There is a particular flatness to the way Mikel Arteta said "it is what it is" on deadline day, the sort of flatness a man reaches for when the alternative is saying something he'll regret in print. He'd been asked whether the window had been ambitious, fast and smart, the club's own language fed back to him, and what came out instead was four words with all the seasoning removed. Compare that to what he said about Andrea Berta's efforts more broadly: "incredible," "efficient," everything a sporting director could want stamped on his first summer. The two registers don't sit in the same mouth.

Do the manager's maths properly before you doubt him, because the case for contentment is not nothing. Piero Hincapié made permanent after a season of renting him. Illan Meslier in to compete for the gloves. Bruno Guimarães, a genuine name, arriving to change the middle of the pitch the way Declan Rice changed it three years back. Christos Tzolis and Ezri Konsa either side of that, recruitment spread across the spine rather than panic-bought in one position. Arteta's own framing, that Arsenal "100% ticked" the boxes the club needed to, that "the outcome can be different to what you expect, but the intention is certainly there, which is what I value most," is the language of a man who believes in process over box score, and God knows this column has spent enough years arguing that xG and outcome are different animals to turn around now and demand he judge himself purely on end product.

Except read it again. "The outcome can be different to what you expect." That is not a sentence a satisfied man produces. That is a sentence built by someone who wanted a specific thing, didn't get it, and has decided the healthiest available response is to talk about intention. When he was asked directly about the lack of a new winger, Martinelli sold to Al Hilal, Tzolis the only recognised left-sided option left standing, his reply was "these are just opinions," which is the sort of dismissal you deploy against a question you find fair and can't fully answer. Roundtable's pundits scored the window 6 out of 10 and noted it had, at one stage in August, been shaping up as a 10. Something happened in the final fortnight that everyone in the building can feel and nobody in the building will name.

The squad depth argument matters more than the semantics, though, because "it is what it is" is a philosophy you can only afford if the squad behind it can absorb the shrug. Arsenal's reliance on Bukayo Saka has been the load-bearing wall of this project for three seasons: take him out of the side for six weeks in any of the last four campaigns and watch the goals dry up like the Emirates on a wet Tuesday against a low block. Martinelli's gone. Tzolis is one Championship move away from being the only specialist left winger at the club, with Eberechi Eze filling in on the flank and Noni Madueke able to do it "in a pinch," which is Arteta's own phrase for a solution he hasn't fully committed to. Arteta's counter is that the data shows something different, that those attacking players logged fewer minutes than perceived last season, with injuries skewing the picture in the first half of the year. Fine. But data explaining why a gap exists is not the same as data closing it.

The bloke behind me, on hearing Arteta's "these are just opinions" line relayed at half-time of a friendly nobody remembers, said only: "Yeah, and mine's that we've got one winger and a prayer." He wasn't wrong and he wasn't trying to be clever, which is usually how you know something's landed.

None of this means Arteta is lying to anyone, least of all himself. Wenger used to do a version of this exact thing, praise the market's difficulty, praise his own restraint, and let the fans fill in the silence with whatever theory suited their mood, usually involving a chairman with the cheque book locked in a drawer. The instinct to protect the dressing room from the appearance of institutional dissatisfaction is management, not cynicism, and a manager who publicly torched his sporting director in September would be doing something far worse than shrugging. But there's a cost to that discipline too, and it doesn't show up in September. It shows up in February, when Saka pulls up in the warm-down against a side nobody expected trouble from, and the only cover on that flank is a teenager who was training with the under-18s in August, and Arteta has to stand in front of the same microphones and explain, with the same flat four words, why the emergency was foreseeable and unaddressed.

The window is shut. What isn't shut is the gap between what Arteta says he values, intention and effort and the shape of the attempt, and what he'll actually need in April, which is bodies. He knows the difference better than anyone in the building. That's precisely why the shrug felt so effortful.