How do Ozil, Sanchez and Lacazette fit into that interpretation of Wenger's actions?
As for kids coming through, Kane and Winks. That's two. Everyone else in our first eleven + backup eleven was bought. Where is this massively superior record with our youth over our signings?
We should guard against going down the path the scum did, where they tried to delude themselves that their academy had all the answers and ended up trying to replace first-teamers with Nacer Barazite, Gilles Sunu, Sanchez Watt, Craig Eastmond, Emmanuel Frimpong, Vito Mannone, Ignasi Miquel, Amaury Bischoff and Nicklas Bendtner.
That strategy *failed*. Utterly so. So much so that all their best players from that era couldn't get out of the damn place quick enough - from Van Persie to Nasri to Fabregas to Clichy to Sagna, nobody wanted to stay at a place where the manager believed that unproven youth could substitute for good players. Until they actually started signing big players again (and winning things as a result), they were failures.
And, need I remind everyone, that was with an academy which poached players from around Europe and Africa, and was more highly-regarded then than ours is now. With a smaller talent base to choose from, and the reputational deficiencies our own academy has relative to theirs, there is no reason to expect that the failure rate would massively decrease for us as opposed to how it went for them.
This is a dangerous strategy. It bears repeating, again and again.