Did Arsenal just have the worst transfer window in recent memory?

History tells us that big spending summers rarely translate to good season finishes, as a recepient of such a horrible window i thought it best to make this thread:


Spurs '13/14



Total spent (gross): €122.53m

Soldado - €30m
Lamela - €30m
Paulinho - €20m
Eriksen - €15m
Capoue - €11m
Chirches - €10m
Chadli - €8.1m

Finished 6th



Milan '17/18



Total spent (gross): €154m

Bonucci - €42m
Silva - €38m
Hakan - €23m
Biglia - €20m
Musacchio - €18m
Rodriguez - €15m

Finished 6th

Arsenal '21/22



Total spent (gross): €154m

Ben White - €58m
Lokonga - €18m
Tavares - €8m
Odegaard - €40m
Ramsale - €30m


Expected finish: ...?


If Arsenal do finish 6th like the previous the cases, i would say their season is a success but the PL is much more competitive and i don't foresee them jumping spaces upon last season's finish with the current roster and manager.

I expect them to finish 8th again, it's a decisive season for Arteta and i surmise that he will be gutted by the end of it.

Our rebuilding summer after kicking out G&H, didnt spend a lot but damn

Nishankly wrote:Our rebuilding summer after kicking out G&H, didnt spend a lot but damn

Replace the people with empty seats and that looks like our standard transfer windows.

Nishankly wrote:Our rebuilding summer after kicking out G&H, didnt spend a lot but damn

What you did with the Suarez money was worse.

Kaladin wrote:
Ben White - €58m
Lokonga - €18m
Tavares - €8m
Odegaard - €40m
Ramsale - €30m

Tbh I've never heard any of those names? So I can't even beginning to think how can someone spend 156m on that?

That Liverpool mercato... Joe Cole and who are the 2 other guys

But i think 2017-2018 Milang project is the worst mercato ever, given the expectations that it would kickstart the club again. Most Milan posters on the forum knew in advance it would be shit, and it sure was. Arsenal are already bad and nobody expects them to improve after this summer.

@Dante owes me 1 week of endless praising of my posts if he ever comes back, betting thread certified. He thought Fassone & Mirabelli would beat Juve lol

M99 wrote:

Nishankly wrote:Our rebuilding summer after kicking out G&H, didnt spend a lot but damn

What you did with the Suarez money was worse.

Amazing

In retrospect, that Spurs mercato is probably not the worst I've seen. They ended up getting a franchise player out of it (Eriksen obviously) who, based on his play for Spurs those years, was probably a 40-60m value type of player.

Lamela at 30m wasn't great, and he probably cost another 30m in medical procedures, but he was a starter turned heavy rotation player during the 8! more years he spent with Spurs, so I don't think he can be called a flop at all.

Soldado was a flop. It seemed a good transfer but we all know how it ended up going down. 16m pound loss on net transfer fees. If you wanted to look at it positively, him being so bad allowed the space for Harry Kane to come in.

Paulinho was a flop, but at least Spurs recouped most of the cash. Lost about 6m euros on him.

Chadli was a good role player for Spurs for a couple years, never complained about him. He was sold for a 6m pound profit 3 years later.

Capoue was a good player until Cazorla did his ACL in. Sold at a loss for 3m pounds

Chiriches was a flop, sold at a loss of around 3m pounds or so.

Overall:

Of the 7 --> 3 flops, loss of about 23m pounds (roughly guessing exchange rates to some extent). Four if you include Capoue, with a loss total of 26m pounds

2 good role players --> One lasting 8 years, one lasting 3 and being sold at a profit of 6m pound.

1 franchise player, a key cog in the CL final side and a key player in multiple squads that really put the pressure on.

Total loss = 20m pounds.

I'm not really trying to make an argument here. Obviously those 7 as a group flopped the season after and it was a rough time for Spurs. I was just curious myself at how it all turned out so I looked it up and made a small write up. I would call that transfer window more of a failure than a success, but getting Eriksen was definitely massive and complicates the picture a bit.

Ödegaard is a fantastic transfer for Arsenal and also really cheap.

Hapless_Hans wrote:

M99 wrote:

Nishankly wrote:Our rebuilding summer after kicking out G&H, didnt spend a lot but damn

What you did with the Suarez money was worse.

Amazing

I see CL, Serie A, EL winners there

El Gunner wrote:lmaoooo Liverpool were a shambles post-Torres & Gerrard and pre-Klopp

True but i think Arsenal have finished below the worst of our time, GOAT league so competitive.

Was comparing to last season but now that I see you managed 8th place, so nvm

No.

Nothing will top Post Hicks & Gillete first transfer window. Nothing.

But in terms of sheer stupidity it was those Chinese Owners for Milan who threw darts in buying players with money we didn't have and close to no one succeeded on field.

Although we have not bought proven quality this summer, the harsh reality is that superstar players will not join our club at the moment because we are clearly rebuilding and we cannot offer any European football, and so our only choice has been to go for the top youth players available to us in the areas where we needed strengthening over this summer window in the hopes that they grow into world class players, and also to recruit Englishmen because we need to improve the number of homegrown players in the squad before the rules change to require more of them, at which point they will become even more expensive.

Given the situation we find ourselves in, I believe that we have generally been doing a good job of identifying promising young talent and filling a number of holes, but unfortunately we have had to pay a premium for every single player we identified because the clubs we have been signing these players from have a) mostly not wanted to sell their best young players, and b) have known how desperate we are to make these deals happen after the Kroenke family's public declaration that they wanted to spend big money on the team this summer, so we really didn't have room to negotiate like perhaps we did in the past when we used to only pay reasonable fees or else we'd walk away. Ultimately, this summer turned into a perfect storm where we had to pay a bunch of money to get the players we wanted and it was either do that, or make no progress at all.

Now the challenge is going to be about how soon we can get these players up to their potential, and if they will all turn out to be top players and not failed investments, like we have so often seen in recent years at our club. Hopefully our scouts who thought these players were worth it know what they're doing.

It's a lot of wasted money no doubt, but this doesn't even top our 2015 transfer window where the only signing we made was a 33 year old Petr Cech.

At least some of these players have some potential to be good, although it's no guarantee that they'll ever be. I believe at least Ramsdale and Lokonga will be good signings.

This rivals the Liverpool trio.

No the worst, but it is pretty shocking.

By Arsenal standards, the sqaud before this window was weak. But even just the starting 11 has some major holes and I cant understand how you can spend so much money and not clearly and definitively improve that 11.

I dont even know Ben White is better than David Luiz and this is the only position which is clearly going to change from last seasons team. Perhaps down the road it will end up being a good transfer, but just speaking about the short term its pretty bad.

I understand Arsenal are not in the position to sign the very best players, but this isnt the best they could do either.