Rangers fans show Arsenal “fans” how it really ought to be done. « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. Supporting the Lord Wenger; coach of the decade
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The day when Fulham tried to take over Arsenal – the full story in “Making the Arsenal”
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By Tony Attwood
Last weekend Rangers played at home in front of a full house, and lost 0-1. At the end of the game TV pictures showed many of the crowd staying on to applaud their team. Let us be clear about that – to applaud their team which had just lost 0-1.
Compare and contrast with Arsenal. While we might expect attacks on the team from Tottenham supporters blogs commentaries from Arsenal fans (often starting their piece by saying “I have been an Arsenal fan for xxx years”) attack the players for being not up to standard.
One set of fans applauds the players off the pitch, having lost, the other sets up endless attacks.
Meanwhile Rangers, as we know are in financial dire straits, and Arsenal has money in the bank. So while Rangers fans quite rightly attack their owner for delivering them into financial hell, the Arsenal Supporters Trust, which has a special interest in ownership and finances claims to have inside information on how much players are paid (not sure how they got that) and attacks the owners for delivering the club into financial heaven.
On the media front, Rangers fans are (at last one might say) attacking the media for misleading them for years about the state of their club, by simply printing anodyne commentaries based on the club’s press releases. Meanwhile some Arsenal fans seem to be at one with the media for their endless, endless attacks on the club.
Indeed the bizarreness of this last situation can be seen from the way in which Arsenal fans digested the story that Eden Hazzard would prefer Tottenham to Arsenal. When the real translation of the story came out on this site, showing that the player would much prefer to play under Wenger than anyone else, they went quiet.
It is quite a contrast.
So there is Rangers – ripped off by their owner, utter devoid of money, under investigation by the tax authorities, and in some danger of coming third in the two-horse race that is Scottish football, and they are applauded off the pitch by their fans after a poor home defeat.
Arsenal, having built a new stadium without any public money and currently sitting fourth in the Football League, fractionally in front of a team that has spent so much money of late that if the FFP regulations ever were to be applied realistically they would not be allowed into Europe, are heavily criticised for their playing style and their finances.
Now I am not a member of Arsenal Supporters Trust. I chose to become a member of Fanshare (the share buying scheme for supporters) which is allied to AST but (as I understand it) that does not make me part of AST. But I have to say I am very disappointed in their activities and if through Fanshare I am a member I would like to disassociate myself from them. If they have a problem with the finances of the club they can express them to the club in the normal way shareholders do – at the AGM and through private correspondence. But of course that is just my opinion.
In June 2003 when Abramovich became the owner of Chelsea and the scale of their spending seemed unlimited I wrote an article to the effect that football as a competition was over. I believed they would quickly be so far ahead of the rest that only the deportation of Mr A would end the growth of a club that had previously only one the league once – and that somewhere around the time Tottenham last won the league.
As we now know I was quite wrong. Money can’t always buy everything – although Chelsea with the money have been a much better bet than Chelsea without. But the comparative failure of Chelsea this year gives me a little hope that ultimately Manchester C will fall the same way, and that financial doping will come to an end – either because of FFP or because ultimately the owners get carried away, and make silly decisions.
What’s more, even the apparently impregnable can ultimately fall from grace. The latest from Rangers is that the owner has used the sale of future season ticket income to repay an £18m debt to the Lloyds Banking Group. It was part of the Craig Whyte takeover.
That one fact is so gross that it needs a re-run – at least for me. Clubs live and breath through their season ticket sales. The season ticket sales of Rangers for the next three years have gone before they have come in. And not just that, they have not been spent on new players or new facilities. They were spent paying off an old debt so the owner could buy the club.
Whyte, the owner, had denied that Rangers’ season ticket holders had paid for the takeover of their club. I think he was lying – although again that is just my view. It has also become clear that the club has not been paying its regular VAT and PAYE payments for some time.
Meanwhile Portsmouth FC, recently of the Premier League, recently of Mr Redknapp, recently cup winners, are back in administration. Quite probably another unheard of consortium will buy them out and run the club, for a year or two as the former majority shareholder Vladimir Antonov has been arrested for alleged bank fraud.
Meanwhile, Barclays Bank, the sponsors of the Premier League, have had papers filed against them in Milan requiring three senior executives of the bank be brought to trial for fraud. The bank is also being examined by the Internal Revenue Service in America for generating false foreign tax credits. Fortunately I don’t have an account at Barclays.
Meanwhile England seem happy to have lost their manager – although my guess is that he will sue the FA for constructive dismissal. But he’s foreign, and he never really did understand England, and anyway we shouldn’t let these clever-clever legal issues get in the way of giving us the manager we want. (Actually Mr C does have a lot of financial knowledge, and the claim against the FA could be mega big. If it happens, watch the press’ reaction. Or silence).
Is this really what we have come to expect of the everyday life in the world of the self-proclaimed best league in the world and some of its near neighbours?
Meanwhile it seems rather possible that Tottenham will be taken over this summer, as they celebrate 51 years since winning the league. One wonders what sort of new owner they will get if the reclusive current owner takes the money and gets out. An Abramovich or an Antonov – who can tell?
It really makes me wonder where is football heading.
What is going on, in my view, is that football is in denial of its own insanity. The ideology of football – the vision of success that can be bought through pouring billions into ventures worth little more than a few shillings has come to prevail over any sort of logic or proper accounting. Blind faith of the type that suggests that by saying something often enough it becomes true, is now the order of the day. It is a bit like North Korea – you know it is in chaos, but they still keep holding those military parades. Losing millions a year is fine, making money is not. Publicly criticizing your own players for their performance or for their contract is now fine – although always good to state how many years you have been a supporter for.
Complex models of football economics have been replaced by simplistic analysis that say that if we are not top of the league we are crap. Anything based on evidence and reasoned supposition has been thrown aside. Perpetual success can never be achieved any more than science can develop a perpetual motion machine, and yet in football perpetual success is believed in and aimed for by many. Every defeat is the end of the world. Every defeat is answered by a demand to spend more of the non-existent money.
It was not always thus. Henry Norris, founder of the modern Arsenal with Jack Humble, spent much of his own personal fortune building Highbury, and then risked everything by bringing in Herbert Chapman as manager. 99 years ago, almost to the day he took the club from a hopeless loss making situation into profit in the space of a few years – and gave the club a period of both profit and success. It is a model that seems as if it were in another world.
To be in Melbourne, Australia, as I was recently, and see the Etihad Stadium there, is to be reminded of how that company has the vision of a total sports franchise. To begin, they will have an Etihad Stadium in each country – just as they have in Manchester and Melbourne. Then it will be one in each city.
It is a fairly horrific vision, and the only hope must be is that the authorities that are supposed to police financial mismanagement will get their act together soon and win a few cases while the FA the EPL will start tearing into mismanaged clubs, and UEFA imposes not just FFP, but FFP+, a set of rules that really has an effect.
That’s the wish – but will it happen? I doubt it.
“The Premier League is the North Korea of football”. Remember, you read it here first.
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From the Arsenal History Society web site
Iconic Moments in the history of Arsenal – Number 9: Tom Whittaker wins the league.