mil pounds, 3 years late.
Played 4 times for Liverpool. Another thing that we don't do enough is loan young players. Chelsea and Liverpool do that a lot, and once they have a good season out on loan, they sell.
