How to prevent such final year contract situations like with RVP « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. Supporting the Lord Wenger; coach of the decade

By Walter Broeckx

We all know better than the board. That is for sure.  Certainly now with the RVP situation it seems that if we had about 2.326.413 other people in the place of Gazidis or Wenger it wouldn’t have happened.  One of the most used sentences these days is: we shouldn’t have let it come this far. Meaning that those dumb asses in the Arsenal board had the nerve to let a player run to the final year of his contract.  So how would those 2.326.413 other people would have dealt with the situation and avoid it.

Well a first solution could be offering the players a contract that never ends. But as a playing career somehow ends around 33-36 it has to end one day. So we can scratch that option I think.

Another option would be to give the players a contract so that in normal circumstances it would not end till their playing days are over. Let us say we give a contract for each player till he is 35 years old.  That would cover most players and would prevent the current RVP situation. Nah, you see. It’s that simple. Fire Gazidis, hire me.

But what happens if a player gets an injury and his playing career is over? Suppose and God forbid it from happening but let us just imagine that Jack Wilshere will never recover. And as we have given him a contract till he is 35 years old this will mean that we have to pay him for another 15 years for doing nothing. Ok maybe we could break the contract but that will surely mean we have to pay some kind of fine for doing this. So that again would cost money.

Another thing is that in this case you have to be sure that the player wants to sign such a long term contract. Because if he would sign now for let us say 40.000 a week it could well be that in 3 years time this is a ridiculous low amount of money for a football player of his calibre. So the player becomes unhappy and this will affect his game. So he will perform less and the team suffers. So you can already see that this option also is not the ideal one as it can easily backfire on you.

How many of you would be happy if we had given Diaby such a contract when he first signed for Arsenal? Or Almunia? To name just a few we have to get rid of.

Oh, that’s right how do you get rid of the deadwood when you have contracts running till the players are 35? So another problem with such a solution. Don’t fire Gazidis yet I would suggest.

Give them longer contracts? Well we work with 4 years contract most of the time because it also means that if the player doesn’t perform as expected it will only cost you 4 years and if you are lucky you could get rid of him even sooner. But with that we have also to accept the fact that a player who does perform (even be it only for one year) he could try to get away and do what Flamini has done or do what Van Persie is doing: force his way out (for whatever reason but monhpies are the most popular – I’m claiming the new word Monphies from now as for players who claim they want trophies as a reason to leave but in fact just want money).

So what happens when we give them 6 years or 7 years? Not much as it ends somehow at some moment in time and thus you will always end up with some situations like the one we are seeing.

Another problem might be that players don’t want to sign longer contracts with a club. They like certainties but a transfer usually brings extra cash for them so they would want to have that option open.

Shorter contracts? Well that will only bring even more instability and it will bring even more instability each season as perhaps half the team is nearing the final year of their contract each year. So also not a solution.

Now of course you can correct me in the comment section and give us the perfect solution to prevent the current situation for once and for all.

I have been thinking myself about it for a long while. And for the moment the only solution I see is to buy a gun. Buy some bullets. Ah we are the Arsenal that shouldn’t be a problem. Then we go to the player his house. We enter the house with the new contract ready to be signed. Ask him to sign the contract and if he refuses to sign we say: “What you don’t want to sign?”  We take out the gun, put in a bullet, point it at his head and ask : what did you say again about not signing? I bet there will be no more player not signing a contract extension any more. And if there is one… A sad announcement on arsenal.com that this player sadly passed away while trying to sign a new contract for Arsenal will be enough to convince the rest to just sign it.  Ok, I think you can imagine this scenario also not being the best possible.

Bottom line: this is the way football is organised. It is a sad situation maybe, but we cannot force players in to signing a contract against their will.  But slating the club for letting it come that far : the gun scenario really is not a real option you know. So we just have to live with it and accept that this is the way football is these days.

Sometimes we are happy a contract ends, sometimes we are sad. But things don’t always go the way we or the club want. It’s a free world and unless we allow slavery again for football players we just have to accept that they can and will move on. For whatever reason and for whatever bullsh*t reason they tell us they want to leave for.

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In order to make sure we don’t miss one aspect on RVP his case we just have another article on him and the others can be found here together with some other stuff.