From Anthony Gee : Arsene – in or out?
Dear Myles,
My frustration with Arsene goes back 4 or 5 years but I won’t repeat old ground.
I think that many of your well-constructed letters brilliantly highlight the growing negative feelings towards Arsene, and many of the letters end up with the same conclusion, despite the differences in their approach.
I would like to add one more often misinterpreted fact into the mix.
This is that we should all be grateful that Arsene has successfully guided the team through the move to the Emirates without dropping out of the Champions League, whilst maintaining profitability.
Arsenal’s year ending 09/10 shows the spending on wages at £111m, marginally (approx £20m) below Man Utd and City, with Chelsea being the top spenders.
If we look down the list we will see Spurs at £67m for the same period.
This is an extraordinary statistic and it needs some pause for reflection : Arsenal spent £44 million more than Spurs on wages in one financial year.
This is shocking.
Many gooners complain that Spurs seem to outspend us in the transfer market (which they do) and many neutrals and gooners alike think that Arsenal’s brilliant book balancing in the transfer market is one of the main reasons why he should not be sacked.
At the same time we all know that the addition of 3 or 4 good quality players would probably be the difference in winning the league this season and possibly 2 or 3 previous seasons in the last 5 years.
So the question is two-fold :
a) why does Arsene spend so much money on wages and
b) why do Spurs spend so little?
The fact that Arsenal reward their huge swathes of mediocrity should be a source of grave concern amongst us fans. Players like Rosicky on £80k per week, and on a long contract, Denilson, Bendtner, Diaby & Almunia not being far behind is criminal.
Spurs on the other hand pay a top whack of £60k per week and the top earner is Robbie Keane and he is currently off the wage bill altogether! OK, perhaps it is not going to be possible for Spurs to remain with such a low top wage, especially if they want to keep some of their best players such as Bale & Van Der Vaart, but what it shows is that Arsene has totally lost it.
He is wasting millions and millions of pounds on garbage players and this is restricting him from spending that money on better players. Make no mistake, this is his decision and his alone.
He is given an annual budget to spend which is not a transfer kitty but a budget combining both wages and transfer funds.
Arsene…..go now, there are so many reasons why, but if nothing else, then go for gross mis-management of your budget.
Myles replies:
I’m 100% with you on that, Anthony.
I think he has grossly mismanaged his budget.
Wenger pays multi-millions to garbage players who never make it in the Arsenal first team.
Then he sells some of them on, along with others who didn’t get that far, and uses the money to finance the next crop.
Was it really true that many clubs wanted the teenage Denilson? Was it true that he cost £4 million? I really don’t know.
Wenger took Denilson off at half-time against West Brom. At half-time!! How often has he taken off a fit player at half-time in the last five years? OK, OK – it was tactical.
Many years ago Mihir Bose found out that Wenger controls the whole playing staff budget.
He alone decides what to spend on wages or transfers. That was a huge revelation, in my opinion.
With that single and invisible organisational decision, Arsenal FC was programmed to fail.
For me Mihir’s revelation was a big story because it was a massive abdication by the board. Even though the Arsenal board have traditionally not interfered in the playing side, that was cowardly. Maybe he threatened to leave if they didn’t agree to that.
Once he acquired that huge power, he could pursue his dearest agenda : to grow his own team.
Arsenal is the only Champions League club that would allow him to try to grow his own team over a six-year period.
Also, he wants to be different. He wants to do his own thing. He loves the kudos of being a star-maker. That was a huge ego-trip when Vieira and Anelka and Henry were winning trophies alongside Bergkamp and George Graham’s back five.
But is Clichy a star?
Is Djourou a star?
Is free-transfer Chamakh a star?
Is Theo Walcott more of a marketing icon than a star?
Nasri has been very good this season but Nasri would do a Hleb in a heartbeat if Pep came calling. And Nasri had won caps for France before he joined Arsenal.
Once David Dein was sacked, the inevitable happened.
When Wenger lost his mate, his ambitious wheeler-dealer buddy, he lost his bottle. He became timid but also more extreme, more doctrinaire, more entrenched in his obsessions. Season after season, he’s rewarded failure, and imported scores of kids on silly wages. Players who win nothing are given a new contract and a pay rise and they owe it all to one man.
Teenage footballers worldwide know that Wenger is a very generous employer who plays attacking football, so they want to join the Arsene FC gravy train.
The board gave him more power than almost any football manager in history because they trusted him to make a profit.
The board gave Wenger the power to not buy the players Arsenal need.
That’s what it boils down to.
The directors have NO INPUT into the football strategy because they have handed the whole club to Wenger. They trusted the greatest spin-doctor in sporting history to keep selling fans the future, to keep on persuading the mass media that his team is very,very close to success.He says he can’t buy experience because it would kill his kids. But he’s scared to buy proven players because they might have egos, might be confrontational, might challenge his training methods, might shout at his babies, might rock the calm of his precious Colney Creche, might fail and have to be moved on at a loss.
Victory through harmony?
That’s a great Latin motto but it’s become inappropriate. Third through harmony would be closer.
Finishing second and third and fourth does not make you a big club.
It just keeps the Champions League money coming in.
And Wenger really needs that cash to pay his wage bill of £111+ million.
And to bribe his captains to stay on for another season of winning nothing.
A big club run by big people would not be terrified about losing Vieira or Henry or Fabregas or Wenger.
Fact : the world is full of professional footballers. And coaches.