Arshavin could allow Wenger to continue his kids policy.
If the Russian helps Arsenal to finish fourth and win the FA Cup, it’s a good season.
If that happens, Wenger won’t change his ideas at all. He will buy more kids.
Critics have wondered for years how Arsenal’s wage bill can be over £100 million and similar in size to Manchester United’s wage bill. That does not make sense.
United are now World Champions and European Champions and were Premier League champions in 2007 and 2008 and they have Ronaldo, Rooney, Rio and others on £100,000 a week and more.
So how can Arsenal’s wage bill be as big as United’s when they only have four people on £80,000 a week and the others on 50K and 30K ?
Clearly, the Manchester United squad have achieved big things and won huge trophies.But if the players in Arsenal’s squad earn as almost as much in total as the players in United’s squad, the Arsenal squad is under-achieving. They are seriously under-achieving. Collectively, they are earning a vast amount of £££££ for failing every year, for having won nothing since 2005, when they won a flukey FA Cup on penalties.
So why is the Arsenal wage bill so high?
Because the academy is packed with foreign kids on £5,000 and £10,000 a week. They join Arsenal because Wenger pays higher wages. While many of the English YTS kids and ex-YTS kids are on peanuts, as keeper Graham Stack pointed out.
It’s been that way for years because Wenger doesn’t really like English culture or English players. He doesn’t trust their lifestyles. He looked at Merson, Hartson and Jeffers and became allergic to British players. He was within days of flogging Ashley Cole to Palace when he discovered Silvinho had a hot passport. He builds up stars and sells them on to Barcelona, and he turns British kids into decent players and flogs them on to Birmingham and Blackburn to get the cash to sign more foreign kids for his academy. So Arsenal is a feeder club upwards and downwards. He sells players to Birmingham as well as Barca.
His kids policy is obviously long-term thinking. It’s strategic. He can operate that way because his success up to 2004 has made Arsenal his football club, a vehicle for his ideas, his methods, his experiments, his obsessions. He can do what he likes. It’s Arsene’s Arsenal. And now he’s hired a Chief Executive to implement his policy. All the noises from Ivan Gazidis so far sound like HMV: His Master’s Voice. Gazidis is the instrument of Wenger’s will and is there to implement the great man’s policy. So Gazidis will keep saying : We will do things the Arsenal way, meaning prudent. Meaning the Ken Friar way, the Wenger way.
However, it’s a bit soon for Gazidis to be saying that Arsenal is in position to withstand a year out of the Champions League. That comment begs the obvious question : How do you know it’s only one year? How can you guarantee it’s only one year? Why would good players join a club that isn’t in the Champions League ?
We know already that Wenger’s policy is to only buy players who are better than what he already has. If those he has can’t keep Arsenal in the Big Four, how will he be able to sign better players?
Still, after a damaging eight months without a chief executive, it’s really good that Ivan Gazidis is here. Arsenal needed someone to help the manager. Wenger now has a No.2 who is 44 and a corporate lawyer.
Gazidis has been Deputy Commissioner of MLS in the USA and since Wenger often sounds like the Commissioner of the EPL, always telling other clubs what they should be doing, and talking about how football should be run, it’s hardly surprising that Gazidis already sounds like the Deputy Commissioner of the EPL, saying that football over here is like the Wild West, in terms of its lack of regulation.
In USA, there is equal media access to the players in the locker rooms and no paid columns by players. The back six pages of The News of the World are often paid columns by the big names of football. That’s not journalism, it’s star-worship, it’s laziness. It’s what Rupert Murdoch decided to do : dumb down English media so that it was all trivia, sensation and celebrity-worship. His tabloids set the agenda for the broadsheets and the BBC.
However, my point today is that the arrival of Arshavin may not be part of Arsenal’s habitually prudent policy. We will probably never know. Wenger may just have said : Cesc’s injured, we need Arshavin. We don’t know how the decision was made.
It’s highly possible that the board, for the first time ever, told the manager that Arsenal need a new star to excite the sponsors and big companies who put millions into the corporate tier of the Emirates. If the manager insists on growing a team, big companies might say, “That’ll take three years. We’ll get back in touch with you in 2012.”
The people at who work at Arsenal know that demand is soft and getting softer. The recession is hurting everybody and that will last into Q1 of 2010.
Diehard fans are now refusing to travel to every Arsenal away game. The shops are not doing much business. Small ripples of dissatisfaction, which started last summer when Flamini and Gilberto were not replaced, have built into a big wave of dissent. This was the winter of our discontent. It’s not just a few hundred moaners and neurotics. It’s very widespread. Right round the world, from Vancouver and Sydney, to Austin and Auckland, to Lagos and Cape Town, to Singapore and Bangkok, there is a tsunami of dissent in the Arsenal diaspora.
In London the fans miss Fabregas and Walcott, they boo Eboue, they loathe Song, and they weep with despair when they see Adebayor playing like a plank.
One season ticket holder sometimes gets up and says in a pompous voice with a French accent, “I believe in my players.” This guy is driving people mad because he says it every time Eboue loses the ball, which is often. So supporting Arsenal has become a farce. Yes, the team is fifth and in two cups, and it’s a super stadium, but it’s become a farce and a chore.
Arsenal staff are very aware of all this. They knew the club had to give fans something, had to give them hope. They have boxes to fill next season and 9,000 renewals coming up. And they know the commercial environment has deteriorated alarmingly.
The other day Wenger said : People think we need a saviour to get us out of this crisis. For him to use the words “saviour” and “crisis” was very unusual. Perhaps unprecedented.
Most of Arsenal’s sensible fans would say : our club needed to make a statement.
And they’ve made a statement. The most gifted footballer available in this transfer window was Arshavin and we signed him.
The new three-year Sky contract gives the EPL another four years of big money to spend making mercenaries and agents even richer. Sky will pay over a billion pounds for the UK rights to show 92 of the 138 Premier League games between 2010 and 2013.
Well done, Mr Murdoch. Well done, sir ! In a recession, people stay at home more because it’s cheaper. I was told yesterday that Sky’s subscriptions are going through the roof.