Arsenal FC: Why New Signings Alone Will Not Win the Gunners Any Trophies

Everyone agrees that Arsenal need to be active in the transfer market.

Ivan Gazidis said so. Even Arsene Wenger said so. Yet with such universal agreement among fans, the manager and the chief executive of the club, very little has actually been done in the transfer market.

With only Ivorian forward Gervinho and inexperienced defender Carl Jenkinson added so far, supporters are justifiably confused and frustrated.

After all, we desperately needed defensive reinforcements after last season's debacle, yet Arsene's only significant signing thus far has been a creative winger.

Though I generally hate being gloomy, what many Gooners fail to consider is that Arsenal are so fundamentally flawed that the additions of a couple good players are not enough to win them silverware.

I acknowledge that they were only preseason games which are merely exercises in fitness, but Arsenal's poor displays against Boca Juniors and the New York Red Bulls showed that last seson's mistakes are far from solved.

Twice we surrendered early leads in the second half, and both capitulations were due to defensive ineptitude.

Equally worrying were the numerous chances that Arsenal could not capitalize on and their immensely frustrating lack of success against defensive tactics.

One would normally write off these miscues as those of a team finding its stride and its rhythm in preseason—that given time, the squad will find its pace and eliminate those initial mistakes.

However, those same errors were what cost Arsenal the Premier League title and the Carling Cup last season. In total, Arsenal dropped 13 points last season from winning positions—12 would have gotten them the title.

After seeing the same old soft-bellied Arsenal rear its head in these last preseason games, I see no justification for believing that the team's problems are on their way to being solved, as much as I yearn for a trophy of any sort.

I did not really care about not winning a made-up trophy yesterday, nor did I particularly care about losing it to an MLS side. Good for New York; it shows that MLS is making some small advances in quality.

What really frustrated me was seeing the Arsenal defence—Marouane Chamakh in particular—struggle to get the glue off their feet as they stood motionless while Roy Miller sliced through the penalty box to assist for the equalizer that won New York the Emirates Cup.

Need I mention that this goal resulted from a corner kick?

How many times last season were we caught napping in defence? How many times was ball watching and sloppy play to blame for the concession of critical goals?

Yet the manager's defense of this is that we are an "attacking team." Well, somehow Manchester United managed to score six more goals than us while conceding six less.

I also remember seeing their open-top bus parade not too long ago.

Perhaps our delicate defense would not be so vilified if we had merely capitalized of the myriad of chances afforded to us by an inferior Red Bulls team. In fact, there should have been many more, but we seem to be perpetually unable to break down the wall that teams invariably establish behind the ball.

Yet Arsene Wenger defends his team by blaming the other team for the failures of his own. There is no gentlemen's agreement that everyone must play beautiful attacking football, so acknowledge other teams' tactics and adapt to beat them instead of making excuses.

If the engine of your car is melting, the first thing you do is not to give it a fresh paint job. Right now, the engine—the foundation, the fundamental aspects and skills of this Arsenal team are rotting away.

While buying a quality player like Juan Mata would certainly not hurt the Gunners' cause, there needs to be a fundamental change in the team and its entire mentality before anything substantial can be achieved.

Until Arsenal can consistently demonstrate that progress is being made and old problems are going away, the Emirates stadium will be reverberating with boos, rather than cheers.

And no new signing alone can change that.

Follow me on Twitter: @planefreakf22