71_2004
To Stan Kroenke and Ivan Gazidis,
After witnessing yet another inept away performance on Sunday, surely you must now have to revoke the earlier announcement of a 3% price increase for next season, and replace it with a price reduction. At the turn of the year, the team was well placed to challenge for the Premier League title for the first time in 10 years. All that was required was some work in the transfer market in January to recruit a quality striker to back up the clearly tiring Olivier Giroud, plus a midfield and defensive addition to the squad. Instead, we get no one which means we are left with a second rate Sanogo (Sanogood!) as a replacement, along with the annual lengthening injury list. Now, we are threatened with missing out on the Champions League following a destructive capitulation.
Champions League qualification should be important, but given the past it will not strengthen our position in the transfer market, and we will not challenge to win the tournament. It is a great excuse to travel around Europe, but is increasing less important from a football perspective.
We have a tactically inept manager, who still seems to ignore the strengths of the opposition on the basis that if we turn up, we will win. Against Everton, predictably the first substitutions were after 65 minutes, which appear to be the time every week, probably decided by a computer the preceding Thursday as no changes now ever appear to reflect the game taking place, often taking off the better players and leaving on those having a shocker. Arsene was a genius for the first half of his reign, but now looks like an old man out of his depth, who has to keep warm in his stupid sleeping bag of a coat.
After the Chelsea debacle, the manager called it an accident. Well, that is patently untrue -
Man City away - accident
Liverpool away - unacceptable
Chelsea away - untenable (and should have been the last straw - how many other managers suffer three such results in a season let alone three months and survive?)
Everton away - gross negligence on all counts (Kroenke, Gazidis and Wenger)
The away fans are currently putting in considerably more effort to these games than the manager and most of the players, and our support is being taken for granted.
When we moved stadiums, it was to challenge the best teams. We have clearly been lied to by you and the manager for years. Now, you want to increase the already highest prices in European football to watch a team that apparently has no intention of fighting for the title. Presumably you, Ivan, are happy enough, bearing in mind your bonuses (in addition to your £2m salary) are all based on finances and the commercial aspects of the business rather than what happens on the pitch. Surely the new TV deals, sponsorship and kit deals bring in sufficient to fund some reward for the people who make the club - the loyal supporters. I have had a season ticket for 25 years, and travel regularly away at home and abroad but now feel I am being dumped on form an ever increasing height. Your only real interest is to get tourists into the stadium who will no doubt spend more money in the club shops than we do.
Now to the bones of this message - please leave your jobs now and take the manager with you. The club should be owned by someone with an interest in the game, get in Jurgen Klopp and a chief executive who has an understanding of football and what it means to the fans, not just the bottom line and their own personal bonus scheme.
Any other business that treated it customers, as you would like to call us, with the contempt you do, would fail!
Hopefully, we can win the FA Cup, and the manager can leave with some dignity, but the way things are looking I fear this will not happen.
