Joe Fitzpatrick 
What do you do with yourself after you've coached a team like the Invincibles to an unprecedented unbeaten season? Must make you feel good about yourself mustn't it? Like you could achieve well, almost anything?
What do you do with yourself after you've coached players like Bergkamp, Henry, Pires, Adams, Vieira, Seaman, Ljungberg, Anelka, Petit, Wright, Parlour, Keown, Dixon, Kanu and Wiltord and won numerous trophies with them? There really must be very little you feel that you haven't seen or done in the game except, that is, for winning the Champions League or gambling a club’s entire future at the top level on your own ability to create your very own Bergkamp, Henry or Pires from scratch. Arsene Wenger very nearly won the Champions League in 2006, but by then he was also already totally committed to his other grand scheme of creating a team of superstars from scratch and dominating Europe for years to come.
What in the world would you say when your Chairman, Vice Chairman and Board come to you with a proposal to build a state-of-the-art stadium based almost entirely on your ability to nurture and develop young footballers and ensure that they consistently qualify for the Champions League? Only Arsene Wenger - at least to my very limited knowledge - has been offered both the challenge and opportunity to develop a young squad on a very limited budget based on his ability to get them into the Champions League every single season in order to pay off the debts on a state-of-the-art 60,000 all-seater stadium.
When you say it out loud it all seems rather absurd, doesn't it? It was a match made in heaven for both the Board and for Wenger. He must have seemed like a godsend to our old Board. Here appears, from almost total obscurity, like a thunderbolt from the blue, this Frenchman with a very good track record building steadily at the club and he has enough confidence in his own coaching ability that he was willing to say that the move to Ashburton Grove was financially viable because he didn't need a huge amount of money in transfer fees to be successful. And by successful, he and the Board meant Champions League qualification, of course.
The share price rose steadily higher and higher while investment in the playing squad was only required if Champions League qualification was ever in serious doubt. Make no mistake about it: if Arsenal had been looking comfortable in their bid for Champions League qualification then Arshavin would never have been bought. It was a panic buy.
The whole stadium move was a dream come true for Arsene Wenger, a smokescreen, a ready-made excuse to hide behind if it all went tits up. It gave him complete freedom to do what he loves to do, what he wants to do and how he obviously wants to go about it, and if he succeeded he would go down in history as one of the greatest football managers of all time. What we are all witnessing, like a terrible accident that we cannot prevent, is one man’s dream that is rapidly turning into some kind of insidious recurring nightmare for all of us.
The reality of this nightmare situation is that the Board created a Frankenstein's monster and not a footballing doctor (or even a professor for that matter) when they signed up for the Ashburton Grove project because, in doing so, they signed up for a new stadium, increased matchday revenue, an increased share price and Dr. Arsene-stein's fountain of eternal youth project all at the very same time.They all went hand in hand.
The problem for us fans is that the directors and shareholders that signed us all up for Dr. Arsene-stein's project have all, to a man and woman, sold their shares off for a massive profit and left us at the mercy of an American sports tycoon who we really don't know much about at all. We don't really know what Silent Stan's agenda is and it looks as if he is going to persevere with the current methodology which, as we all know, is by no means guaranteed to bring us trophies.
We will no doubt be exposed to the horrors of more failed experiments in our first team like Almunia, Denilson, Eboue, Diaby and Bendtner and we will be forced to watch as our better players get so sick of the mediocrity around them that they just pack up their snoods and leave.
Just as we are going through this current transfer saga with Cesc Fabregas, we could very well be going through a carbon copy situation with Jack Wilshere or Aaron Ramsey in a few years’ time. How are Wilshere and Ramsey going to react to being the shining lighthouses amid a sea of mediocrity? Will they stick around while obvious deficiencies in the squad are papered over with bargain basement signings and whatever gems the youth system manages to unearth? I don't think that they will, and it's not beyond the realms of possibility that when they are 23 or 24 we will be in exactly the same situation with them. Mr. Kroenke might then be tempted to take the untold millions he will undoubtedly be offered for their services at some point.
What a scam! Keep on with the eternal youth policy where the average age of the team never seems to increase, all the while flirting with the top prizes, then selling off our best players as soon as replacements roll off the production line and rinse and repeat ad infinitum. If we are not careful, we could see our team slip irreversibly into what the once mighty Ajax have now become, A club that has one of the best youth systems in the world but is for all intents and purposes a selling club that is not going to win the Champions League anytime soon, if ever at all.
We were sold a big lie. We were told that this Stadium move was going to allow us to compete financially with Europe’s elite, and the people who sold us that lie are no longer at the club and either they or their families are the richer for it. We are left with the monster that they helped create and an unknown quantity in Stan Kroenke who, for the moment at least, looks as if he is happy to see if their Arsene-stein monster can win silverware with the little monsters that he has created at Castle Colney or bought at the footballing equivalent of Primark.
