Agreed but credit the club where credit is due. No home advantage for nearly 2 seasons now whilst trying to temporarily bed into a new home, half full stadiums, a team that, I feel may benefit from one or two new faces in certain departments but not to a critical level, plus teams around us chucking silly money about to enhance their chances.
Since we last signed a glut of players & broke our transfer record the following teams have made steps to push up closer or surpass us:
Woolwich have surpassed our transfer record twice, (Aubemayang & Lacazette)
Manchester United have surpassed our record outlay in that space of time three times (Fred, Lukaku & Matic)
Chelsea five times (Kepa - a world record fee for a GK, Jorginho, Pulisic, Bakayoko & Morata)
Liverpool five times (Allison, Keita, Fabinho, Salah & Van Dijk, two of which were world record transfers for their respective positions)
Man City five times (Mahrez, Bernardo Silva, Walker, Laporte, Mendy)
Even Everton have shelled out more than we have for a player on two occasions (Sigurdsson & Richarlison) and West Ham have as well if certain fees floating around online are to be believed (Felipe Anderson)
Hindsight we can look back on the decisions we've made/ haven't made to see where we could have made tweaks but for all of those teams to have invested heavily on real quality and for us to still be ahead or just slightly behind them I think is huge testament to how the club have moved forward. We haven't got many new faces that teams haven't sussed out yet, teams don't need to study us as much to work out how to stifle us so we really are at more disadvantages than people realise. All thigs considered for us to be a clear third where a positive result yesterday and in the home game against Liverpool earlier in the season would have put us above them is a big achievement in itself, trophy or no trophy.
People are getting frustrated and I understand why but we are punching well above our weight as others have tried to squeeze the gap. A little more patience is required I feel. The longer the nucleus stays together, the stronger we'll become.