Something simple « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. 800,000 visits last month

By Tony Attwood

The Villa game was a game you could break your leg in, just by turning the wrong way.  An opposition player, one of your own team, a hoarding at the side of the pitch – you could collide with any quite innocently in weather like this, and end a career.

It was simple: avoid injury.

Villa v Arsenal is something we all want to forget – but, would have been something we might have remembered for ever had Jack played and broken his leg.  Or had Jack played and scored the winner.

Quite honestly, I think we might all agree that the game was horrible, the weather was horrible, and our support siding with the AAA and the media near the end, did us no favours.

Is there anything good to say?

Well, we have a few more details on the shirt deal.  Reports suggest that by next summer we’ll have £70million to spend on players after the five-year sponsorship deal with Emirates comes into effect.

What I didn’t realise at first is that the arrangement is again frontloaded so that there is money now to put into the team.  What that implies is that someone (Mr Wenger presumably) demanded the money in order to compete against the money clubs, in the next couple of years.  They will have problems coming to terms with FFP, but with our FFP position secure we should be ok to lash out the extra dosh.  It also became clear that there is, as we have always thought, a £30m contingency fund held by the club to compensate for not qualifying for the Champions League.

So Emirates Airlines pay us £30m+ sometime in the next three months.  Perhaps not enough to make a huge impact in January, but with sales sluggish as the money clubs won’t be spending too much because of FFP and with Arry the Red sniffing around for players who need to be moved out to reduce the salary burden, there could be some movement.

Ivan Gazidis said: “We’ve got a lot of money coming in but you’ll see it in next year’s financial results.  We want to be able to invest in the team a little bit more now so we’ll have that capability by the summer. But we also kept some powder dry so we’ve got the ability to invest if our manager finds the right opportunities in January

“We can pay bigger salaries and I think we can invest more in transfer fees now. How we make those decisions will be based on a manager whose judgement over the years has been shown to be absolutely outstanding. There is nobody I would want to be thinking about those types of decisions on behalf of this football club.

“There’s clearly pressure to spend money. The bigger pressure though is doing it in a way that actually pushes the club forward.

“It is very easy to spend a lot of money and not get a lot of benefit from that on the pitch. We’ve had a manager who has done an outstanding job through a difficult period and he will do an outstanding job investing this money, I have no doubt about that.”

By way of comparison, Man U’s curious deal with Cehvrolet which resulted in the senior vice president of Chevvy resigning, are getting £51m from 2014-15.  Man City are on £20m from Etihad.  Chelsea get £14m from Samsung, and Tottenham £10m from Aurasma.

As for Villa v Arsenal, I think I am just going to play some music and forget it.