Thursday, June 9th, 2011 « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. Supporting the Lord Wenger; coach of the decade
London in the EPL, part 2
As Mr Redknapp prepares for his day (or perhaps week), in court, defending himself against charges related to fraud and corruption during his previous managerial life, he has taken on a new life, doubling as the man asking the Tiny Totts chairman Daniel Levy to finance three players he feels he needs to get back in the top four.
What is interesting here is that while most of the quotes relating to Mr Wenger and Arsenal players appear in one source without being clearly attributable, often relating to a tiny fragment of a sentence that Mr Wenger might have said, rather than the whole paragraph, with Tottenham we have the innocent until proven guilty Mr R saying on Sky Sports News “I want Daniel to go out and get three fantastic players now to come in.” It sounds a bit like apportioning blame before the knife goes in.
He continues…
“You can’t say that just because we didn’t make the Champions League, we’re not going to improve next year. If you do that then we’re not going to get in it again. That’s a fact, because you won’t pass the teams that finished above you last year. If we don’t improve then they will improve. Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal – they will improve, and Man City… they’re unbelievable. They are never going to stop improving as will Kenny [Dalglish] with Liverpool now. You have to keep improving if you want to keep anywhere near those teams. I certainly feel we need three players of real quality if we are going to compete with those teams otherwise it will be very difficult.”
And you can see his point – and it is one he has been developing for some time. His theme is always the same, City, United, Chelsea and with a grudging twitch, us, plus Liverpool lurking. What now for the Tinies? he keeps asking.
But they are £30m down on income before they start. And yet, hang on… Haven’t the Tinies been making as much or more money than we have each season? I have never quite worked out how, but that is how it seems.
Now compare and contrast the chairman/owner/manager relationship at the Tinies with that at Arsenal. You have Daniel Levy/Jo Lewis in the Bahamas/The Redknapp (innocent until proven otherwise). Not exactly working as a team I’d say.
We have Mr Hill-Wood/Mr Kronke/Mr Wenger. OK Mr H-W has his critics, but he is in fact a figurehead – there to represent the long tradition of his family running the club. Mr Kronke is as foreign as Jo Lewis but he’s around a hell of a lot more, and we can see what he has done with his other clubs. And we have Mr W (although I have long wondered when it will be that the anti-Arsenal Arsenal groupings suggest that we would have won the league under Mr Innocent-until-proven, as opposed to Mr Wenger.
So what has Daniel Levy said? In fact he has spoken not of the need for more players, but of the need to streamline the squad. So while Mr Hill-Wood always says, the money is there for Mr Wenger, at Tottenham there is a total conflict.
And since the Tinies got rid of their reserve team about five years ago in order to save dosh, streamlining can only mean two things. One is to pull out of the youth leagues, and the other is to cut the first team squad.
And here’s another thing. While we spent much of last summer looking at the impact of the 25 rule, this season it hardly gets mentioned. But for the Tinies it is an issue.
Three Tinies are no longer outside the 25, having become 21 years old during the season, and so adding to the numbers are Sandro, Bale and dos Santos. More pressure.
Then there were the big time big money men out on loan: Keane, Naughton, O’Hara and (oh yes he is still there) David Bentley. All back and in the 25.
WHU, as we know, and as mentioned in the last article in this little series, can’t afford to keep Keene. Giovani has been at Racing Santander and the word on the rather dirty streets around the mucky end of WHL is that Arry don’t like him. O’Hara has a long-standing back injury and may or may not survive.
Ledley King is another problem. £75,000 a week for a very modest number of matches in a season – a dozen if you are lucky, half a dozen if not. Quite expensive really.
Woodgate and Cudicini are out of contract this season I think, so I guess they go just to cut the wages bill.
Then there is Pavlyuchenko, Hutton, Kranjcar, Corluka, Palacios – all big money men with big salaries – which makes them harder and harder to sell.
So what is the poor club to do? Sell Bale for £30m to Real Mad? Or maybe move on Luka Modric who has five years to go on his contract?
This whole muddle has come as a bit of a shock to the club I think, and the quotes from Arry suggest that he is as much in denial about the Tinies lack of finance as he is about his forthcoming court case (and there he is innocent of course until anyone decides otherwise).
Last season we were endlessly told that the Tinies were bidding £30m or more for Rossi. The AAA moaned that soon the Tinies would overtake us and would take our place in the Champs League because we refused to spend. But in fact it almost looks as if they are in Leeds-world (you will remember the Champs League semi in 2001 followed by a quick tumble into their spiritual home of the third division).
So what of Diego Forlán – wasn’t he trotting the Tiny way – or so we were told. Except he is paid over £6m a year. So perhaps not.
“I don’t know if we have any money to spend,” said Redknapp a while back. s. “We might not. I have not asked the chairman. We will have to wait and see. But if there isn’t, we will get on with it again and be strong again next year.”
The big problem of course is their endless delay over the stadium. While we went on and just did it, they got planning permission for the WHL project (complete with hotels – who ever would want to stay in a hotel at WHL?). Then having muddled that through they decided they wanted the Olympic stadium instead. But they didn’t get it – so now they are fighting another expensive legal battle. This could run for years and years, and all the while they have a ground smaller than Highbury.
Of course the press do not see it as a disaster. They consider Redknapp’s one season in the Champs as “remarkable” given the size of the ground – forgetting that we have been there year after year in Mr Wenger’s time.
But now certainly times have changed and the challenge for the Tinies is simply to keep going financially. If the rich overseas owner pulls out (and we should never forget, the Tinies are just like QPR and Chelsea in this regard – financed by a rich owner) they are in an awful mess.