The trouble with football is it keeps going wrong. « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News, supporting the club, the players and the manager

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By Tony Attwood

The story that those people who don’t like Arsenal love to tell is that Arsenal gets it wrong.  Transfers, financial policy, tactics, youth policy, flexibility, you name it Arsenal gets it wrong.

And I am sure they do.  Not all the time, in fact I think not most of the time, but sometimes like all organisations they don’t get it right.

In fact that’s the point.  No one gets it right all the time.  And it is the fact that some get it more wrong than others that is the real issue.  I just thought I would give three examples of clubs that really do get it wrong:

First, AC Milan have promised refunds to fans who have renewed their season tickets, following the departure of Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Thiago Silva, along with Alessandro Nesta, Clarence Seedorf, Gennaro Gattuso and Filippo Inzaghi.  Some hard core supporters put on a mock funeral for the club.  Others had filed a legal case arguing that fans bought season tickets on the assumption that Ibrahimovic and Silva would be at the club.

The club says the offer of refunds was made because of “the need for style and love of the club towards its supporters and independent of any legal analysis,” adding that “the lawsuit is without any foundation.”

Milan has lost around 250 million euros across the last six years, they have debts that have even an Italian bank worried, and their stadium just doesn’t generate the income other stadia do because it is showing its age, and doesn’t have the sort of facilities that the Emirates does.  In short, without major investment in a new ground (difficult at this time) they are a bit stuck.

The point is that the club came 1st and 2nd in the last two seasons.  But the last time the club made a profit was 2006, and that was because of various special factors.  Loss is the order of the day.   So it looks like Milan must turn back to its youth academy which has stopped producing, and find some way to develop its stadium, which it doesn’t own, if it is to dig itself out of the mire and meet FFP requirements.

This is interesting because youth and stadium is where Arsenal have spent its money. and Arsenal’s contrast with Milan is striking.  Arsenal can and are marching forwards with their new marketing plans as the old marketing contracts start to run out.  Milan’s only option (get a better ground to raise their matchday income) is much tougher.

Portsmouth, a much smaller club, are much closer to the edge.  But they won the cup recently, and had Arry as a manager recently too.  Now bankruptcy looms, and unless the club can get rid of the rest of its players quickly, they are finished.  They would be removed from the Football League completely and would presumably do what other clubs do: reform, find a new ground, and enter somewhere around the Puma Engineering Hampshire Premier League along with AFC Aldermaston and the like.  Quite what the Football League will do about it, I don’t know – presumably just play one team short for this season, and then work out some extra promotions next year.

The problem though is the players.  If all the players go, then they presumably have to bring in youth players and free signings, and all that will do is make the lingering death more painful.

To take another example of problems: Rangers.  Rangers we’ve heard about so often – but the latest is worth mentioning.  Rangers won the league in 2009, 2010 and 2011 but have now been kicked  out of the league and re-admitted into the Third Division (actually the fourth tier).  They have accepted a ban on signing players for a year.  21 players have gone by my calculation (but I could be wrong) and they have 13 left.  I am not sure if all 13 want to play in the 3rd division, but even if they do, it is not really enough.

So presumably the rest will be youth players and loan players.

But it is not over yet.  There are still matters outstanding, in that the club is being investigated for cheating on its contracts – that is by giving the SFA one version of the contract and the player another version.   The club say they have been punished enough, but the SFA’s problem is that if this case of false contracts is proven, then some of the trophies that Rangers have won will have been won by cheating, and so presumably should be removed.  If the SFA do nothing, then the message is, cheating on contracts will not result in punishment – and that doesn’t work too well either.

Rangers protest – and would perhaps do the same as Juventus – that is to claim that they did win the various cups and leagues, and so continue to show them as having been won, even though they have been stripped of the titles and victories.  Bit messy really.

But the Rangers problem affects all Scottish football.  Celtic are asking their fans to buy season tickets despite the lack of Rangers in the league – which suggests to me (and as always I stress I am merely looking on from a distance) that they are selling fewer tickets than last season.

And what would happen, I wonder if Rangers, because of its shortage of players, didn’t actually get promotion this season?  OK that is perhaps too wild a thought, but a lot depends on how they get around the squad changes.  Everyone is assuming Rangers will recover and rise back to the top league because of the club’s massive support.  Maybe that’s true – but supposing they don’t.  Or supposing some serious oligarch sees this as the moment to buy up another SPL club and get it into a top two battle with Celtic.  Rangers might return and find they can’t automatically get back into a top two dogfight each year.

I’ve written all this about Milan, Portsmouth and Rangers because recently we did a series here on the billionaire clubs like PSG – and the way the billionaire model is spreading.  This is the other side of the same coin.

The fact is that if you look back a couple of seasons the notion of these events described above actually happening seemed impossible.  We were in a world in which there were doom mongers like me saying, “this is financial insanity” and reporting regularly on the Italian meltdown, but somehow nothing seemed to touch us and no one in Britain was much interested.  Arsenal were blamed for not spending to compete with Chelsea etc, and that was that.

And yet, and yet, this stuff is creeping closer and I am utterly certain there is more to come.

But also I am encouraged that more and more clubs do seem to be thinking that FFP is going to be serious, and in fact the only clubs ignoring FFP seem to be Chelsea, Man City, PSG and some of the Russian clubs.  Others are starting to move in the direction of the financial responsibility that has been associated with Arsenal since Henry Norris took over the club in 1910.

Which leaves us with two big problems: cheating and fraud.  Cheating on player registrations, cheating through fixing the refs, cheating through not paying taxes that are due and fraud through money laundering.   FFP is a step forwards, but is, I suspect, only a step.

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