Our failure this coming season? « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News, supporting the club, the players and the manager

So Arsenal are dammed to finish outside the top 4 and we should not have wasted our time and money on youngsters like AOC, Miyachi, Jenkinson, and the pursuit of Campbell – when we should have been pursuing the worlds best established players.  Add to that a dire pre-season and it’s clearly time for Arsene to go.  I think that just about sums up the media and anti Wenger feeling right now.

In view of the above every Arsenal fan should be concerned, or should they?

Lets take the emotion out of this debate and deal with just the facts:

1) Arsenal are certain to finish outside the top 4.

This is the view of nearly every pundit.  Now the thing with pundits is that they are not actually held to account for their views – no one says at the end of the season “You called it totally wrong, you’re fired”, the same goes for fans.

In fact if you want to get a professional opinion that is accountable then you need look no further than the bookies – people who if they get it wrong are fired, and who look for factual and statistical sources to design their risk models.  You’d think that from the opinions expressed all over the media that the bookies would be rating Arsenal as outsiders to the top 4 so is that the case?

Looking at Statto.com, which shows the odds from the top bookmakers on Premier League top 4 finishers, not one bookmaker gives better odds on Liverpool beating Arsenal to that spot;  and that is without any new signings:

http://www.statto.com/football/odds/england/premier-league/top-4

I’m not saying that the bookies are always right, but they are the majority of the time, and it is exactly their business to get it right – making money is not partizan, no friendships of managers are taken into account, no one is trying to sell newsprint – it is pure business.  So I think we can safely debunk that one.

2) Arsene should not waste his time chasing youngsters when we need established players.

First of all it’s not just Arsene – there is a huge network of people involved, in addition we as humans can multi-task – so the pursuit of young talent is not hampering buying established players.

Why buy the young talent? Simple – the world of football has changed; 10 years ago you had to worry about United, Barcalona, Real and Milan when you were trying to attract new talent.  Now in addition you have the billionaire’s club – PSG, Malaga, City, Chelsea and a whole host of Ukrainian and Russian owned clubs – all with money to burn and very deep pockets.  If this trend continues then anyone with a modicum of talent is going to be extortionate, and every time we go in for a player the selling club is going to let the other clubs know to drive up the price.  The only way to survive is to buy or develop young and tie into long contracts.

Regarding buying established players, there isn’t some mythical player supermarket where you can just wander through and drop a couple of world class centre backs in your trolley – there are very few world class centre backs in the world – and Cahill and Samba are not proven at this level, especially with an attacking club that is always pushing forward.  You have to find the player, persuade the club and the player, then fight off the overtures of all the clubs with deep pockets.

I’ll leave you to make up your mind on this point – I’m not trying to tell you how to think, but as a long haul supporter I’m going with the club doing the right thing here.

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3) Dire pre-season.

Does it matter? We lost one game.  It matters to me as a supporter that we did not thump New York or Benfica at the time, but after the season has started it’s soon forgotten.

The clue is in the name – Pre-season.  It’s preparation, a time for learning – for making the mistakes before the consequence id 3 dropped points.  And what have we learnt?  The first team or combinations there of look good, and there appear to be some good surprises in Frimpong, Gervinho, Miyachi, and Traore not being as bad as we may have thought.  However, there are some issues when we put some of the B team on the pitch – losses of concentration and some howlers – something that cost us dearly last year when we were down to the bare bones – but how many points has this lost us this season? None.

The Guardian compiled a good article on the correlation of pre-season form and actual league success which can be found here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2010/aug/05/pre-season-form-premier-league which shows that in our Invincible season we actually drew at Celtic, Barnet and the giants of SC Rizing, and lost to Peterborough and United in the Charity Shield.  We added a very young Clichy and Lehmann that summer.

So what can we tell from this? Firstly that pre-season is no guide to our future performance and that there are issues, and we can only really judge if quality is not added in certain areas before the end of the transfer window – so juries out for the moment, but not the end of the world.

Conclusions

So where are we then? The bookies feel that we are going to be at least odds on for a champions league spot, with only United and 2 Billionaire clubs potentially above us that we could not hope to outspend and may have to take the long game into consideration.  Care is being taken to make sure that we will continue to challenge in the future and fingers crossed for another addition or two before the end of the window & pre-season form is irrelevant.

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