CanadaGooner
It is now 100% confirmed that Project Youth is now Project Groom. Arsenal have become a grooming-ground or a training-ground for clubs who are truly in the footballing business. If, as Wenger and others have told us for eight years now, that it is all about developing young players and then the trophies will come, why are we now selling players who are nowhere near the age of 30?
Any idiot would know that, in today’s economy, grooming players is only to sell them! The chances of keeping a young player at the same club for longer than two or three seasons is almost zero, with the Man Citys of this world circling and the unparalleled greed of these players! Just six years ago, Theo Walcott was earning his breakfast money at Southampton. Wenger put all sorts of faith in him, brought him to Arsenal, got him in the England Squad, kept playing him even when the entire Arsenal fan-base said he was c**p, and now we’re being told Walcott wants £100k per week??? How many trophies has he won for us? What improvement has he made in his six years at Arsenal?
It’s one thing for a football club to turn into a business, as we have in the last five years, where the owners are only interested in doing the maths for Champions League money and our players are rewarded and praised for finishing in the top four; what is unforgiveable is for a club with such tradition as Arsenal to turn into a feeder-team/training-ground for Barcelona, Man City and now even Man Utd. It would be interesting to count the number of players Arsenal have ever bought from those clubs (and I don’t mean those bought at the age of seven!).
For years we were told that it was a long-term project and process, where we would soon have a strong squad of players who believed in the club’s ethos and played that brand of football. But with each season, that brand of football becomes more and more unclear. We no longer have an incisive passer of the ball in the midfield (Vieira or Fabregas), we no longer have a tough bullish midfielder (Flamini or Wilshere or Song), we no longer have a strong defence, and we don’t have a reliable goalkeeper.
So, where has project youth taken us? Eight years with no trophy and no sign of a competitive squad in the making. Notice I keep saying eight years! I’m counting the current season as well! I’m usually an eternal optimist but I also blend in a bit of reality, which is probably what has been lacking at Arsenal for almost 10 years now: You can’t build a team by grooming young players anymore! It’s a 60s concept. In this day and age, these players don’t honour their contracts and couldn’t care less about being faithful to their clubs or to the fans who gave them their first opportunity
My guess is that, now that we’ve become a grooming team, we will now seek to buy some better (older) players and the fans will be told this new project will need a few years to work, so we may need to wait another eight years for a trophy! A team like ours, with the situation we’re in, needs to focus on the League Cup and the FA Cup for now to get us back to winning ways and then begin the tedious rebuild!
