Bard
The debate about Wenger’s ability to take us to the next level is done and dusted and has been for a long while. Only the most loyal and deluded of fans believe that he can somehow reinvent himself as a top manager. However something worrying has been going on and I don’t mean playing players out of position.
It’s his change in attitude to our finances that has me puzzled. Was our activity over the transfer window evidence of a plan or is Wenger now so powerful that he is able to make it up as he goes along?
However we have performed on the field, the stewardship of the club’s finances hasn’t wavered one iota, much to our annoyance at times. The Ashley Cole fiasco, the Suarez £40m+ £1 offer, and less importantly our refusal to pay peanuts for Mark Schwarzer when he was available are evidence of how carefully the club’s money was guarded. Players were sold to balance the books, sometimes causing frustration and anger amongst the fans. There is the oft-quoted remark that Arsene Wenger treats the club’s money as if it were his own. Allied to this has been a steady stream of invective aimed at clubs who spend money – ‘financial doping’ he has called it. Whatever happened on the field we could rest assured that the finances were solid. Arsenal, the Bank of England.
After 20 years of this the club has performed a 180-degree turn this season and started throwing money away in a quite extraordinary manner. The Ox transfer was a quite remarkable episode. He was effectively sidelined by not being offered a new contract for negotiation until the last minute. The Ox was reluctant to commit to the club. Lo and behold Wenger suddenly announces that he wants to build a side round him and made him a massive £ 180,000 a week offer. Really? It didn’t appear that the Ox and his advisers knew anything about this plan. If you want to build a side around a player does it not make sense to sort out his contract well before his final year? Was that the plan discussed and agreed at board level? If it was it seems a bizarre strategy. There was no financial damage as we raked in £35m but for a player to go from ‘unwanted’ to deserving of a £180,000 a week contract in the space of a month suggests muddled thinking as the very least.
Next up are our two superstars entering the final year of their contracts. Quite why and how the manager has allowed this to happen beggars belief. There would appear to have been a spectacular cock up somewhere in the system. An alternative view is that actually there isn’t a strategy at all. If Wenger wanted to keep them as he has stated many times over then why not make them an offer well in advance of the last year of their contract? They either sign or we sell them for top dollar, nothing complicated about that. Here is where it gets even more bizarre, having let their contracts run down Wenger starts telling us that letting players of the calibre of Ozil and Sanchez run down their contracts is the new norm. Really? He quotes the fact that 107 players currently have let their contracts run down. Tellingly he doesn’t name names. Are any of these players of the calibre of Ozil or Sanchez? It would have been good to know. I also didn’t see any of the other managers coming out in support of this pronouncement. Is this Wenger being ahead of the game? Or is it spin to mask a massive c*** up behind the scenes.
This isn’t the end of it, having declared that they wouldn’t be leaving under any circumstances as the transfer window drew to a close we found out that keeping Sanchez wasn’t quite as rock solid as he had suggested. We accepted City’s £65m offer with the proviso that we could find a replacement. Here things really get weird. Rumbling in the background throughout the transfer window was a very typical Arsenal transfer saga. We were in for Thomas Lemar. While all the other top clubs were bidding in tens of millions for players, Arsenal as usual were going up the equivalent of a fiver a time. Our final bid seems to have been in the region of £45/50m. This was knocked back. Then all of a sudden with the deadline approaching and wanting a replacement for Sanchez we bid a jaw dropping £94m for Lemar only to find that he apparently wanted to stay put. How did we go from a strategy of negotiating for a player in the £40-£50m bracket to thinking he was now worth nearly double, £94m in the space of a couple of weeks? If we thought he was worth a lot more than £50m why didn’t we offer a serious sum, say £70m, and get the deal done? Was this the plan all along or is Wenger making it up as he goes along?
As it stands Ozil and Sanchez can run down their contracts and leave for free in the summer. At today’s prices you would have to say it could cost anything between £150m-£250m to adequately replace them. We have long known that the board is largely weak and ineffective but it is stretching credibility to believe that someone as astute as Gazidis has signed up to this financial muddle. It’s my view that worryingly Wenger has become a dictatorial figure at the club and decisions are now made on a whim with no input from the board. As an institution we are beginning to look less like the Bank of England and more like North Korea.
