Friday, June 8th, 2012 « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. Supporting the Lord Wenger; coach of the decade

By Tony Attwood

The question is: how far would you support your club in return for trophies.

Some supporters have in the past drawn the line and said, this far and no further.   The group that set up FC United of Manchester, now in the Northern Premier League, were one example of a group so alienated by the activity of their club – Manchester United – that they went off and did their own thing.

Supporters of Wimbledon drew the line when the club was moved to Milton Keynes and so they formed AFC Wimbledon – which is now in League Two (the 4th division) having worked its way up.

Supporters of Cardiff are having to decide if being changed to red and white is beyond the pale or whether the promise of a debt free club with a big transfer budget means that the colour of the shirt is of no matter.

It is, as I say, all a question of drawing the line.

John Beech of the excellent Football Management blog recently put it very clearly:

“What is happening at Cardiff is little short of seeing owners who view a club as a commodity which can have some brand value spray-painted onto it to make it stand out from the rest.  A simple question to Dato Chan Tien Ghee [the owner]– if the key to your success lies in owning a red club, why didn’t you buy a red one?  If the answer is simply ‘Well, Peter hadn’t got a red one in his briefcase to show us’, God preserve us.

“Others have tried this drastic rebranding, with some commercial success.  An obvious example is that of SV Austria Salzburg, which Red Bull bought and rebranded as FC Red Bull Salzburg in 2005, complete with change in club colours and logo.  The new club has enjoyed considerable success since the takeover, but the old club had also, and that is where the comparison begins to break down.  Red Bull bought an already successful club and turned it into an even more successful one.  But in doing so they alienated fans to such an extent they started a new club, which they called SV Austria Salzburg, and which has already climbed, Wimbledon and FC United of Manchester style, from the seventh tier of the Austrian football pyramid to the third tier.

“I’ll leave my final thought to the SV Austria Salzburg fans who are reported as having raised this banner in the past few days.”

(Do click on that banner – it is really worth seeing).

While I was writing the book “Making the Arsenal” about Woolwich Arsenal FC in 1910 I asked myself this question: if I had been a fan living in Plumstead, seeing my club sink away from its high spots a few years before, and knowing that we were about to go bust, would I have supported Henry Norris as the new chairman?

Norris paid all the debts, but didn’t invest a fortune in new players.  And he did make proposals to the effect that Arsenal should move to, or even merge with Fulham.   After dropping those ideas following resistance from the existing board and from the League, he gave the assurance that the club would stay in Woolwich for a year.  Later he extended that, and Arsenal spent 3 years more in the area, before moving to Highbury in 1913.

Now, what would I have thought had I been there?  Would I have withdrawn my support in protest at the arrival of Henry Norris?  Would I have given up football totally?  Would I have moved over to arch-rivals Millwall?  Or would I have followed Arsenal to Islington – even though the journey was a bit of a bugger.

I would like to think I would have gone whenever possible to the new ground, especially as, although the club were relegated at the end of their tenure at Plumstead, they did well in their two years in the second division.  I wouldn’t have objected to the changing of the name from Woolwich Arsenal to The Arsenal, either.

And with Arsenal today?  What if Mr Very-Rich comes along and says, “£100m transfer budget every year?  No problem!” and then we find out that plan A involves making us play in black and white, what then?  Would I keep my season ticket, or would I resign that seat in block 99?  Or if he said, “Arsenal is not the right name – I am in the power generating business, not armaments, so we’ll call the club Power Arsenal.

I think I would leave, and the comparison between Henry Norris in 1910 and Mr Very-Rich now is instructive.  What Norris did was rescue a failing club.  He determined that moving to north London was fundamental to the long term survival of the club, and so he delivered on that.    But the changing of colours, as in the case of Cardiff, and the changing of the name as with SV Austria Salzburg, is nothing to do with the good of the club.  It is to do with corporate whims.  That’s the difference.

But there is more.  There is the question: what happens if Mr Very-Rich gets up and goes away?  Or worse, turns out to be a crook.  That then is the problem.   Rangers, let us not forget, were incredibly successful in Scotland, winning the league nine times in a row, among other things.  Portsmouth won the FA Cup in England.  And now both are… well, in a mess.

That’s why I feel we need to tread very carefully when it comes to considering rich people investing in clubs as benefactors rather than shareholders.

Part of my worry is the speed at which football is changing and new benefactor owners are coming through.  We have looked at quite a few in earlier articles, here are some more.

Getafe   In April 2011 by Royal Emirates Group for around £80m ^]

Real Santander.  In January 2011 bought by Ahsan Ali Syed, an Indian business tycoon and went through three different managers last season.

TSG 1899 Hoffenheim.   A fifth division side in 2000, the was bought by Dietmar Hopp and reached the top division by 2008.     And for a moment let’s pause here.

Dietmar Hopp transformed a local amateur club into a top Bundesliga club, but not everyone is happy with this.  There is no history, no fan base, and bizarrely the club is from a village with 3,300 inhabitants.  In this regard it challenges the myth put about that German clubs are all owned by the fans and financed “properly”.  Wolfsburg and Bayer Leverkusen receive financial support from corporations (Wolfsburg from VW and Leverkusen from the drugs company Bayer.

We could go on…

Spartak Moscow has a chairman (Leonid Fedun) seemingly worth $7.1 Billion (although they have not won the league since 2001.

In fact once we are into Russia we can see the way the whole thing can get out of control.  A whole group of very rich people and companies owning the clubs (Dinamo Moscow, Lokomotiv Moscow….)

In the Ukraine there is FC Metalist Kharkiv, owned by Oleksandr Yaroslavsky and Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk owned by Andriy Stetsenko.

There are so many clubs like this, and all the time we have the thought: only one club per country can win the league, only one in Europe can win the Champions League.  And yet sometimes there are several mega-rich clubs per country.  What do they do when they don’t win the league because another mega-rich man has done it?

Or worse, what if it is all just a game, rather than a tribe and a passion.  Look at the interestingly name Arsenal Kyiv.

In May 2007, because of their financial problems they were going to be relegated.  Then Vadim Rabinovich took them over and started paying for the transfers etc.  Then in January 2009 Leonid Chernovetskyi bought Arsenal Kyiv for about 50p.  Chernovetskiy’s son Stepan became the club’s president.  In 2010 Rabynovich bought the club back.  Apparently young Stepan wasn’t doing very well.  So it goes…

My points are

a) In some cases it is a rich man’s game – and you never quite know when they will get tired of the game.

b) In some cases it is a marketing ploy, in which case there has to be a limit somewhere as to how many changes to tradition you can take.

c) In some cases it involves corruption, like Rangers, and I suspect, Portsmouth

And above all, nothing in this game is stable.   Maybe that is the biggest point.  An Arsenal built on solid foundations, as I believe the club is at the moment, will survive the end of Mr Wenger, the sale of shares by Mr Kronke, and so on, just as it has survived such changes before.  Just as it survived the banishment from football of Sir Henry Norris for selling the club coach and putting the £150 in his pocket, because Sir Henry had spent his money building a self-sustaining football club.

But a club which is morbidly dependent on the annual financial input of the benefactor, or is dependent (as Rangers was) on no one tumbling the fact that there was something very dodgy going on in the way players and managers were paid, is a big, big risk.

And that’s why I tend towards supporting the self-sustaining model, even if it means I don’t get another Unbeaten Season, or even another League win in my time.  I will know that the club that has been at the heart of my life ever since I can remember will be there for my grandchildren.

And somehow that’s rather important to me.

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This article is the end of the series on the billionaires.  If you have any ideas for topics we might look at, or indeed you might like to write something yourself, please do write to Tony.Attwood@aisa.org

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