Sure
I'm going to go into a lot of depth.
When you said that it depends on an individual's interpretations of success, you're right to a certain degree. But Arsenal do have high expectations. We have won the league and multiple other trophies or finished in high positions whilst having half of the revenue streams and paying less wages than Man United did. Granted there was more of a level playing field and there weren't as many Oligarchs or Sheikhs interfering with the game, but we ourselves have a lot of money and we have an egalitarian pay structure which hasn't worked.
It's a case of paying the dross too much and paying our better players too little - and in essence, we struggle to offload the deadwood due to their obscene wage demands, and we struggle to maintain our top players because of our low wage cap in comparison to the clubs we should be competing with on the pitch.
Our lack of success or 'bottling' on key occasions i.e. in finals or when the cosh is on, has led to us losing our top players. Whilst it can not be good for dressing room morale to keep players that want to leave, if we try to keep them and tell them to honour their contract, show some ambition by bringing in some other top players and see where we go from there, then perhaps we could be in a better position than we are now. Another issue we've had is contracts. Why do we allow our players to run their contracts down to the final years? It shows that they have the power, they can negotiate the money they want or they can leave at their own will. Poor handling of the situations. And if we offer new contracts on say an expiring 2 year deal, then if a player refuses, it gives us enough time to get rid and then look at potential replacements.
If a 17 year old ''kid'' can see where we look like going wrong, I fail to see how rich professionals can't identify these problems.
Anyway, you may have thought I was going off on a tangent, but my point is that if we had addressed these types of issues to start with, it could have led to better league finishes and silverware and there wouldn't be a huge divide between the fans.
I think a team of Arsenal's expectation levels and calibre should be striving for more. I think we can still compete with the City's and Chelsea's of this world - if things at the club are set right from the hierarchy of the management to the set of players we have available. Bringing back David Dein for instance, would be a massive boost and we could get our business dealings done nice and early and we wouldn't haggle for so long over prices like Gazidis
purportedly does.
I hate it when people say we can't compete financially. We actually can. We have enough money. It's a case of management and strategies to help us bring back glory days.
Dortmund have won the league back-to-back and have won their domestic cup, despite having less turnover and paying less wages than the likes of Bayern Munich, Leverkusen, Borussia M'gladbach and Bremen. And they did this whilst losing some key players such as Sahin.
The reason why they won it was because they had a good manager, competent boardroom that backed him and competent players. They went through a bad spell around October/November, but showed resilience to win the domestic double.
Whilst money can be a factor, team ethic, innovation, man management and having new plans of action are also pivotal to a team's success. Not that we need the money anyway, according to our accounts. (
http://www.arsenal.com/assets/_file...1318409853_Arsenal_Holdings_plc_-_Annual_.pdf - page 53).
And the reality of it is, over the last 7 years, the latter things I mentioned have not been good enough for Arsenal.
