Arsenal need to spend some cash after Flamini arrival

Arsene Wenger – Shrewd businessman or a clever manager?

People would lose their sh*t. The world would drown in a wave of contradictory bullsh*t as Gooners, the world over, screamed in the clubs direction for not signing Flamini sooner.

“He was available on a free FFS you clueless, incompetent w*nkers!”.

Oh sh*t, Arsenal fans didn’t like what they got after saying they didn’t want what they needed

Contradiction is one of my biggest pet hates. It’s up there with needless stupidity and the two are combined far too often when it comes to Arsenal.

I’ve seen hundreds of tweets flow through on twitter for the past 6 weeks about depth and the need to sign more players for the squad as well as players for the starting eleven. When I challenged some of these tweets by posing the question “Would you rather we tried until the last minute to sign better players or do you just want numbers?” the overwhelming majority of responses, to my surprise, was “We are thin, we need a bigger squad”.

I like to clarify before I judge so I asked these people if they cared who the players were and most said “I don’t care what their name is, we just need numbers”.

Most of those people complained like hell on twitter yesterday when we signed Flamini. They complained because he didn’t cost anything and because he wasn’t the player they wanted the club to sign.

Contradictory.

I had someone tell me that “one free signing is okay but when they’re all free it isn’t good”. I asked them if price correlated with ability and by that logic if we signed Ronaldo and Messi on free transfers tomorrow that one of them would be a bad signing. Their reply was to compare Sanogo and Flamini to Ronaldo and Messi. Weak.

The logic and reasoning one chooses to use is the same regardless of the players involved. It could have been Cabaye and Tiote and if anyone thinks that either of those players is better for Arsenal than Flamini, then they clearly didn’t watch Flamini in 2007/08. Wenger believes that he is the same player who left and seriously, who are we to argue? He saw the guy in training everyday.

I’m sure people would have been happy if Flamini cost £15m. Sol Campbell didn’t cost a penny and he was one of our best ever players under Wenger.

Some will say the comparison is unfair but what Sol did is exactly what Flamini is going to do but from the other side of the mirror. Both came to make up numbers. Sol became first choice and thus made other players the backup players. Flamini is mostly here to back up Arteta.

It would be preferable to buy better players and allow what we have to become the backup but in the absence of better players, and lets face it, it’s hard to find someone significantly better for our set up than Arteta, you go for similar quality to become the back up.

I’m glad we got Flamini on a free because that’s £17-20m saved on Cabaye, that we will hopefully use to sign someone else.

The window isn’t over yet and there is a lot we probably could have done better, although without knowing exactly what happened for sure I am just saying this as a personal interpretation but one thing is for sure and that is, re-signing Flamini was a good thing regardless of who we sign or don’t sign next.