Mick Appleton
So the club is to have a new owner? What will this mean for the club? Is Arsene looking over his shoulder? These and many other questions will arise when the dust settles on Stan Kroenke's imminent takeover of the club.
I think that maybe this takeover has come too late for us to close the gap on the big spending clubs and that the board may have missed an opportunity to see major investment in line with Chelsea and Man City's by refusing to let Kroenke take over earlier. At the beginning of the 2012-13 season the new UEFA spending restrictions kick in, which will mean a club cannot spend more than they bring in over a three year period. This will have a huge impact on us should we now try to bring in big name players on inflated wages, especially with the current 50% tax bracket effectively meaning that we have to pay higher wages than any of our counterparts in the other main footballing nations.
We have one of the highest matchday incomes in the world but other money streams are limited due to poorly thought out long term deals being signed. We current lag way behind Man U, Chelsea and Liverpool on this front. We got £100m for a 15 year deal with Emirates while Man U got £80m for just 4 years from Aon, well it probably seemed like a good idea at the time.
We will also be hampered by having a large number of overpaid players in our squad! Diaby, Denilson, Eboue and Bendtner have all signed new long-term contracts recently which will almost certainly mean their deals were improved? This cannot have been done on a performance related basis and can only have been done to avoid them leaving the club on a Bosman. All clubs will find it hard to maintain a 25 man squad which is filled with the top percentage earners, especially if those players are sub-standard. Manchester City are the club most likely to suffer but we will also have problems if we have the expected clearout in the summer and try to plug the gaps by buying the finished articles that we all crave. It will be a balancing act and I fear the club may decide to persevere with the current policy of polishing rough diamonds rather than bring in the experienced quality required to sustain our challenges for trophies beyond March and April.
Arsene must be worried this morning. Will Kroenke be as patient as the current owners have been with regard to winning trophies? Maybe Arsene's prudence will win favour with the American but there's no guarantee of that when Kroenke will want to prove to the supporters that his takeover is good for the club. I'm not sure that any assurances will have been given to Arsene regarding his position and he will have a nervous wait before his fate is confirmed at the end of the season. If by some miracle we win the title and he is retained, I really hope that some pressure is exerted on Arsene to change direction and accept his experiment just hasn't worked (yes even if we do win the title).
Only time will tell if the takeover will be good for us but a break in the gloom that has surrounded the club in recent months would be a start.
