From Mukhtar Khan :
Mate, the world changed!
Sometimes your readers are like the Taliban, harking on about an era that never really existed except in retrospect.
When was any professional club about anything other than the money, even Arsenal? Remember the Bond Scheme?
When have the Directors of Arsenal Football Club ever put their hands in their pockets? Never. To be fair they’ve never taken money out of the club either except by selling their shares.
Perhaps some of your readers would like to go back to say the summer of 96? Off the back of the Euros, football riding high in people’s minds what did we do that summer? Sign John Lukic on a free.
Perhaps they want to go back to the era of GG’s bung? Merson & Adams in rehab? Arsenal players being done for drunk driving every year, turning up drunk to training or fighting each other at Xmas parties?
What about selling Brady & Stapleton for peanuts? What about a decade of minimal investment and abject mediocrity on the pitch.
No era was perfect and change is inevitable. Football fans are a curious breed of passive-aggresive males that cannot deal with change. Helpless to truly effect any change.
There is a lot that isn’t right about today’s Arsenal.
Sadly ,we live in corporatised world that uses the ‘media’ to drive its agenda. It’s all about instant gratification and we have all been sucked in. If we don’t get it we can write in to blogs like yours and feel better for minute.
Me? If you had told me in 1985 that in years to come of the world’s greatest players would one day play for the Gunners I’d have said that you were mental. But it happened.
As long as there is a club that plays in Red & White in North London and calls itself Arsenal, I’ll keep drinking the Kool-Aid.