Arsenal: Arsene Wenger’s fiery rant sounds like an accusation

Arsene Wenger is not one for a rant, but the loss to Stoke City seemed to open up a new Arsenal manager, and in the process, he may have shot a veiled accusation.

Arsenal’s loss to Stoke City was – in a word – deflating. All of the momentum and excitement that came about from the comeback win against Leicester City was lost in one awful hour and a half of typical Arsenal garbage.

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After the match, no one was happy. Least of all Arsene Wenger who, while he normally retains a cool head, spouted off quite a bit. He shot at Granit Xhaka, calling his mistake ‘stupid’ and fired off on another tangent about the transfer state of this club. Here are his words, as quoted by ESPN FC:

"I expect to sell players first, that is all. I expect some players to go because we have too many players and it is not manageable. Many clubs are in this situation which is why the transfer market is quiet. We have 33 players at the moment, and that is too many players."

This isn’t something new. He has been saying this for awhile now, but all we have heard is bids supposedly being rejected for being a few million pounds off the asking price.

Which all seems a bit counter-intuitive if this is becoming such a problem. So I’m going to go out on a limb here and share my theory with the world.

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And my theory is that if Wenger is going to rant about having too many players and mention this problem three times in the span of four sentences, then maybe it doesn’t fall on him. Maybe these statements are all a veiled dig leveled at the board, telling them to accept these bids so that we can start cleaning up and moving forward.

Wenger has dropped hints before that while he is control of what players to go after and what players not to, the money portion of it may not be all on him.

Not just that, but while Wenger is known to deflect blame on referees or whatnot after the match, he is not one to deflect blame in the transfer window when he is the one at fault. And I firmly believe that.

There is another force at work here. Because I don’t feel like Wenger would be putting himself in a situation like this, where he is willingly not doing something that would alleviate the situation.

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If nothing else, I always prefer to blame the board. Because it’s Stan Kroenke and generally speaking, they deserve it. But again, another topic I’m willing to debate, so come at me if you have another side to this (Twitter: @sippenator101. I’ll be waiting for you).