Simon Lloyd
It’s only the end of August, and according to many fans, and all of the media, the fat lady is currently clearing her throat ready to sing Arsenal F.C. to the football graveyard. The blame for this untimely end has been laid at the door of manager Arsene Wenger. The main reason given is the lack of transfer activity over the past five years or so, and it seems that everyone is absolutely sure of how much money has been available to spend on new players over those years.
Many of the newspaper articles, television & radio reports and various blogs, are written/presented with absolute certainty that what is contained within them is the truth, and their central argument is based around that belief. The recent team performances have only added fuel to what is already an inferno of negativity surrounding Arsenal’s chances this season.
The truth is that no one, except a select few inside the club, really knows how much money has been available to spend on new players, or who the manager has targeted in this, or previous transfer windows. It’s all been speculation and rumour and whilst some of what is published may be turn out to be accurate, it is usually more by luck than judgement. When it comes to transfers, Arsene Wenger has always played his cards very close to his chest. This summer is no different, and as I write this we appear to be on the verge of signing Per Mertesacker, Chu Young Park and Andre Santos, none of whom have received much, if any, media speculation. This complete lack of knowledge of the club’s transfer targets shows how little we know about what goes on behind the scenes, and I expect it is the same regarding the available funds for transfers.
There have been quite a few articles recently showing the transfer spending of the big clubs since we moved into Ashburton Grove, and they all say the same thing, Arsenal are in net profit on transfer dealings, despite everyone knowing that the club has ‘X’ amount of millions to spend every year. When you compare that to all the other big clubs, they each have a deficit of hundreds of millions of pounds, and most of them have no trophies to show for it. When I look at these known facts I find it difficult to believe that there has been any significant money for player acquisitions over the past six seasons.
Arsene Wenger is an intelligent, successful manager, and it is beyond credibility that he does not know where the problems in the team are. He has always maintained that he will only buy players that are better than what we have, and I suspect that the players he wants are well beyond the means of the available transfer budget. So he constantly shops around the bargain basement trying to unearth a rough diamond, rather that making the £20M+ signing he really wants. As we have seen the problem with rough diamonds is that it sometimes takes quite a while to shape them into a footballing gem, and usually they don’t live up to expectations. In the past the team strength meant that he could give them time to be honed and polished in amongst world class players. Now they have to hit the ground fully formed, and are berated when they fail. Take our two current centre backs. both were relatively unknown when they signed for roughly the same amount of money. One of them, Vermaelen, has established himself as a world class player, and we want to build our defence around him. The other, Koscielny has been far less successful, but many agree that given time he could become a good player. The difference is Vermaelen had Gallas along side him when he joined and had the time to develop. Koscielny was signed to replace Gallas and then lost Vermaelen for the entire season. Even with no time to settle in he was expected to be as good as Vermaelen from the off, without the experienced head along side him.
A secondary line of attack this summer has been the protracted departure of Fabregas and Nasri. The question asked is why did he let the situation develop to a point where your two star players leave the club within days of each other so close to the start of the season, when everyone knew they wanted to leave.
Again I find it impossible to believe that Wenger did not know that these players wanted to leave. Eventually they left for very different reasons, and what he has done is get the maximum amount of money for each player. Fabregas only had one intention and that was understandably to re-join his boyhood club Barcelona. This put Arsenal in a weak bargaining position, and to get a deal that matched the initial valuation of the player was no mean feat. It did however mean waiting until the season had almost begun before the deal was done. Nasri was an altogether different proposition. The accusation was that the contract situation should have been addressed earlier. It now seems that his his head was turned by the money on offer from Man City and others. This led to a bidding war and to get £20m+ for a player in the last year of his contract was another amazing deal. Nasri has since said that the contract offer from Arsenal was not as interesting as others put forward by his agents. Had they both gone on first offer we would be about £25M worse off.
I hope that all the hard bargaining over these players allows Wenger to spend all £60M, and bring in the players he knows we so desperately need. If he doesn't he will take the blame as usual. I doubt we will ever know if the board have blocked the funds for the last few years, but in the case of the Fabregas and Nasri transfers I don’t think Wenger would fight for deals of that size if he knew the money would not be available to him.
Unfortunately, I have no idea what the truth is. What I have done is look at the transfer dealings from the Ashburton Grove years, and in my opinion the board have restricted the transfer funds to a large degree. On a positive note let’s see what deadline day brings, and whatever happens get behind the manager and the team for the rest of the season.
This article is intended to be about the club’s transfer policy and Wenger’s transfer dealings only. Whilst I do not want to discourage any comments, if you want to debate his tactics and coaching ability there are some excellent articles on the Gooner website covering those subjects.
