Peter Hill-Wood, the Arsenal chairman, is confident that Arsene Wenger can build a team capable of delivering trophies next season despite a lack of major transfer activity at the Emirates.

Samir Nasri and Aaron Ramsey are the Arsenal manager's only confirmed new additions, although there could yet be an 11th-hour move for Gareth Barry, the Aston Villa and England midfielder, whose move to Liverpool looks to be at a stalemate.

"Buying a whole lot of stars and hoping to mould them together is one way of doing it, but it is not Arsene's way," Hill-Wood said. "He [Wenger] prefers to build long-term as best he can and develop young players in the way he wants them to play. I am personally very much in favour of that."

The futures of Emmanuel Adebayor and Alexander Hleb have yet to be resolved and the Arsenal manager looks set for more negotiations to shape his squad ahead of their departure to a pre-season training camp in Austria next week. "I am a patient man and so are my colleagues," Hill-Wood said. "As long as we are doing what we think is the right thing on the playing field then I feel we are relaxed about it, but at the same time we are not complacent.

"We would like to win trophies as much as the players and the fans, but there can be only one winner of the Premier League and the Champions League and it was not us this year.

"Although we did not win anything it was a very good season. Most other clubs would have been happy to have ended where we did, but it was disappointing because we had set our standards so high. We were up there and I think we will be challenging again next season."

Wenger has continually resisted the temptation to invest in one big name, preferring instead to develop the talents of promising youngsters and it is a policy fully endorsed by the club's chairman particularly as Arsenal look to maintain a strict wage structure and balance the books following their £350 million move to the Emirates Stadium.

Hill-Wood insists such tough decisions are a necessity. "Maybe people need to be waking up to the realities of the world and that the days of easy money have come to a pretty sudden end," he said. "There is an awful lot of talk about big transfers and major demands of players, but you will find throughout the UK and Europe that money is not quite as easy to obtain as it used to be."