Qwiss this isn't a criticism of Arteta for what it's worth, it's a criticism of our recruitment team (specifically negotiations). Ultimately, I think we've overpaid in a few instances and whilst you accept that when you have gaping holes in your team, there comes a time where you need to tighten things up.

Our net spend over the last 6-7 years is pretty mega so whilst we can obviously do more to recruit in attacking positins, I also don't think you can say that Arteta hasn't properly been backed at a squad level. If we get tighter on getting more bang for our buck, that will help as until things evolve commercially, we're not going to be able to spend more than the biggest spenders.

Don Pacifico interesting. bits i agree with, some bits i would disagree with

• on overall transfer spend, we are 4th since Arteta joined, behind Chelsea, United, and Spurs. We are just ahead of both Pool and City who had better stars and an established style when Arteta joined. so it is hard to say that we have spent a ton relative to our peer set
• this is especially true when you look at our age profile. we probably need to move on Partey and Jorginho from an age standpoint, but the other players are a good age, and you'd only move because you can do better - e.g, Jesus
• where you do have gaping holes is that we have a relatively small team. i used to be of the opinion that we needed one more, but i actually think now that this team probably needed two more (minus Sterling - who is a sack of wine), for us to have survived that tough Sept-Oct fixture list. That's what derailed us. Williams + Wood or something like that, would've made a difference. i still think we needed the players we bought (Merino, Cala); we just needed more up front.

We had to break even right?

Should also add what a glorious head of hair Petit still has, fantastic.

Qwiss the sudden stop is what makes no sense to me. Kroenke gives Arteta money for years when we looked God awful with little signs of improvement, he still did last summer to allow him to buy Merino and Calafiori which together cost close to 80m already but now there's nothing to fill up the forward line?

Makes perfect sense if they think he can't be trusted in the market, Sterling for significant wages and he gets garbage minutes, 500 defenders and goalies signed. But if you don'T trust him get rid of him and get someone in you can trust and who might even be able to get more out of the current batch, not doing anything at all right now makes zero sense.

There was talk that the owners were not happy about how we were not getting good money for sales. They have spent a lot of money in the past 3 summers so maybe the plan was this summer to reign that in. There was talk about becoming more PSR compliant. Liverpool didn't spend much either and neither did City.

Also I think as a club we are quite fussy when it comes to signings, we tried for Sesko and Williams hard in the summer and was a bit disappointing we didn't have a fall back option to either. The striker thing unlike many I can still live with, we really needed a wide player.

"We spent a bunch of money before so we have less money now" seems like the easiest thing to explain ever.

Claudius agree with your point on age profile.

On your net spend point, whilst I'm not completely discounting it, I think most here would be of the opinion that both United and Chelsea (and to a lesser extent Spurs) have invested pretty poorly. This can be taken as an endorsement of our recruitment I don't think it completely proves the point that we've maximised our spend as others have just been more profligate.

Qwiss I agree you can't just halt spending. But as mentioned, there was clearly intent to invest more this summer (Williams & Sesko) but for whatever reason we didn't recruit alternatives. That's bitten us in the arse but I don't think we planned our net spend to be quite so low in the summer; I think we expected to spend more and then rightly or wrongly chose to keep our powder dry when we couldn't get our first choice targets.

Don Pacifico if thats true it should be no problem to drop the bag now.

Claudius I just don't think the fact others have spunked money away completely absolves our guys of responsibility. I'd need to do some more sourcing but across Europe, I feel fairly confident there are a number of good deals happening that we could be matching on a more regular basis.

The other part of this equation we haven't referenced is our selling, which I think we're pretty much all agreed has been poor.

Coombs it should be possible in theory. In reality we don't have a DoF, our last one had most likely little to no say in who get signed, the next one will be appointed by the manager and the owner is a billionaire yank cunt who's probably surprised that our football players don't wear helmets.