David Seaman is hoping Arsenal's failure to qualify for the Champions League acts as a catalyst for a change in mentality at the club.
The former goalkeeper, who made 568 appearances for the Gunners between 1990 and 2003, believes the club need to revise their wage structure in a bid to attract the best players to the Emirates Stadium.
Arsenal will not play Champions League football next season after a fifth-placed finish, a situation which takes place against a backdrop of boardroom wrangling with Alisher Usmanov attempting to buy out majority shareholder Stan Kroenke.
Seaman believes that, regardless of those issues, the club needs to re-assess how much they spend on players.
"This has definitely been coming; they've always been in contention at various stages of the season but then they'd get knocked out of the Champions League and then the league form would just dip," he told Sky Sports News HQ.
"I hope this is a catalyst for change. Everything is in place for the club to kick on and they need to start attracting the big players again."
He added: "Looking at it now, we seem to be a long way from winning the league. Maybe this is just the thing that we needed, to give us a kick up the backside.
"I think a lot of other teams have overtaken Arsenal, certainly from a financial point of view, and that's where the problem lies.
"Arsenal don't pay the top money for the top players so they're always going to be different to the bigger clubs and obviously that needs looking at. They're not attracting top players.
"What are the targets of the board? Are they happy to make a profit every year or do they want to win the league? If they want to win the league there have to be changes.
"If you look at the highest-paid players, none of them are at Arsenal. So they have to have a look at the wage structure."
David Seaman was promoting SpottoCash, a spot-the-ball competition for the digital generation, ahead of its formal launch later this month.
No comments:
Post a Comment