So Paddy Got Up - an Arsenal anthology (16 page)

The modern game is light years away from its ancestors. Money swirls in and out of the game, caught in a typhoon of greed and glory. The past is suppressed and consigned to obscure satellite channels, packaged in highlights bundles for the midnight hour. Football’s face has been surgically altered and botoxed beyond recognition. And where does this leave Arsenal?

Boundaries are being wiped away. The Internet means that fans in geographically disparate locations can chat as easily about the match as our forefathers did in the pub following the final whistle. As club sides go, Arsenal has one of the most internet-active sets of supporters. It is difficult to quantify but this experience makes them one of the biggest clubs in the world by that measure. If this is the case, why is the media perception so different? Why are Arsenal treated as poor relations to other clubs, including those who make their debuts in the Champions League this season.

Investment is happening on a global scale. The European leagues, traditionally considered the biggest, are not necessarily the richest. Super clubs are emerging from the former Russian states; oligarchs invest vast sums for players in order to chase Champions League glory. The most startling example is at Russian club, Anzhi Makhachkala, who signed Samuel Eto’o on a deal rumoured to be worth £250k per week after tax, on top of a £22m fee to Internazionale. Perhaps the biggest change is coming with the arrival of Middle Eastern money. Beneficiaries include Paris St Germain and Malaga, neither of whom are reluctant to flash the new found cash. For years the Parisians lost their best players to others, now they enjoy the role reversal. Malaga has spent heavily in an attempt to gate-crash the top table in Spain. They will find little room with Barcelona and Real Madrid unwilling to share space. Indeed, with so few challengers they have made it all but impossible for anyone to win the title such is their dominance of revenues.

The biggest change is at Manchester City. Having invested heavily in previous summers, they have moved up another level with money and quality of players bought. Already targeted by UEFA under the Financial Fair Play regulations (FFP) for their sponsorship deal, City need to increase their revenues to cover ever-increasing costs. Already this summer they found it hard to dispose of players, doing loan deals with Tottenham and others to cut their playing staff. These clubs offer the biggest threat to the status quo. As they spend more on fees and wages, traditionally run clubs are marginalised in the transfer market. No longer is the solution to slowly build a squad, promoting youth with a mix of older heads. The Super Clubs want it all and they want it now, purchasing their way to silverware as quickly as they can. The FFP rules will counter some of the excesses, but not all of them as clubs become more commercially aware, exploiting their brands in the global marketplace.

Arsenal has not taken advantage of this. Tied into sponsorship deals that helped to build their new stadium, the club’s commercial revenues are found badly wanting when compared to their domestic and international rivals. Negotiations have not brought forth solutions, the club reluctant to follow Chelsea’s lead in paying off previous sponsors to negotiate more commercially advantageous deals. To put Arsenal’s position into perspective, Manchester United’s recent sponsorship deal with DHL for their training kit compares more than favourably with Arsenal’s for their first XI shirts. Summer 2011 was the first time in forty years that the club had ventured to the Far East for a tour, but two matches played in Asia hardly constitutes a massive commitment. Dipping their toes in is fine but rivals such as United and Chelsea exploited these markets long ago, moving onto the United States of America for their pre-season tours. Having an American billionaire owner, Arsenal will presumably follow that path. Arsène Wenger’s opposition to such matters will be considered but ultimately ignored in the pursuit of financial enhancement. Arsenal needs it. Wenger admits that once the bigger clubs come into the process, Arsenal will always lose out in a bidding war for either transfer fees or wages. This suggests that in the modern game, Arsenal’s business model is wrong.

How do they alter it? Alisher Usmanov makes the right noises publicly but finds little support for his desire to invest, particularly as he seems more concerned with dividends. The Uzbek wants us to believe he would invest heavily on the playing side but it is easy to say these things when you know there is little or no chance of your offer being taken. However, even the biggest clubs around the world have hit financial trouble with the traditional football model. Barcelona had severe cash flow problems at the end of the 2010/11 season whilst the debt incurred by the Glazers in purchasing Manchester United has necessitated them floating part of the club on the Singapore Stock Exchange. By comparison, Arsenal remains financially one of the most valuable clubs in the world; the self-sustaining model employed by the club shows its worth in various lists compiled by both Deloittes and Forbes. The Emirates Stadium has increased match-day revenue, enabling higher wages to be paid amongst the squad (although wages paid at Arsenal are easily and willingly trumped by Chelsea and both Mancunian clubs). Can they compete at the highest level continually when faced with those whose spending power far outweighs their own? The answer to that is quite simple: they must. It is a trite observation but true nonetheless. Clubs such as Arsenal competing with those who utilise what Wenger calls ‘financial doping’ are necessary for the good of the game. If Arsenal fail and no-one else steps forward to take their place, money has won. Michel Platini might worry that overt corruption will ruin the professional game, the imbalance caused by huge investments from owners or bankers, covertly corrupts football. This is not to cast Arsenal as a White Knight. They are not fighting any such battle for the good of the game, simply for the good of Arsenal Football Club. It is the corner into which they have been painted. Football is such a fluid game on and off the pitch, that this year’s financial champions may be next year’s Sugar Daddy plaything.

This year saw a change in the perception of Arsenal. Previous years had seen the club tipped to be the one of the ‘Big Four’ who dropped out of contention. Liverpool filled that gap instead, the season after finishing runners-up. Arsenal launched a title challenge in 2010/11that eventually withered away into a struggle for fourth place. The departures of Cesc Fabregas and Samir Nasri have been seen as cataclysmic for the club. If you strip away the hyperbole, losing two key players is bound to impact any team. Wenger, though, has negatively influenced opinion on this matter. Whilst not setting the agenda, he did nothing to diffuse the situation. Speaking on the club’s Asian tour, he observed, “Imagine the worst situation – we lose Fabregas and Nasri – you cannot convince people you are ambitious after that ... I believe for us it is important that the message we give out – for example you see about Fabregas leaving, Nasri leaving – if you give that message out you cannot pretend you are a big club. Because a big club first of all holds onto its big players and gives a message out to all the other big clubs that they just cannot come in and take [players] away from you.”

It is the language of football, the self-aggrandisement of the sport. The words have come back to haunt him on more than one occasion, gleefully thrown back in his face by his critics. It begs the question, can Arsenal be considered a big club if they cannot hold onto their best players? The issue is clouded by the context of the sales. Fabregas was returning home, to a former club, a club he supports and had done since he was a child. In that instance, is it a diminution of Arsenal’s status to sell the player, particularly since his new employers are considered to be one of the best club sides in football’s history?

In my opinion, it is the sale of Nasri that highlights the problems Arsenal face most. The player had all but agreed a deal to extend his contract with Arsenal. Something happened at the start of the 2010/11 season that put the matter on ice, the suspicion is that his agent had contact with other clubs and the player’s head was turned by the money on offer elsewhere. The wages he plumped for at Man City were £75k more than Arsenal offered and was willing to pay. City had the need and economic means to pay the substantial sum, showing that they were in a hurry to snap up any talent that became available in their avaricious pursuit of silverware, emphasising the wealth gap created.

So, does this signal a lack of ambition? Nasri has not been backwards in stating that this is so, criticising the board – not Wenger though – for failing to back the manager in the transfer market. With any media interview caution must be applied but if players believe the club lacks ambition, surely there is something in what Nasri says? Again context comes into play. The Frenchman’s last days at the club were rife with acrimony; many supporters maligned him as treacherous and greedy. Nasri hit back at his critics, feeding prejudices, while trying to portray himself in a more favourable light.

Losing key players, no matter the reason, suggests the club are not achieving their targets. Were Arsenal Champions of England, or Europe, on a regular basis, would Fabregas have been so eager to leave? It’s hard to prove but had Arsenal achieved silverware in the previous seasons it would certainly have made his decision more difficult. And therein lies the crux of the matter. For all of these reasons Arsenal can be considered a big club, a crucial one contradicts the argument: trophies; or to be more precise, the lack of them in recent seasons. Since winning the FA Cup in 2005, Arsenal lost in the Champions League final as well as two Carling Cup finals. Defeats have also come at the semi-final stage of the Champions League and both domestic cups. Always the bridesmaid: never the bride.

Does this matter in the context of Arsenal and the modern game? It does, simply because of the vicious circle that exists at the top level of professional football. To attract the best players, you must win silverware. If you don’t, the best players will be reluctant to join. It highlights the vacuous nature of many footballers that they leave clubs bemoaning the lack of silverware without the slightest hint of taking personal responsibility for their part in that failure. Arsenal remains one of the game’s biggest clubs but it is a position increasingly under threat. No matter what the finances might say, it is honours that matter more. There is little point in being rich and mediocre. The club’s challenge over the coming years will be building a winning squad, one that can compete with wealthier clubs on a regular basis, and one that can sustain its place amongst football’s elite.

***

Stuart Stratford is the author of Arsenal blog, A Cultured Left Foot

15 – WEMBLEY. BASTARD WEMBLEY - Tim Clark

Wembley. Bastard Wembley. For some, it must be a Champagne-splashed coliseum of pleasure, forever ringing to the sound of ‘Campeones!’, fireworks, and Laura Wright lustily belting out the National Anthem. Not for me. For me it’s the kind of shithole that gives shitholes a bad name: an ugly, rain-blasted concrete mausoleum. It is the place where my Carling Cup dream crawled to die.

Yes, that’s right: dream.

Okay, look, I know. I really do know. IT WAS ONLY THE BLOODY CARLING CUP. The Mickey Mouse, none-of-the-big-boys-care Cup. Except, the thing was that in 2010-11 we did care. The manager did, ditching his kids-only policy for far stronger sides than he’s selected in previous seasons. And so did the players, desperate to finally see some, dammit, any kind of pot-shaped reward for their efforts. None more so than Cesc Fabregas, who cruelly ended up missing the final with hamstring twang from a (as it eventually transpired, heartbreakingly irrelevant) league game against Stoke’s travelling Orc army.

But perhaps most of all, it had come to mean something to the fans. Largely, what it meant was the chance to reset the miserable stopwatch that hangs around every pundit’s neck, detailing down to the last nanosecond how long it’s been since the Arsenal last won anything. At time of writing: 6 years, 3 months, 18 hours and 31 seconds. Ugh. All of us needed that monkey off our backs. In fact we needed that monkey off our backs and shot into space without so much as a Russian flag to wrap his tiny body in. “Fly, Dimitri, fly!” While I can’t really excuse the hyperbole of saying that winning the Carling was my dream, I can at least try to explain it. You see as a relatively late Arsenal starter, I’d never seen one of our captains lifting a trophy in the flesh. And although technically we were still stuttering along in four competitions at the time, in the wake of the debacle at St James Park, and several other spectacular capitulations, the season was already starting to feel like quite the bum-clencher.

Having limped past such luminaries as Ipswich, Huddersfield and Leeds, I’d come to see the Carling not exactly as a sure thing, but certainly as sure as things ever got. By the time February 27th rolled around, I’d mentally built it up to be some unlikely combination of the Jules Rimet trophy and getting my 500m swimming badge. It was to be the spark from which further glory would surely follow. No longer would our players resemble a small copse of haunted trees before big games. This. Was. It.

Or so we thought. The other half of ‘we’ being Arse2Mouse’s co-blogger Dave Meikleham. At the time, both of us were working in Bath, writing about videogames for pennies, and had bonded over a mutually destructive love of the Arsenal. When the chance to rent a season ticket appeared on the company noticeboard we jumped on it, paying £500 each to split home fixtures stood at the back of the North Bank. On the eve of the season we began our blog, Arse2Mouse.com, partly because having thought up the name it seemed too good to waste, but also to provide a cathartic outlet for what we’d already taken to calling ‘the madness’. Plus, every man needs a hobby, and blogging seems to be the 21st Century equivalent of fannying about in a shed.

If anything, though, Dave had built winning the Carling up to even more preposterous heights than I had. We were both exiles in the West Country, me from London, him from Edinburgh, but money matters had meant he’d decided to move back to Scotland before the end of the season. The final was to be his last match, and in our minds the glorious reward for months spent schlepping up and down to the Emirates. Little did I know at that point that his decision would mean seeing out the end of season Collapseo-rama© on my own, a sequence of games we now refer to simply as ‘the death run’. Emotionally, though, we’d bet everything on seeing Robin – beautiful Robin, who wore the JVC shirt in his bedroom as a boy – lifting a trophy, now matter how clownish.