Quote:
Originally Posted by bababui
It looks fairly certain that Rafa is gone. Who would you like to lead the team and would you agree that the Wenger system is preferable for a team both financially and strategically, rather than buying a bunch of high priced players and hoping they can play together?
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I'm not yet sure it's "certain" that Rafa will be leaving.
Your 'Wenger premise' is basically flawed: he has spent a lot of money as Arsenal manager. He's now been there long enough to have some youngsters emerging, but again - most of them were bought at 18/19/20, for significant money, with a few more at the ages of 16/17 for big money (or 'stolen', as Barcelona might argue about Fabregas). And that's in the last four or five years (when funding was tight when building the Emirates stadium) - prior to that, he was quite happy to splash cash on established players, some of them pretty poor signings too, as well as youngsters. Even in the last couple of years he's bought players in their mid 20s like Hleb and Rosicky for approx £10m each, or shelled out significant money for highly rated youngsters like Walcott. But no, he's the media darling who is brilliant at developing virtually free, unknown young talent...
If a manager is in the same job for 10 years, he's obviously doing something right. He's also going to get some young gems come through simply on the law of averages, though. I'd say Ferguson's 90's Man Utd side was infact a much better example of developing young talent - Nevilles, Beckham, Scholes, Butt, Giggs.