As we're unlikely to see terraces again at football, this is the virtual equivalent where you can chat to your hearts content about all football matters and, obviously, Arsenal in particular. This forum encourages all Gooners to visit and contribute so please keep it respectful, clean and topical.
supergeorgegraham wrote:Now that we have seemed to come back to a point where we can buy a big name has the last 8 years damaged our reputation. To look at this closely lets look at who caused us the most problems.
Before Abramovich Chelsea were nothing at all. A team in our shadows who we beat time after time after time.
Lots of money gets pumped in their wages hit the roof and suddenly they start to win things. At first playing really boring football compared to what we were doing but as we slid into signing Chamakh and Silvestre and then selling our best players they went on to win the Champ League. Yes they did not deserve it buy hey ho.
Now we say we are back and ready to compete. Do the big stars take us seriously ?. How do the football world view Arsenal now ? Is the global vision of football put Chelsea as the bigger team due to their recent success ?
Money plays its part these days so the next couple of years will be interesting. I will never see Chelsea as anything other than a fake club who paid for trophies with money they never had.
I have said on many occasions that we allowed ourselves to be bullied by Chelsea and that selling them Cole was the pivotal point. We did not have to do that - the £5m plus Gallas was a shocking deal and the player wasn't demanding £100k per week, but £60-£65k which could have been paid easily. Everyone has a price but we sold cheaply - we didn't do a Levy and demand £35m like for Modric, or €80m like United for the sale of Ronaldo. We just rolled over to Chelsea and basically said "yep, you can shaft us" and basically opened the door from that point, since when City & United have seen as as easy pickings. There was a time when we didn't allow ourselves to be bullied - Real paying us £23m for Anelka, £30m for Petit and Overmars back in the day. The club was run properly then......now we are a joke; a selling club being run by marketeers with little commercial acumen. Even the deals they done in 2006 were below the market rate in a pre-recession age when they could and should have done significantly better
