Custodianship/Self sustainability – where do we go from here? « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News, supporting the club, the players and the manager

Custodianship/Self sustainability – where do we go from here?

Richard Bedwell

If we believe those who understand these things there are two tectonic shifts happening in football at the moment. The first, according to Ivan Gazidis, is that football generally is moving towards the way that Arsenal runs its business. Driven by the demands of FFP and the European-wide fear of imminent bankruptcy the Arsenal template is being accepted as the only way to go. It won’t happen at exactly the same speed everywhere, but happen it will.

The other thing we know is that revenue coming into Arsenal, both in the form of sponsorship and of TV broadcast fees, are going to expand quite substantially. A combined figure of perhaps as much as £70m a year was bandied about at the AST meeting last week.

The full impact of these shifts won’t be with us until the 2013-14 season and  it could even be a bit later for some elements. So, knowing what’s going to happen with a pretty high level of certainty, what do the Club do in the meantime? As I see it they have three broad options.

1.      It moves from its current (and very long established) strategy to a position that is closer to where the rest of football is actually moving away from. This has been described as a more ‘aggressive’ strategy and would involve Arsenal throwing its financial weight around a bit more both in terms of transfers and salaries. It might even involve the possibility of going into (player cost related) debt in the knowledge that the money to pay that debt would start to arrive in the not too distant future anyway. It would also of course mean that, if other clubs are being encouraged to emulate Arsenal, any move towards them makes that task that much easier.

2.      It stays exactly where it is. Having established the template that UEFA desperately needs to be able to put before the more FFP-resistant clubs, to change that model in any way now might be a strategic error. Even if it was only seen as ‘temporary’ and merely the spending of guaranteed revenues in advance of their arrival the spell might be broken and we would have less of an argument with UEFA if FFP (a basic plank of the Club’s future planning) did not get delivered.

3.      Move even further away from the inflation riddled past/current market and start ‘phase two’ of the long term plan now. Current evidence would suggest that this may well be what is actually happening. If you can’t stop players running their contracts down in order to maximise their own bargaining power with you (or anyone else) then play the game as much to your own benefit as you can. Don’t get blackmailed into keeping the inflationary spiral going and  aim to take as much of the steam out of the transfer market as you can and, more importantly still, reduce player wage costs.  In order to do this you need players to replace the ‘rebels’ preferably already on your books so that your position is as strong as it can be.

Given that player costs is where most of our money goes and given that we don’t like how much it’s costing us to watch the buggers play, this seems like something we might want to support. Gazidis has stated that the plan is to take as much pressure off ‘the stadium’ to deliver revenue and if that means taking the pressure off us it sounds like a plan.

But does it increase our chance of success on the field and does it maximise on our enviable financial strength?

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