Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta has defended the club's summer recruitment drive.
The Gunners topped the Premier League spending list by forking out over £140m.
Their new crop of players is predominantly made up of players under 23 years of age, and Arteta insists the club needed to invest for the future.
"In recent years, and what we have inherited, the fact that we don't play in Europe, [we] needed a substantial change," Arteta told the official matchday programme.
"We want a club that is sustainable, that is stable financially but the same time can compete at the highest level, because we know the demands for our club is to be the best. We have to do that.
"On top of that, we needed to recruit in a lot of positions. In order to do that, we had to spread the money and how it was spent wisely. Then we had to be very specific with the qualities, the targets we want that can reach the potential that is required at that level with the competition we have with other teams, to reach that [aim].
"The whole strategy was around that, making those decisions as quickly as possible that could give us big margins of improvement in a short period of time."
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