As the new season approaches and pre-season gets underway, most Arsenal fans have one massive eye on the transfer window as they hope to see the club land a massive striker signing.

Over the years since we moved to the Emirates we have been frequently told that the move itself would not impact our ability to buy players only to be told recently that it did, in fact, hinder our ability to buy players.

But that’s all over, right? We spent big and bought Mesut Ozil and Alexis Sanchez and Granit Xhaka. We can, as promised, now compete with the biggest players on the world stage.

That’s why we moved right?

In 2013, Ivan Gazidis said “This year we are beginning to see something we have been planning for some time, which is the escalation in our financial firepower. It means we can look at some options that weren’t really in our financial capability.

“We should be able to compete at a level like a club such as Bayern Munich. I’m not saying we are there by any means but this whole journey over the past 10 years really has been with that goal in mind.

“We are moving into a new phase where, if we make our decisions well, we can compete with any club in the world.”

Here’s Gazidis again in 2012 – “As we look to the next two, three years we will have an outstanding platform on which to compete with any club in the world.“

So it is perhaps surprising to see the very same man saying this week, “We came in second last year, which was disappointing. But we’re on the right track. We’re making progress in what is a fiercely competitive world, against competitors that have the capability to spend far more money than we do.”

This is one of the major problems with Arsenal and part of the reason fans get so angry at them.

They tell us over and over and over again that we can compete financially, that we can buy whatever players we want, and then when the time comes to actually do that, to complete the team that has been building for years but never finished, we’re told ‘ah, sorry, no money to compete with the rich teams!’

Isn’t that why we moved?

Isn’t that what the past 10 years was for?

Wasn’t it to give us the platform and ability to compete with those very same clubs?

Arsenal may not, for business reasons at the very least, be able to tell us the whole truth about how much spare cash they have for transfers, but do they have to actively lie to us?

Most Arsenal fans know that there are certain clubs we can’t (or shouldn’t) try and compete with financially and we don’t demand that the club tell us every little detail of their spending ability, as much as we’d love to know.

But most Arsenal fans also know that being lied to repeatedly and treated like morons, with the memory of a goldfish, is a pretty crap way of being treated.

But don’t worry, Ivan thinks there might be some talent in the lower leagues in France we might have missed.

Take that, Bayern Munich!