Well hot dang, we’ve not spoken about net spend for a while.

This MNF beauty is doing the rounds on the twitternet (I hate it when people invent twee terms for stuff), and it’s pretty interesting because it shows you that Stan K isn’t as conservative with the pennies as you might think.

Over 4 years, Arsenal has a net spend that sticks us 3rd in the Premier League. Pretty appalling that we occupy the Europa League on that money, but we took care of the issues there in summer. What this table tells you is three things.

1. Arsenal turned into a hoarding club under Arsene Wenger. After years of having to sell players to keep things afloat, he went full on grandma on the other side of the family and hoarded players like she hoards newspapers and nik-naks from the local school fete.
2. Chelsea really make their cash work hard for themselves. They buy high and sell even higher. They hire in the best coaches, fire them when it doesn’t work. They win things. If Chelsea can win the league on that cash, so can Arsenal.
3. Spending money doesn’t necessarily equate to success. Manchester City has been dominant for the last 18 months, but United have been utterly shite. The reality is this season, the 5th highest net spenders are duking it out with the highest net spender. Again, we have to stop feeling sorry for ourselves and get smarter.

I didn’t want to put a 4th one in because it’s Spurs related, but it really does show you what an outrageous coach Pochettino is. He would be an absolute weapon at United, which is where I fear he’ll end up when Jose gets his P45 at some point this season. He makes players better, he motivates them to stay when there are greener fields and he spends fuck all. He’d have been a lovely manager to bring in when the money started rolling at Arsenal. It is what it is…

Rob Draper had some interesting quotes from VV and Sanllehi in The Daily Mail.

‘We want to make our fans proud of their football club,’

‘We do that in two ways: by winning and by winning in what we call ‘our way’.

‘We want to win the biggest trophies in the game and if you compete in the Premier League, there are only two: that’s the Premier League and the Champions League. And we want to win them in a way that respects 130 years of history and heritage (at) this amazing football club.

‘The short-term ambition is to get back in the Champions League. That is a step on the journey but not the ultimate ambition, which is 100 per cent shared by Stan and Josh.” (VV)

I mean… we’ve heard all this before, but it doesn’t just feel different this time, it looks different. We’re not hoping for progress based someone changing, we have a manager who has overseen title wins this decade. We also have a team on and off the field that is delivering really positive early signs. Also, and this is just me rose tinting… the LA Rams are doing really well, hopefully, that push for real success on the west coast of America will filter through to London. Trickle down winnertivity I believe they call it.

I also liked this comment from Raul.

‘We’re in a great streak of victories, hopefully, it will last longer. The longer the better. But we know there are going to be ups and downs this season. Performance has probably not been at the level of the results. Which is great. It is better to be a lucky winner than an unlucky loser.’

A bit of fucking honesty for once. We still have sections of our fanbase that can’t properly differentiate between winning and winning well, but at least we have people that can see that the performances haven’t been up to par. The reason I like that comment is it means there’s no mystical set of KPIs that are working out of view… success is the what matters. Putting on a show is important. Moving the club forward is the goal.

If it goes down the shitter, we’ll find a new manager. Anyway, take a read here. The bit about buying in a mega player left me a touch damp.

Right, that’s me done. See you in the comments. x