I don't often highlight particularly low quality pieces of journalism but today's Dail Mail has some of Martin Samuel's excrement within, and it deserves a closer inspection and ridicule. It starts off badly by falsely assuming that Arsenal have made a habit of buying in ready made superstars, in fact nothing could be further from the truth and by starting off from this false premise, Samuel's foundations of sand soon disintegrate to reveal no logical or coherent argument.
The truth is that Arsenal have never purchased superstars, as a club we have brought in top players who have been struggling for various reasons (Bergkamp/Overmars/Henry), young talent to develop (Anelka/Cesc/Clichy) and some slightly lesser known established players (Lauren/Pires). Arsene has always sought value and consequently we have never gone out to buy a big name superstar who would have commanded anything like a top whack fee.
In fact very few English clubs have purchased the very cream of top world talent in its prime. Most of the so called 'galacticos' of the modern game have tended to go to Italy and more recently Spain, as opposed to England. The history of the world transfer fee record makes interesting reading and demonstrates this point perfectly, the last eight record fees were paid by Italian or Spanish clubs.
Samuel ignores the fact that Arsenal are one of the few top clubs that isn't actually being bankrolled by a sugar daddy(City/Chelsea) or racking up massive amounts of unsustainable debt (Barca/Manu). It is no surprise that we cannot compete in the transfer market with some of these reckless charlatans, it would be suicidal to do so. Samuel than attempts to dismantle the signing of Gervinho, stating that he's not even a regular for Lille, yet another poor error from the bearded one, Gervinho was about as much of regular as it was possible to be, 32 starts for Lille in the league alone last season.
Samuel distorts reality in order to paint the negative picture of Arsenal then he wants to paint, this is just bad dishonest journalism. The truth is that Arsenal now are probably a relatively bigger club than we have been at any point previously in our history, and as a result we are capable of bringing in some pretty substantial players if we chose to do so. Certainly we can't compete financially with those who have an infinite supply of blank cheques, but frankly it would be madness to even try. Samuel would do far better to concentrate his anger and aggression towards clubs that are driving this reckless wage inflation with their unsustainable and reckless financial practices than pick this weak fight with Arsenal.
