Joe Fitzpatrick 
Liverpool and Tottenham have employed two young and dynamic managers in Andre Villas-Boas and Brendan Rodgers (both of whom studied under Jose Mourinho at Chelsea), and both clubs seem to be backing their new managers with as much financial muscle as they can muster.
Arsenal, on the other hand, are sticking with a manager who hasn't won a trophy since 2005 and are potentially destroying the value of their future sponsorship deals with their miserly transfer-policy. Arsenal's deals with Nike and Emirates (shirt sponsorship) expire in 2014 and will not be worth an awful lot should Arsenal finish fifth this coming season. Sponsors will only pay the big bucks to the teams that are playing in the Champions League and who are going to be seriously challenging for silverware (except for the anomaly of Liverpool of course!). All joking aside, Tottenham, Newcastle and Liverpool are the teams against whom Arsenal should be measuring themselves this coming season, because it seems pretty obvious to most of us now that Manchester United's unprecedented commercial success, and the oil money of both City and Chelsea, have put the Premier League title well out of our reach for at least the short-term future.
The teams that aren't owned by free-spending billionaires (wasn't it just our luck to get the only tight one!) are desperately trying to copy Manchester United's successful earlier model of gradual investment in the playing squad as sponsorship, merchandising and prize money increase. Success on the pitch has a direct correlation with the commercial success of a club, and Chelsea's new sponsorship deals in the wake of their Champions League triumph are clear evidence of this, even if you decide to discount the Gazprom deal as more than ever-so-slightly dodgy.
If Kroenke is not going to invest in a squad that is clearly deficient in several key areas, and then have the balls to set some clear targets beyond "finishing in the top four" for his football manager to achieve, then it's pretty logical that the teams that are starting to invest significantly and set targets for their managers will eventually overtake us. Arsenal may have been able to coast along to top-four finishes in the past but now, with the teams around us starting to invest heavily, we must either decide to make a real push while we still have a solid base or risk falling behind.
You would have thought that someone would have told Silent Stan Kroenke that, once you start losing in this game of ours, the fair-weather fans in foreign countries will change their allegiances faster than you can say "Manchester City", and that the only way he is ever going to make a serious return on his investment in Arsenal is to push for sporting success and the commercial success that goes with it.
Then again, he could just be quietly making a fortune by keeping us ticking over and paying off the debt while it gets more and more expensive each day for Usmanov to buy the club from him. As soon as Arsenal drop out of the top four, and he can no longer sell the club-level tickets as fans protest outside the stadium, Kroenke will put the world’s largest "For Sale" sign outside Ashburton Grove stadium. Let us pray that Usmanov will still want us by then.
