It has become fashionable to ratchet up the pressure on Manchester City and their manager, Mark Hughes, and Arsène Wenger got in on the act today when he suggested that City's new signings might not gel immediately and if they did not, there would be problems.
City's lavish spending spree has included taking Kolo Touré and Emmanuel Adebayor from Arsenal and Wenger, an opponent of what he calls "financial doping", drew a parallel between what is happening at Eastlands and Real Madrid's latest galáctico project.
He knows from bitter experience how damaging a bad start to the Premier League season can be – Arsenal lost five of their first 14 games last time out – but he acknowledged that Hughes faced difficult decisions over the composition of his starting XI.
"In football, it's always important to have the right balance," said Wenger. "Manchester City look to have a great squad quality-wise but sometimes when you buy more than three players, you take gamble a little bit. Sometimes it clicks straight away but sometimes it can take a few months.
"Real Madrid are in the same situation. You cannot say that they have not bought fantastic players but will it click straight away or will it take a few months? Nobody knows. And you know that if you do not find your balance straight away in the first games, it's difficult.
"There is a parallel between Manchester City and Real Madrid," Wenger continued. "There is similar financial potential, similar ambitions but, of course, the history is on the side of Real Madrid. Real were not 10th in the league last season, they were second, they already had big players and a big team. City has more to create than Real Madrid."
Wenger stood by his "financial doping" argument and he suggested that City's wealth had had an unsettling effect on dressing-rooms up and down the country. "We live within our natural resources at Arsenal and when we make money, it is because we have worked well and made good decisions," said Wenger. "That's not the case for everybody. We can be successful despite some teams having more money but what it does is it puts a lot of pressure on the wages of the players at all the other clubs, and that's more difficult to cope with."
City are desperate to break into the Premier League's top four and enjoy Champions League football but it is Arsenal who will enter the draw for the final qualifying round of Europe's elite competition tomorrow morning. In the tweaked format, they could face opposition from one of Europe's leading leagues; their opponents will be Fiorentina, Atlético Madrid, Celtic, Anderlecht or FC Timisoara of Romania.
"We are conscious that we have tricky teams out there but, on the other side, I think nobody would like to play against Arsenal," Wenger said. "Qualifying for the Champions League group stage is not crucial financially for the club but it is crucial in sporting terms because we want to play with the best."
Wenger also sounded an optimistic note about the season ahead. "The team that won everything last season was Barcelona," he said, "and what did they do beforehand? They sold Ronaldinho and Deco, and they even wanted to sell [Samuel] Eto'o and maybe Thierry Henry. Football is not predictable."
