Rebuilding from Highbury and The Invincibles

Last season, after an 8-year trophy drought, Arsenal finally lifted the F.A. Cup. Hopefully for the Gunners, this lays down the ground work for a period different and more successful than what they've had in the past decade. Although a 17th consecutive season in the Champions League is quite the success itself, the reality is that Arsenal, “The Invincibles” from 2004 have since won the least silverware among the top English clubs. What with building a new stadium and a generation of players leaving them, they have had to remodel a lot in the past years, but things are now moving in the right direction and it is time for Arsene Wenger's side to step up.

In the eight seasons before this drought, from 1997 to 2005, Arsenal won an impressive 11 trophies. With the kind of squad they had in this period, the likes of Vieira, Bergkamp, Pires, Sol Campbell, van Bronckhorst, Edu, Grimandi, Adams, Gilberto Silva and of course, Henry playing for them, success was a given. But beginning from the summer of 2005, this squad began to diminish. Arsenal did make it to the Champions League final in 2006, but as history shows us, from then began a period of misery for the club. By the summer of 2007, the squad had a very different look and Arsenal were not doing a good job finding replacements, not that replacing Dennis Bergkamp or Thierry Henry was ever possible.

In truth, this apparent collapse had good reason behind it. Gunners were forced to build a new stadium in 2004 because Highbury was getting out of date. They were struggling to finance this project so what Arsenal did was employ a strategy of keeping a close count between money spent and earned in transfers. This business policy was used by Wenger around early 2000s and although Arsenal's core was shaped by players purchased in Wenger's early days, most of them were sold within 2007. The construction of the Emirates Stadium began in March 2004, and that year Arsenal won their last league title. The following summer Arsenal spent less than 5 million pounds in transfers, but they did win the F.A. cup in 2005, which was their last major silverware until 2014. Since the summer of 2004, Arsenal's competitors in England at that time, Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester United have spent big in transfers, around 740, 600 and 530 million pounds respectively. In this period, Arsenal spent only 356 million pounds in transfers altogether.

These figures and facts show that Arsenal had to deal with a rather rocky road of transition, financially and in a football sense. But the figures and facts also suggest that they have overcome it by now. An impressive 230 million pounds have been invested in the squad the past 4 seasons, and the likes of Mesut Ozil, Santi Cazorla, Lukas Podolski and Alexis Sanchez are now a part of Arsenal. They have some amazing home grown talent in Aaron Ramsy, Jack Wilshere, Theo Walcott, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Kieron Gibbs. Arsenal has proper leaders in Per Mertesacker and club captain Mikel Arteta. They have a balanced squad, with strength in all departments yet the gunners fail to get all their guns blazing. Arsenal is supposed to be frontrunners this season but they have been drawing their league games, they are now out of the Capital One cup and they were toyed around at the Westfalenstadion against Borussia. It's time for Arsenal to actually start playing like a top team. Wenger desperately needs to look beyond the “fourth place trophy”, because if they can't do it now, it's hard to foresee when and how they ever will.