I cannot imagine how West Ham, Leicester, heck even a newly promoted Villa are spending more than a club like Arsenal. Surely their owners are making everyone fools.
It does feel weird how small our budget apparently is. However I really don't believe it is as little as £40m. I know our wage bill is massive and we have missed making the CL for 3rd season in row. Basically we are paying CL wages for EL performances, so I guess we have to get rid of some players before we can significantly add more. The problem is though, these players are hard to shift precisely because the wages they are on.
For a few years we have been run very badly. We have made so many bad/stupid decisions it has set us back a few years. From wasting good money buying the wrong players (Mustafi and Xhaka for £35m each, Lucas Perez £18m, that is nearly £90m on just three players who aren't good enough for us), to letting Ramsey walk out for free (lost £50-60m there). Also letting Sanchez and ozil's contract almost run out, forcing us to sell Sanchez on the cheap (swap with Mhiki) and giving Ozil a £350k a week as he had us over a barrel. Same thing happened with Wellbeck, letting him go on a free instead of maybe getting £25m for him. All these decisions have now hamstrung us. We also bought Lacazette for £50m and Aubameyang for £56m, although both were a success.
As you can see from that we have actually spend quite a lot of money, either through player purchased or lost through letting players run down their contracts. Add the fact we hardly made any money from player sales and our net spend the last few years is quite high. In fact it is higher than Liverpool's.
We have finally restructured everything at the club, it seems there is a plan now, But first we need to tighten the belt a bit.
A still think we will spend about £70m this window. We will need to if we want to challenge for top 4 place.