And then there was none. As Kolo Touré, Arsenal's last surviving member of “The Invincibles” of 2003-04 , put the finishing touches to his move to Manchester City yesterday, so did the perception grow that, with another senior player heading north, the club's prospects had gone south.

Inside the Emirates Stadium and at the club's training ground in London Colney, Hertfordshire, they do not see it that way. Arsène Wenger, along with the board, had weighed up the potential downside to selling Touré, along with Emmanuel Adebayor, to the club who have designs on Arsenal's place in next season's top four.

And while bookmakers were offering short odds yesterday on City finishing above Arsenal in the table, Wenger feels that, regardless of whether he succeeds in securing his top targets in the transfer market, his team will be challenging for the main prizes next season rather than simply looking over their shoulder at Mark Hughes's expensively assembled squad.

There remains a calmness at Arsenal that calls to mind the tongue-in-cheek observation of David Dein, the former vice-chairman, about when Roman Abramovich turned up at Chelsea in 2003, “parking Russian tanks on our lawn and firing £50 notes at us”. They, like their counterparts at Liverpool, Manchester United and indeed Chelsea, are noting the impact of the extraordinary spending of City and Real Madrid this summer, but have not been panicked. The board's faith in Wenger and, by extension, in the Arsenal way of doing things - a patient process that is the antithesis of the build-'em-quick policies at City and Real - remains total.

Thomas Vermaelen, a 23-year-old central defender signed from Ajax, is Arsenal's only addition this summer, with no sign yet of the player that would add aggression and physical presence to the midfield or of any kind of replacement for Adebayor. For all the complaints about his workrate, the Togo forward weighed in with 58 goals in his three full seasons at the club. As for the players being targeted, most of the names mentioned in dispatches, such as Marouane Chamakh, the Bordeaux forward, fall into the familiar category of work-in-progress, rather than ready-made acquisition.

Unrest among supporters has been fuelled by assertions from Farhad Moshiri, business partner of Alisher Usmanov, the Russian billionaire who is the club's second-largest shareholder, that Arsenal cannot compete in the transfer market without agreeing to their proposal of a rights issue that would significantly reduce the club's £318 million debt. The board, though, remains resistant to Usmanov's proposals and is eager to dismiss the notion that the club are being strangled by the £133 million loan for the Highbury Square development. That loan, while burdensome and in need of refinancing, remains ring-fenced from the club's football budget.

One senior figure at the club complained of the “frenzied attention on how much money you have spent in the transfer market, as if that is the only indicator of success” and pointed out that Arsenal have not been alone among the “Big Four” in treading cautiously. Wenger, like Sir Alex Ferguson, handles his club's money with care and, while his needs may appear greater than United's, the Arsenal manager has articulated to his board the belief that, with players such as Cesc Fàbregas, Theo Walcott and Robin van Persie a year older and a year wiser, and with Andrey Arshavin now integrated into the Premier League, he expects his team to make significant strides in the coming season.

It all comes down to whether you trust Wenger's judgment. There have been times in recent years when his unswerving faith in this group of players has looked like a flaw, not least as they succumbed to a comprehensive 4-1 aggregate defeat by United in the Champions League semi-final in May. To the outsider, there is a glaring need for more experience, more physical presence and more character - shortcomings that would seem to have been compounded, rather than addressed, by the sales of Touré and Adebayor. But when Wenger, while continuing to search for reinforcements, has told his board that Arsenal will be a force to be reckoned with next season, he has done so with conviction, rather than hope.

The question is how much longer Arsenal can keep doing this, how much longer they can remain truly competitive while selling established players every summer. Where once Wenger prided himself on offloading players, such as Patrick Vieira and Thierry Henry, when they were at or just beyond the peak of their powers, the past 18 months have seen them lose Lassana Diarra at 22, Mathieu Flamini at 24, Alexander Hleb at 27 and now Touré and Adebayor at 28 and 25 respectively, while the word on the Spanish football grapevine is that Fàbregas, the club's captain at the tender age of 22, will rejoin Barcelona next summer.

It does not appear to be a recipe for on-the-pitch success, but as always the focus is on the long term. Wenger has weighed up the threat posed by City and concluded that his club's needs are best served by selling them Touré and Adebayor. It is a risky strategy, one that may feasibly backfire, but Wenger believes that it will make Arsenal stronger.