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Wenger: “We Dont Have As Much Money To Spend As Everybody Says”

By on August 23, 2013

Arsene Wenger says Arsenal don’t have as much money available to spend as people claim, but he’s confident he will add to his squad before the window closes in 10 days time.

Only this morning I wrote about how the Mirror claim Wenger is ready to spend £80m on up to five new signings while the BBC reported on Thursday it could be as much as £100m, as we target marquee names such as Karim Benzema and Angel Di Maria.

However, while Arsene admits he will bring new faces in before the window closes, it seems those figures may be a little inflated with the boss claiming at his press conference on Friday morning that we don’t have as much money available as the newspaper suggest.

He told Sky Sports News:

“Yes, I’m confident that we’ll make the signings we need because of the desire of the players to join us,” said the Frenchman.

“There’s also the fact that while we maybe don’t have as much money as everybody writes, we have some funds available to do transfers.”

Of course this could be Wenger back-tracking after Ivan Gazidis told the world we had a huge warchest to spend earlier in the summer. I’m sure the price’s Wenger has been quoted have got up by 20% following Ivan’s comments, so perhaps Wenger is trying to do a bit of damage limitation by pleading poverty to try and bring the prices down again.

We all know how much there is to spend, or at least how much there should be to spend – circa £70-£80m including the money we’ve already made from player sales. Now it’s time to spend it.

Wenger has rightly been criticised for his lack of action in the market so far but he’s defended himself, insisting he acted quickly to bring in the players he wanted but things haven’t come off as quickly as he’d have hoped. He continued:

“We’ve worked on it very hard but it hasn’t come off as quickly and as well as we wanted.

“You’d be surprised how early we acted. In our job, you can spend a lot of time, not going on holiday and work on things without it coming off.

“In football, you have to deal with any situation and be patient. As long as the window is open, anything can happen until the last minute.”

I’m sure he and the club have worked hard but it’s clear something has gone wrong somewhere, and the buck stops with Wenger. To leave our transfer business to the last week is scandalous and he seems to be giving us every excuse under the sun. The only fact that matters is we’ve got ample funds available and we’ve only signed an unproven striker on a free with little over a week left. That’s simply not good enough.

But he’s still got time to put things right. Hopefully we’ll be able to bring in at least 3 players before the window closes. Wenger seems confident, so let’s see what he brings us….

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What do you make of Wenger’s transfer activity so far?

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