With Samir Nasri and Cesc Fabregas Out, Have Arsenal Become a Feeder Club?

In an interview covered by ESPN, Arsene Wenger recently expressed the fear that, with the sales of Samir Nasri and Cesc Fabregas, Arsenal have become a breeding ground to which the richer and more successful clubs of the world come to poach the best up-and-coming world-class players.

Asked if Arsenal have become the nurturers of the world's top talents to be cherry-picked in their prime by the club's rivals, Wenger said:

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Yes we are concerned by that. When you take players who are 16 or 17 years old and play them in the Premier League, you need to be brave. But you do it because they deserve it and secondly because you hope the club will be rewarded when these players are 23 or 24, and are in a position to deliver. So it is a concern.

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There is certainly a case to be made for Arsenal being little more than an overachieving "feeder club" at this point. Indeed, Arsenal have been losing key players for many summers now.

Though Arsenal managed to escape the 2010 summer transfer window without losing Fabregas to Barcelona and without losing any key players to their rivals (unless you considered William Gallas a key player—a debatable topic all of its own), they were not so lucky in the summer of 2009, which saw Arsenal lose both Emmanuel Adebayor and Kolo Toure to Manchester City. 

The summer of 2008 was similarly painful, as the club lost Mathieu Flamini, an excellent central-midfield partner to Fabregas at the time, to Milan on a free transfer and Alexander Hleb to Barcelona.

Going even further back, the summer of 2007 saw the club lose club icon and talisman Thierry Henry to Barcelona, and the summer of 2006 saw the club lose Ashley Cole to Chelsea and Jose Antonio Reyes to Real Madrid.

Even the summer of 2005 saw the club lose midfield dynamo Patrick Viera to Juventus.

You have to go all the way back to the summer of 2004 to find a summer in which Arsenal came out as real winners in terms of their transfer dealings and were not negatively impacted by transfer rumors about their biggest players.

Even in the summer of 2010, ignoring the transfer speculation surrounding Fabregas, Arsenal were not able to adequately replace the loss of four central defenders at the club and suffered greatly from the lack of a competent, formidable center-back partnership for much of the season.

Not coincidentally, the last season that Arsenal had a successful summer in the transfer market, 2004-05, was also the last season Arsenal won silverware, winning in the FA Cup in 2005.

The team also finished second in the league that year, a feat which hasn't since been repeated.

On the basis of all of the evidence above, it's clear that a) Arsenal have been getting abused in the transfer market since the summer of 2004, and b) that Arsenal's success is almost directly tied to how successful they are in the transfer market, or rather, their ability to come out of a summer transfer window as "winners" rather than "losers."

To me, their inability to hold onto key players despite a clear correlation between a good transfer window and a good season confirms that Arsenal have indeed become an overachieving feeder club, as painful as it is to say.

What do you think?

Are Arsenal officially a feeder club following the loss of star players for the sixth transfer window out of seven, or is there still time for Wenger to make key signings for the club and prevent the tag from sticking, despite Wenger's belief that there is little top quality available on the transfer market?

I look forward to reading your comments below.