From Rhys Jaggar : What the AST had to say last night
Radio 5live had a chat with a senior guy at AST last night, with Steve Claridge and Jason Roberts adding their pound of flesh for good measure.
1. AST reported that Arsenal had £50m in cash and wanted to know whether it was ‘being kept for a rainy day’ (i.e. a season without ECL) or to be spent on players.
2. They sounded slightly bemused that Djourou had been awarded a contract extension on £50k a week. Claridge fell off his seat hearing that…..
3. They said they would survey fans to determine whether Wenger retained their support or not, between now and the end of the season.
4. They said that, based on the analysis of two financial professionals in AST, Arsenal would lose £45m in revenue through not being in the ECL. This makes sense, if you assume £35m less in TV and prize money and £10m less in matchday revenues. It says to me revenue for a non-ECL season would be around £180 – 190m in the ‘football segment’.
Also on 5live was Ian McGarry, who suggested his three points to sort things out:
1. Fire Wenger.
2. Buy Colloccini, Schweinsteiger and Cavani.
3. Keep RVP.
He is a Scot after all and anything to further the Scots’ Trades Union in the EPL.
Interesting spat between Frimpong and Piers Morgan.
This morning’s Times documented quite a bit of what Frimpong said.
Admirable passion he showed, but I’d ask the youngster a few tough questions:
1. When the fans suffer and you tell them to keep paying up and coming along, good times or bad, do the players suffer on an appropriate metric for them (their pay packet) when times get worse?
2. If not, why do you think players have a right to tell fans how to behave, seeing as how they don’t take responsibility in their pay packet for their failures on the pitch? 3. Will you be exhorting all your colleagues, notably Denilson, Diaby, Djourou, Bendtner, Vela to take a £20k a week paycut, so that van Persie can have an £80k a week pay rise? Which he has earned through being the EPL’s top scorer despite not playing for the best team…….and they have earned through being not good enough to play for Arsenal or being permanently injured.
4. If not, would you agree that you and your colleagues are a bunch of sponging scroungers who couldn’t care less whether the finances of Arsenal FC went to pot, being solely interested in drawing your salary until contract’s end, oblivious to the fact that no other club would pay remotely the same for their services?
5. Given those slight deviations from ‘results for results in a results business’, do you think that Mr Morgan at least has the right to say his piece??
6. Do you expect fans to be given a 20% reduction in season tickets next season if the prospect is ‘Thursday night, Thursday night, Thursday nights on Channel Five!’, as some jovial Spurs fans sang to me during the Arsenal-Man Utd game down the pub last month??
7. If not, why not?? That would test Frimpong’s true allegiance with Arsenal, wouldn’t it??!! Nothing like a 20% pay cut to see who cares and who’s a mercenary, eh??
One interesting slant last night was that apparently, when Guardiola was getting it in the neck from the Spanish media, he decamped to Wenger’s house for a week and they talked things through.
Perhaps the payback from that is that he will allow Wenger to glide gracefully upstairs and take over at the Emirates?? I don’t know on that…..but it would be a bit ironic for Fabregas that just as he gets to play for his childhood hero, he toddles off to where he has just come back from?!
You clearly don’t think that’s an option…….but it could make sense.
After all, Guardiola’s done it all with the best players in the world, maybe his next challenge is to do things starting from slightly lower down?
Ferguson’s interview is worth a listen.
Apparently, he substituted Big Sam’s bottle of wine for Ribena and the burly Lancastrian had a mouthful of neat purple stuff. The kit man ran like hell down the corridor to stop getting beaten up!!
It was about as gentle an interview as you could imagine – no BBC creating a feisty programme there!
Probably the reason he did it……