Mick Appleton
In the words of the Green Day song, "Wake me up when September ends". Yet another summer of pain has arrived for all Gooners and the recurring nightmare of our captain wishing to leave the club has returned to haunt us. As with last year, we have gained some additions but lost our best player in the process. Don't let the club fool you with the “we’re sure he'll see out his contract". As soon as they get a suitable offer, they will sell. Unfortunately for the money men at the club (isn't that all of them these days?) van Persie's announcement will reduce his value and I suspect we will have to let him go for as little as £15m. This would obviously be reduced to nothing should the club convince him to stay. I personally hope they don't. The lessons are there from previous seasons where Vieira, Henry and Cesc all stayed for one more season only to underperform and be injured for large chunks of the season.
I will come to my thoughts regarding RVP at the end but you can see the root of our problems if you read the following facts –
• We are 19th on the net amount spent on transfers
• We have made a profit of £21.3m over the past five seasons
• Man City have spent £382.2m
• Chelsea have spent £190.7m
• In our last five seasons at Highbury we averaged a spend of £5m per season
• At the Emirates it's minus £4.2m.
Although the other top-six clubs have spent less than Man City and Chelsea - Man U (£36.6m), Liverpool (£26.8m) & Spurs (£6m) - you can see why we are no longer competitive at the top level and why our key players are looking to leave to win trophies elsewhere. I genuinely don't believe that Henry or Cesc wanted to leave for money. With the money top players earn today, they are not going on the dole when they retire, but what they know is that you won't want to show a bank statement to your kids, you will want to show them medals. This seems beyond the comprehension of the powers-that-be at our club.
Running a normal company along these frugal lines is often the right thing to do, but a football club is about so much more than that. Our aspirations and hopes are wrapped up in the eleven men wearing our colours when they take the field on match days. We are invested totally, and we cannot change allegiance or suddenly support another club because someone decides that financial fair play is more important than winning in top-level sport. Most Arsenal fans are of long standing, and have suffered with the club through many ups and downs over the years, but I can never remember a time when our expectations were lower. To be constantly selling our crown jewels and replacing them with cubic zirconium is soul-destroying. I'm not saying I want us to get in to massive debt that would jeopardise the club, but I do not want it run as a profit-making organisation either. The most frustrating thing is that Usmanov has been waiting in the wings to invest his millions in the club but a small-minded minority do not want him in the club because he was brought in by David Dein.
Sadly, Chelsea have proved you can win trophies with the right investment, but Man City have proved it even more as their recent history has been a lot more chequered than Chelsea's, having sunk to the third tier not so long ago. Arsène has done an amazing job keeping us in the top four while moving to a new stadium and managing to turn a profit, but there are not many of us who wouldn't have preferred him to have spent a bit more to turn our recent near-misses into trophies. This however, is never going to happen with the current regime, and the UEFA Fair Play rules will not come to their rescue, so we will have to get used to turning an unheard of player into a star so that they can go off and win trophies with other clubs.
Lastly, RvP. This will not be a popular view, but here goes. I thought Robin would be more loyal and more grateful to the club that has stuck with him through years of injury and mediocrity. Despite all of the points I have outlined above, I feel he should have stayed to lead the club out of its current rut. He says he loves the club and the fans, his wife and family are happy in London, and he's not motivated by money but he is also obviously not motivated by loyalty! Vieira, Henry and Cesc had all given several of their best years to the club before they left; Robin has given us just one. Excluding 2011-12, he has averaged 22 games and nine goals per season. As soon as he has a world-class season, it's "you don't match my ambitions, I'm off". The two recent signings have strengthened the club and seem to be a small step in the right direction, but Robin obviously wants bigger names to be added and that is never going to happen while we have our current wage structure, so I think we've seen the last of van Persie!
Unfortunately, it's a chicken and egg situation, if we keep losing our best players, other marquee players will not sign, and if marquee players won't sign, then the stars won't stay. I know we also have problems with our wage structure but that could be solved by trimming the dead wood and having a smaller but better paid squad instead. We could also take Usmanov's roubles. This, I presume, would encourage RvP to stay and other big name players to sign. Sadly, I have just read a quote from Arsène this morning that says "I will not change even if I keep losing my star players", so it looks like we're in for at least two more barren summers. Enjoy.
