I feel like you are just mis remembering Wenger era Arsenal. Sanchez and Ozil were not really big, outsized fees compared to the market, first off. Ozil was an opportunistic signing because they needed to trade a player out having signed Bale. Xhaka- 25 mil. Not really mega money.
The point was though that Wenger used to be a guy that got them to overachieve consistently. Then he was a guy that got them to play at par, consistently. Then he was a guy that had them still at par, but other teams had improved so much that Wenger’s par had gone backwards. He was a guy that needed good players to achieve. He gave them freedom, he trusted them, and when they had the 3rd best team, they’d finish 3rd. When they had the 4th best team, they’d finish 4th. And when they had the 6th best team, they finished 6th.
The whole problem with Wenger era Arsenal is that they didn’t have a strategy to overachieve and eke out the additional % points that would take them punching above their weight again. Their whole strategy was spending what they could, giving those players freedom and because they couldn’t spend as much as United, Chelsea or City, they would never consistently get above them again. The club had way too much power concentrated in Wenger’s hands, and that’s why we’ve seen the moves to disperse that now.
Sanchez and Ozil were both bought for 40 million plus, if I remember -*shattering* Arsenal's transfer record (doubling it, iirc) in consecutive summers, as well as inflating their wage budgets into the 175k - 200k ranges almost immediately. Similarly, Mustafi was a 35-40m signing, as was Xhaka. After them came Lacazette for 50m+, and then Aubameyang for close to 60m.
Wenger was not hesitant to spend because of some philosophical compulsion. Necessity forced him into his approach during the lean years.
As for Wenger and getting players to overachieve, then getting them to on par, and then underachieving, you're severely underestimating the effect transfers had on that era, imo. They made a profit of something like 40m in transfers during that eight-year period, and their players were mostly cheap buys from obscure places - occasional splurges like on Arshavin were surprising precisely *because* they were the deviation from the trend of cheap punts turning out good (like Adebayor, Sagna, Clichy, Nasri, Hleb, Rosicky, Fabregas, Koscielny, Eduardo and so on).
Wenger overachieved with that squad just getting them to 4th, never mind the title challenges and 3rd place finishes that they had during those years. What he did turning cheap youngsters into top-class players and making a 40m profit in the interval doesn't indicate 'on par'.
It indicates overachievement, and performances at least equivalent to Poch's performances here, imo. With the same MO.
And, unfortunately, with likely the same results that we will have, given those similarities. Nothing won, and a club now no closer to the title than they were when they *started* building the Emirates - indeed, a good deal further away.
We on the other hand, do have a strategy. It’s strategy around finances, it’s strategy around player recruitment, it’s strategy about the standards we expect and it’s strategy around the training we do, all geared towards making sure we can punch above our weight. To make players like Ben Davies, Kieran Trippier reach heights they never thought possible. To make players like Dier, Kane and Dele perform like key cogs immediately. And for players like Eriksen and Son to reach their potential. It doesn’t just happen because we sign them and they all just happen to be good, it’s the environment we create for them. It’s the standards of behaviour and consistency of performance we expect from them. And a culture is established via your actions. You set rules for the group, and adherence to those rules is rewarded (Poch has always tried to fit Dier into the team because he is a standard bearer of a relentless desire to improve, but when Poch saw those standards drop behind the scenes, he benched him) and non adherance to those rules is punished - GKN wearing his headphones rather than supporting the team, Dier putting less work in behind the scenes, Walker not waiting until the end of a title challenge to tell the club he wants to leave.
I'd argue that this isn't that different to what Arsenal did - in both cases, to punch above our weight in the context of a new stadium, we adopted the tactic we felt would suit us best. In Poch's case, it's relentless improvement, and in Wenger's case, it was the development of young players into stars (which in itself involved a good deal of relentless improvement, I'm sure you'd agree). It worked for Arsenal, but only in that it kept them around the CL places - and the danger there is that our tactic, if it does involve selling our stars to our rivals... isn't all that different, imo.
Again, the 'soft' Wenger excusing failure and bad performances only really became a thing after 2013/2014, when his relevance also started declining as the Poch-era managers began entering the league. Before that, his system produced stars, and what players *were* coddled were excused on account of Wenger's 'loyalty' to his charges - which is possibly where Poch has the advantage over him now.
And remember, for every player that upped their performance after joining us, there's likely one that couldn't. For every Kane, there's a Soldado and a Janssen - for every Davies, there's a Fazio, and for every Mason and Bentaleb, there's a Paulinho and a Stambouli (GHod, what a cop-out that signing was). And, at some point, turning punts into stars will yield diminishing returns, if it hasn't started to already.
Our strategy works in getting us into the CL places, but it isn't some perfect plan that will result in endless improvement. It has a glass ceiling that even Poch has spoken to - one that we will eventually have to confront, either with cold hard cash or with acceptance of our 'place' in the order of things.
You are completely writing off this standards argument as if it’s nothing, but it’s a key component of our ability to overachieve. Arsenal didn’t have such a plan - it was give total control to Wenger and hope he takes them back on top. As such they kept performing to par while us and Liverpool, with actual plans around how to overachieve, went past them. The Modric example is irrelevant - we forced him to stay and we weren’t a team that finished above par. We weren’t a club that used relentless standards as a cog in overachieving. Dier is someone that knuckled down, but we could quite easily say to him he would get consistent pay rises at Spurs and he is years off needing to make his ‘one final big move’ (which is a real thing for footballers but not something he needed to worry about).
Us and Liverpool went past them because we have relevant modern managers in an age where their tactics are perfectly suited to the contemporary zeitgeist. Essentially, post 2014.
Again, it's different eras. If Poch had tried his hard-pressing football and relentless improvement in 2007, I'm not sure how effective it would have been given the way football still was at the time - with an abundance of lazy strikers and No.10s, few modern training tools or practices and antiquated performance management methods.
But I'm not sure you could ascribe that to some substantive difference in our overall *strategies* in terms of targeting winning the title eventually. You could if we decide, f*ck United, we're selling Toby elsewhere. If not...well, the similarities stand, imo for the reasons I've outlined above.
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