I know what you did last summer Arsene... you bought rubbish players

Last summer’s transfers looked terrible at the time and they have panned out exactly that way (with the exception of Champo, who - I'm sure entirely coincidentally - is the only one we paid real money for).

Arteta has seen a lot of game time and is the chief architect of our being so rubbish (someone said over the weekend that Arsenal is ‘designed to pass, not to win’; Arteta is designed to ‘pass for the sake of passing, and badly’), Mertesacker is average at his best and terrible at his worst, Santos I didn’t particularly like when he played (though Wenger loves him as he does Gibbs).

Park I won’t even comment on, Jenkinson is a joke and an injured one at that, Gervinho shows glimpses of talent and tons of non-talent, and at best he is very raw (at 24!) and will probably never develop into a good player, and Benayoun I guess is good for Carling cup games. All in all, it has all played out EXACTLY as expected last summer, and Wenger did not have some crazy insights from hyperspace after all that nobody else could see.

With this in mind, I’m shocked that Wenger is shocked about our form this season at all. A team with Fabregas and Nasri is a better team than a team with Arteta and Gervinho - no two ways about it, it's clear for anyone to see and it is reflected on market prices. Heavy Milan result aside (despite all my grievances, even this bunch of players could have done better at Milan) that’s exactly what has happened. A team that was not quite good enough last year is worse this year. Where’s the mystery? We are performing exactly at the level someone would expect given the downgrade in the quality of personnel.

Van Persie is defo going this summer, and I would be the first to urge him to do so; he is a top class guy and this is a mediocre team (for the standards it sets itself; it would be a great Everton team for example, and even a great Spurs team any year other than this one). With the £30 million we get for him we can make Wenger’s £15 million profit and spend £10 on buying some random youngsters and some random ligue 1 attacking midfielder than has once chatted to Eden Hazard at a party. And we'll even have £5 million in the bank to give all our underperformers a hefty pay-rise (because for all the talk of Wenger thrift and underspend in the transfer market, there is no thrift when it comes to salaries)