Today I’m going to speculate.
I’m going to guess and see where that takes me.
As regular ANR readers know, I’ve pointed out that Arsene Wenger is a masterful spin-doctor who sets his own agenda, bamboozles a compliant media, spins his own headlines, and moves the goalposts when it suits him. He is much cleverer than the directors or the journalists. He could do their jobs but they could not do his.
Last week, while I was away, the great man modestly announced that he was giving himself two more years to make his strategy work. If he had not won a trophy in 2010 or 2011, then his strategy would have failed.
As we landed at Luton airport on Tuesday at 2pm, Peter Hill-Wood and Ivan Gazidis were lunching with Wenger a few miles away and having the club’s most important conversation of 2009.
What was that conversation?
Was it about transfer budgets and targets, as we’ve been told.
Fans and media think it was about : How much do I have to spend, and who should we buy?
Was it : Give me more money to spend !
Was it : You need spinal players !
Was it : You’ve got to sell to buy, so flog Ade, Diaby and Traore for as much as you can get !
Or was that meeting something else completely?
Bear in mind that the dynamic of power at Arsenal has changed radically since January. After Keith Edelman was sacked, Arsenal had no chief executive for eight months. Arsenal FC had nobody driving the business for 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 EIGHT MONTHS! Nobody making proper plans for 8 months. It was a £200m turnover business with no hands-on boss running it on a day-to-day basis. That was insane and ridiculous. It was a disgrace.
Then Ivan Gazidis took over in January 2009.
By May 1, Stan Kroenke had acquired 28.3% of Arsenal.
Stan is now the biggest shareholder.
Ivan Gazidis is a corporate lawyer who makes plans like a corporate lawyer and builds his power-base like a corporate lawyer. He is a smashing guy, a charmer who is especially good with the fans, as executives have to be in USA, where sport is show business.
Lawyers are often gregarious people, unlike accountants. Former MD Keith Edelman was a number-cruncher who was never going to win any popularity contests. As Danny’s project manager, he grafted to borrow £260m from six banks, kept costs down and made front-loaded commercial deals to pay the builders. Edelman got the new stadium open on schedule and on budget. Fiszman, Friar and Edelman achieved something colossal there.
Two weeks after May 1, did Stan Kroenke tell Ivan Gazidis to start managing the coach?
Did Stan get on the phone and say, ” Let’s get real here, Ivan. Six years without a trophy will empty the boxes and destroy shirt sales, we’ll be playing for sixth place, and you won’t be able to sign any Champions League players or hire a top coach. Tell him it’s got to be now! It’s later than he thinks.”
If so, Gazidis may have zoomed north into the leafy green lanes of Hertfordshire on a new mission. He may have sat down with Wenger and said : “What are we trying to achieve as a club? Let’s agree what your target is for next season. We pay you £5 million a year for achieving what? How do we measure your performance? This season is over, so tell us what you want to achieve next season and how you’re going to do it.”
Clearly, Danny Fiszman cannot manage Wenger from a village on the shore of Lake Geneva, so they’ve installed Ivan to manage him. And Ivan did not come 3000 miles to Arsenal to fail. If Arsenal do not win a trophy in 2010, you can be sure it will not be seen as Ivan’s fault.
The CEO sat in the front row with Ken Friar at the Shareholders Q&A and saw Wenger attempt to justify himself and saw his shell-shocked face as he was exposed to the anger of season-ticket holders. After that fracas, Peter Hill-Wood said he’d have to look long and hard at whether to allow this kind of session to happen again. Why did Peter say that? Because Wenger finishes fourth and makes a profit.
Wenger has never faced that scrutiny, that backlash, before. He never experienced that kind of pressure at Monaco or Grampus Eight. The same Q & A last year was a love-festival and since 1998 it’s been : You’ve got a job for life, keep playing football with style, we think you are Jesus Christ in a tracksuit.
On Tuesday night I was told that lunchtime meeting was impromptu, unplanned, possibly convened that morning.
But is that such a big deal? A CEO goes to the training ground to talk to the manager about next season? Don’t all chief executives talk to the manager about next season?
Arsene Wenger is 60 in October and has accumulated colossal and unique power at Arsenal, where he alone controls the overall wage & transfer budget.
So Arsenal’s key decisions are all made by one man – and made in a different way to other clubs. Rather than risk buying the experienced players he needs, and making a big mistake which might cost him his job, Wenger prefers to give pay rises to his many proteges to make them more loyal to him. He has 52 players and he snatched Aaron Ramsey from Man United and put him on £850,000 a year when he would have been on £350,000 at United.
No wonder he is so good at signing promising young footballers ! His youngsters are on very good money compared to other clubs. He probably has 10 teenagers on £10-25,000 a week and another 20 on less than £10,000 a week. In this way, Wenger spreads his bets.
But if he goes on operating that way, and spending far too much on the wages of players who are not in his first team, the team will always be short of the two quality players it needs to turn Arsenal into a big club that wins big trophies.
His CV is impressive but a CV is only relevant when you are looking for a new job and he isn’t.
He’s built a training ground, pumped multimillions of English money into French clubs, polished rough diamonds into World Cup stars for France, modernised English football, re-branded Arsenal globally, made a splendid new stadium possible, and then, when the money became very tight, tried to grow a title-winning team of kids who will learn and bond and fight for each other, as all champions should.
Overall, my guess is that Ivan Gazidis has timed his move well.
He doesn’t want Wenger to be able to say : You didn’t give me enough time. So he’s done it at the earliest possible opportunity. He has said : You have some cash, you can raise more by selling players, and you have the whole summer to sign the men we need.
Maybe Wenger was outmanoeuvered this week.
Maybe, for the first time ever, The Professor has been outmanoeuvered by a board member.