Lance Beauregarde
For quite some time now, Arsenal’s Board of Directors, represented by Gary McAllister’s better-looking twin-brother, Ivan Gazidis, has been proudly declaring that Arsenal’s self-sustaining business model is the way forward. Arsène Wenger himself (who, despite not officially being on the board, is basically a member, given how woven into the fabric of the club he has become) has stated that, in his humble, yet brilliant opinion, professional football clubs should only be allowed to spend money that they have made through club activities. This means merchandising, gates, sponsorship deals, etc, and does not include money given to the club by shadowy Russian oligarchs or impossibly wealthy Arab oil barons.
No-one can deny that this is an extremely noble approach to running a club, or any business, for that matter. Arsenal is the equivalent of one of those Amish communities you see in American films – you know the ones – their members all wear big hats and live on farms and no-one is really sure if they actually exist. They only eat what they grow themselves, build their own barns and expose their young only to the well-established shared values of the community, whilst keeping external viewpoints out (Arsenal’s youth academy, anyone?). This brilliantly-conceived, albeit slightly bizarre metaphor falls apart, however, when you consider that the Amish do not have a loyal fan-base to keep happy. Nor do they have to compete with other communities to recruit new members, and there is no pressure on them to deliver silverware (most of their cutlery is made from locally-sourced tin).
Now, in the process of getting carried away with the idea of running off to join an Amish community, it may seem that I have wondered completely off-topic, but I do have a serious point to make here. The Amish way of life is not the way forward unless you choose to opt out of mainstream society and reject capitalism and democracy. Similarly, Arsenal’s business model is not the way forward unless the club decides to opt out of the Premier League and all cup competitions, and form its own league where there are no other clubs and therefore no trophies and no actual games (in that situation, we would probably still manage to concede an alarmingly high number of goals from set-pieces). It is not the way forward when most of the other big clubs are not following Arsenal’s lead, but instead are attracting outside investment and spending big money on world-class players.
‘But wait!’ I hear some of you cry. ‘What about Uefa’s new Financial Fair Play rules?’ Surely, when they come into effect, Arsenal will have an advantage over other teams because we have already been following these rules for years! This is a point that the polished version of Tony Robinson, Ivan Gazidis, has made on several occasions. And he is correct in that, by 2013, when the rules come into full effect, all professional teams in Europe will have to be Amish, just like Arsenal. This means that Manchester City will not be able to spend, say, one hundred million pounds on players during one season, unless they actually make at least that much through club activities that same season, or something like that. It’s actually a bit more complicated than that, but the general idea is that they will have to curb their spending considerably, as will Chelsea and Manchester United.
This seems like good news for Arsenal – by 2013, the financial playing field will be even, and Arsenal will be able to offer the same wages to top players as any of the other clubs, right? Wrong. Not if things continue the way they are going, anyway. By the time the rules come into place, it is possible that Chelsea, City, United and even one or two other clubs may have pulled so far ahead of us that, even with financial parity, our ability to attract the top players will have wilted because of we will no longer be a Champions League team. Furthermore, there will probably not actually be financial parity because success for a club equals more money, not just because of the extra prize money coming in, but also because it makes a club more marketable around the world.
There are also ways around the rules. Manchester City, for example, recently signed a stadium-naming rights deal with Etihad Airways worth £100m. This seems like an unusually high amount of money for such a deal and it is, because City’s owner, Sheikh Mansour, has links with the airline and therefore is being creative in how he pumps money into the club. Uefa has said that it will look into the matter when the new rules come into place, but City will argue that given that the deal was done before such regulations existed, it was entirely above board. When the rules do come in, I am sure the billionaires will find ever more ingenious ways to get money into their clubs.
So all this means that, while Arsenal is currently ahead of the game in terms of its business model, by the time the other teams have restructured, they will have won so much more silverware and signed so many more world-class players, that it will not be an advantage. Yes, transfer fees and wages will go down, and we won’t see giant lumbering, allegedly drunken lummoxes with no skill going to Merseyside clubs for £35m (I’m not naming any names here), but that won’t make any difference. When all the clubs are Amish, City, United, Chelsea and possibly Liverpool will all have great big fat pigs and cows that could feed an army, and enormous houses and barns that could accommodate … well, an army. And what will Arsenal have? A few mangy dogs and an anorexic goat called Ralph. Maybe.
The point is: success breeds more success, and if the Arsenal board had been more proactive in trying to win trophies over the last six years instead of jumping the gun on Uefa’s Fair Play rules, we would have been in a better position than we will be come 2013. All the other big clubs are doing is taking advantage of the fact that, for the time being, they can spend big and make sure they have a large enough boat when the flood finally does come (I’ve suddenly decided to switch to a new metaphor for no apparent reason). All Arsenal can afford at the moment is a dinghy, and it might be too late for them to save up some money and trade it in for a bigger model.
