Emmanuel Fyle
I wrote an article article for the Online Gooner fairly recently, arguing that the case for a change of management at the top was now overwhelming. In light of the recent confirmation of Arsenal’s now comical annual implosion, I would simply like to reaffirm that case, and highlight a few further thoughts which have become much clearer since Arsenal’s season was confirmed as an unmitigated failure.
The first talking point that needs investigation is the quite frankly disgraceful 6.5% Turpin-esque hike on season tickets, reinforced by the even more abhorrent increase on red and silver memberships. What Arsenal fans need to challenge here is the increasingly futile Ivan Gazidis, whose actual positive impact on Arsenal FC becomes less clear with each passing day. The handsomely-paid Gazidis, one of the three highest-paid sports directors in the UK, attempted to justify the price hike by claiming that it was required in order for Arsenal to ‘remain competitive in an ever-spiralling transfer market’. Those Arsenal fans out there with the blinkers firmly off will instantly see through this mendacious statement and seek to challenge it on several points.
The first, most obvious point, is the fact that Arsenal are less active in the transfer market than even Bolton Wanderers: whereas Gary Megson splashed out almost £12 million on Bolton’s record striker acquisition, Arsenal’s record in a commensurate five-year period remains the £9 million paid for Eduardo Da Silva. In fact, Ivan Gazidis has often gone out of his way to stress that Arsenal will never pay the sort of fees the transfer market dictates as the requirement for top-class talent. Hence, the first of Gazidis’ evident falsehoods is pretty easy to challenge.
The second point on which Gazidis needs to be challenged is that his clearly absurd statement is diametrically opposed to what he has long declared that Arsenal were about. Allegedly, our ‘self-sustainability model’ was based upon Arsenal’s getting to the stage where our quality supply of youth players and shrewd investments meant never having to become active major participants in the transfer market. Oh dear Mr Gazidis, your contradictory statement about needing a price hike to become more active in the transfer market can now be further exposed as the antithesis of what our ‘self-sustainability’ model is supposed to be about. With Gazidis’ doublespeak now exposed as fraudulent and insulting to those of minimal intelligence, what of the state of Arsenal Football Club?
Arsène Wenger’s faults have been done to death by myself and by every other individual who has seen the array of shortcomings prevalent in this club over the years. Hence, for me to go over set-piece deficiencies, sub-standard players, injuries, a suspect medical department, the total lack of leadership, the need for a strong number two and the total lack of tactical acumen would merely read as a repeat of any article or submission you may have read from 2005 onwards. However, a couple of points on Arsène Wenger that I feel need to be challenged are as follows: the first is the chill-out culture of complacency that Wenger has helped instil at the club. One of the best ways of highlighting this can be through empirical study of Arsenal’s wage bill, and the attitude and behaviour of the Arsenal players.
Irrespective of what the AKB brigade may say, Arsène Wenger is 100% responsible for the culture of laxness and complacency that abounds at Arsenal. Through his plethora of unacceptable statements – ranging from ‘I would take second for the next twenty years’, to ‘the Carling Cup is not an actual trophy’, Wenger has attempted to redefine the meaning of failure. When your players are told that finishing 3rd or 4th is an achievement, do not expect them to give everything to come first. It is a scandalous mindset, and this in turn has made average players believe that they deserve far more than their actual worth. Some of the ludicrous statements I have read from Arsenal players have been indicative of this culture of over-permissiveness. Wenger should be tearing strips off these players; many of them should consider themselves incredibly fortunate to play for Arsenal. However, reading the dirge that some of these players come out with, one would think that Arsenal owed these players everything. Some of these highlights include:
• Nick Bendtner threatening to leave, and then declaring Barcelona as his ‘free choice’
• Denilson claiming that Arsenal cannot satisfy his desire to win trophies, and that, as a consequence, he will seek solace elsewhere
• Abou Diaby telling L’Equipe that he is ‘frustrated’ at Arsenal’s lack of silverware and may have to look elsewhere to find a club more amenable to his means. He even mentioned Barcelona as being his preferred destination
• Samir Nasri allegedly demanding to be paid in the region of £120k a week for bothering to show six months of form (preceded by two years of mediocrity).
Quite who this indescribable band of players, who between them have zero trophies, think they are is beyond this author: the disgraceful ‘performance’ at home to Aston Villa failed to come as a surprise and we then saw the players living it up at their ‘end of season party’, with assorted mediocre players filing in and out of swanky Mayfair eateries, with some players even being caught with cigarette packets in hand, grimacing at the assorted paps. Nothing wrong with enjoying the fruits of one’s labour of course, but when you take the scandalous lack of effort against Villa into context, as the fans are being asked to fork out even more, for less, it sticks in the throat.
There seems to be a group of Arsenal fans who are living in the hope that fan discontent will definitely make Wenger change his ways this summer. Memo to these people: Arsène Wenger has shown his contempt for the fans who pay his exorbitant, ill-deserved salary. None of you have ‘worked half a day in football’. All of the noises Wenger has been making are those of a man completely oblivious to any failings and determined to remain entrenched in his unsuccessful philosophy: ‘There will be no massive changes’ he asserts. ‘I want to keep this squad together’. Surely he should be looking to break it up as much as possible? ‘We were the closest we have been to the title’. Oh, does that explain the failure to finish in the top two for over five years now?
Nothing will change.
Wenger’s ability to persuade Pat Rice to continue in his capacity as assistant statue is evidence of this. Sure, Pat Rice is a club legend. However, how anyone can absolve him of blame, when he is a main component of the coaching staff, is beyond me. If there are tactical failings within the team, if there are failures of management, then the management team must bear maximum responsibility for this, and that includes Pat Rice. Also, please do not accept the ‘Youth policy’ misnomer that gets bandied about by Wenger and board members. It is a money-making policy; just as the move to the Emirates was. The Emirates was supposed to enable Arsenal to ‘compete with the biggest clubs in the world in the transfer market’. Quite who we were competing with for Squillaci, Silvestre or Chamakh is unknown to me. Quite why Jérémie Aliadière, who has had his chance, is at the club playing in reserve team matches (hence potentially taking the place of an actual youth player) is also unknown to me.
The ‘youth policy’ is a suitable wall for Wenger to hide behind. If a player ends up succeeding like Cesc Fabregas or Ashley Cole, he will be sold for a gigantic profit. No matter the situations surrounding the departure of Cole, it remains a fact that this ‘youth policy’ is unsustainable as it continues to reward under-performing players, and frustrates the best players. Cesc Fabregas is now desperate to leave Arsenal as a result of this ‘youth policy’ – it drives the best talents out. For the ones not good enough, who arrive to great fanfare (Rui Fonte, Havard Nordveit, Quincy Owusu-Abeyie), they will also be sold on for small profits to a decent Championship club. Wenger’s recent response to Fabregas wanting to leave was typically myopic: ‘He has no guarantee of winning any trophies at Barcelona’ was his reply. True. However one thing that is guaranteed, as evidenced by a simple trophy count, is that Cesc has zero chance of winning a single trophy of note if he remains at Arsenal.
Arsène Wenger is not entirely a fiscally-responsible manager. This is a myth peddled by Wengerites, unable to put down a factually creditable argument. When one observes that Wenger has ratified and overseen a wage bill that has rocketed to almost £111 million and then one considers the lack of success, there is no case to be made for an appreciating wage bill being proportional to decreasing on-field success. Arsenal is a very well-run club of course, with one of the best wage/turnover ratios in the league – however this does not excuse some of the absurd amounts of money being paid out to many players.
I am always brought back to the example of Armand Traoré (remember him?). In the summer of 2010, Benfica made Traoré an offer to join their club. He would have had a chance of European football and the opportunity to get regular first-team football with a big European club. Traoré’s agent however, rejected the offer, based on the fact that Traoré would stand to gain almost three times as much financially by chilling on the Arsenal bench. Is that the kind of mentality that the ‘Arsenal way’ is supposed to foster?
The culture of complacency at Arsenal is rampant and it needs to be done away with. There is a bust of Arsène Wenger in the club – an absurd state of affairs when one considers that there are no guarantees that he will leave Arsenal with an untainted legacy, and more pointedly, given the fact that he is still in the job. Better managers, such as Alex Ferguson, do not have this honour bestowed upon them whilst in active management. The so-called ‘custodians’ of our club, whom the AKBs insisted for so long were responsible for keeping our traditional club safe from the clutches of foreign speculators (‘We don’t want his sort’: ring any bells?), used the Emirates stadium move as an excellent buffer for their profitability scheme. Not one of them put their hand into their pocket: they stood idly by and watched the cash reserves swell. Arsenal have a transfer facility of £41 million from the sales of Touré and Adebayor and, at any big club, a manager starting each season with Almunia in goal and no serious central defensive partnership would have been forced to dip into this. Not at Arsenal.
When the moment was ripe, the board were too happy to sell out their shares for massively-inflated profits. The plan all along appears quite clearly to anyone wishing to see the facts. And so we return to the culture of complacency: we now find out that the bridge at the Emirates has been renamed ‘Ken Friar’ bridge: another self-congratulatory pat on the back for a living Arsenal employee. Every major player involved in the Emirates stadium move has profited enormously: Wenger in the summer of 2010, when most people would have thought the pressure would reach a crescendo, was offered a contract extension until 2014, with increased freedom to ‘experiment’ on his ‘project’, all at a cost of £6.5 million. The board members were all rewarded handsomely. The players, almost all of whom continue to disappoint every year, have never been more handsomely rewarded for repeated failure.
Contemporary economic theory dictates that, in a market economy, there must be winner and losers. Who, then, are the losers in this capitalist fanfare of success? Answer: the Arsenal fans, who want success on the pitch for their club. That would be the same ones asked to pay an extra 6.5%, the ones asked to fork out even more for their memberships. Take the money equation out of the Arsène Wenger question, and there are too many facets of his management that have become unacceptable: lack of set-piece coaching, lack of discipline, lack of tactical acumen, a refusal to show grace in defeat, inability not to insult the intelligence of supporters with absurd statements, a refusal to address obvious deficiencies within the team.
