Good old Ivan Gazidis has come in for a lot of stick from Arsenal fans over the years, especially when he has made claims of Arsenal spending fortunes when we were actually selling our best players. On Friday Gazidis attended the annual meeting with Supporters groups and it seemed to have been very civilized….
Times have changed and now that Arsenal really have money to invest, the Gunners Chief is not so slapdash with his statements. In fact he seems a bit circumspect and makes the point that it is a lot harder for the club to improve a squad that is already very good, but he does seem confident that this can be done this summer.
Ivan was quoted as saying on the Arseblog: “… the thing everyone wants to talk about, is what’s happening at the tip of the iceberg with the first team and we’ve built quietly and without a lot of fanfare a good and deep squad.
“Now this summer is quite a delicate one for us, because it’s easy to improve when you’ve got obvious weaknesses, but I feel we’ve got a very good and strong squad across all positions. We’ve got a very healthy age profile, it’s a young squad and we’re in great contract positions as well, lots of long contracts, not too many people we have many issues with contract wise.
“The challenge for us, and what a great challenge to have, is how you improve that. You’re right, we have to do that but it’s actually not very easy when you’ve got a very good squad. Because when you bring somebody in, you’re pushing somebody else down, so you’ve got to be sure that when you add someone, you’re really raising the level of the squad.
“That’s our challenge this summer and I’m convinced we’ll be up to it, as we have been for the last couple of years.”
So that sounds promising from the CEO, and it does imply that anyone we do buy will be much better than our current players.
Fingers crossed!