Rocky the King
With three more points Arsenal will have managed again for the 17th year to be in the top four. Where I will give Arsene Wenger praise is that this is no mean achievement, but next year will be a big test, as let’s face it, had Man Utd got there act together, are you seriously going to say that we would have got this place? The Club has to accept that world class players will deliver and we cannot do without them. It also means that as a club we must now stop selling our best players, and in fact build around them by adding more world class not less. Up until the purchase of Mesut Ozil it had appeared that the Arsenal Board and AW do not want to break the wages structure and in so doing they wished to maintain the Self Financing model. Well the only thing that is being financed by this model are Stan Kroenke’s share portfolio and not eligibility to next year’s Champions League, because what is clear is that UEFA will be powerless to prevent the likes of PSG and Manchester City having their own way. This is because of the way in which they have used massive funds to further their own interest, way in excess of any new revenue streams, thus blatantly infringing the spirit of the FFP rules.
Man City have breached the FFP rules but have already been reassured that they will not be kicked out of the Champions League. So the penalties are going to be paying lip service and a betrayal to all the other clubs like Arsenal who played by the rules. 20 Clubs will find out this week what their plea bargaining deal is. Now if I were in charge of UEFA, no financial fine would hurt. Firstly it could be appealed against and secondly how much pain can a national economy worth thousands of billions take? In any case any severe action by UEFA will cause these clubs to run for the Court of Arbitration in Switzerland and when have you ever seen this body uphold justice in the game? What is clear is that loopholes exist to enable teams to get around the fair play rules, and it is down to the clubs to have the gall to exploit them. Arsenal Football Club appears to have double standards, where the requirement and fairness of applying corporate governance is taken upon a case by case basis in a rather arbitrary manner. It appears from the outside that it is take, take, take, by the board and give, give, give by the fans. Even the new commercial deals seem heavily weighted upon the requirement of the fan base to spend, spend, spend. I can see no evidence that Stan Kroenke has any intention of putting his own money at risk, neither are there plans to allow anyone to inject equity into the club’s coffers.
How can Arsene Wenger attract high quality world class players to the club, when a call from a Man City agent will have multi-million £ signs before their eyes? The average wage for players at Man City is £5.3 million a year. That’s over a 100K per week. Aguero is reputed to earn 220K per week with Yaya Toure close behind. A wage bill of a staggering £233 million a year - how can any team possibly compete with this? Yet don’t be too sorry for Arsenal, we have the highest paid CEO in the Premier League, so clearly we are prepared to spend the money if we want to as a Club. Arsene Wenger reputedly gets around £150k a week for his efforts and if Monaco can entice him to break his promise to the Board then he could leave and increase this to 230k a week which represents a £12 million per year deal. We could also run high level efficiency savings to reduce the £50million costs that we incur in order to run a stadium. Perhaps a few less Diamond Club Lounge improvements and more player squad improvements Ivan? The only way that the bubble in football is going to burst is with another world financial melt down which leads to the leading broadcasters not being able to finance exclusive TV rights packages. So no change there then. So let’s spend a little of that £140 million cash that was put aside to protect the club against being out of the top four and be at the top table as of right, not by good fortune at the expense of others.
Twitter@RTKafc_insider
