http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/24569490 Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger insists the club's priority is to develop their own players, such as Jack Wilshere, rather than make big-money signings. The Gunners broke their transfer record by £27.4m with the £42.4m signing of Mesut Ozil in September. But Wenger warned that this would not be the start of a new policy. The Frenchman said: "The future of this club will rely on the quality of the work we do here inside - in developing our players and scouting with quality." Wenger said Arsenal's football strategy is focused on three key areas, all of which he believes are imperative if they are to succeed. "The first level is to continue to defend our style of play, philosophy of play and values - that can only be done by developing our own players. "The second level of development has to be based on the intelligence of our eye. Players who are unknown can become big players here through our connections, through the quality of our scouting and through the quality of what we have seen in them and how they could develop. "The third part of our ambition is to scout and buy recognised world-class players. This season we have bought Ozil - you don't need any scout to buy Ozil, you just need money." The strategy is sound and to maintain long term success, we need to produce our own rather than buying all the time. The two most successful clubs in domestic football are Barca and Bayern Munich. Incidently, they come from two of the strongest international countries in the world. We seem to be continuing our investment into our youth system by recruiting a new top-class new head of academy, who will review all operations on youth development, which should lead us forward. This will not only benefit Arsenal but the England team.
It's clearly the right way forward, as we can build a solid core of our own players, and then add the world class players to take us to the next level. If every summer, all we did was add two top players, and keep what we have, I for one would be happy with that.
But keeping your best players, also depends on getting success, if we continue to go on barren spells, it makes it harder to keep your best players, Ozil is fantastic, but would he want to remain with us come the end of next season if we fail to win anything this and next year? So in order to keep our best players, we need to start winning trophies. That's how we kept our Pires' and Vieira's, even when the worlds best clubs came looking for them, they stayed with the Arsenal.
I think the plan is to win trophies with a mixture of home grown talent like Wilshere, Ramsey, Szczesny, Gibbs etc and World class established stars like Ozil and Cazorla. If we add a world class striker then this team is pretty much a title contending side.
I completely agree with all three points. The key thing to making it work though is NOT to sell your best players year on year.
