It is possible to beat teams like Man C and Chelsea. But it takes care and patience. « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. Supporting the Lord Wenger; coach of the decade

By Walter Broeckx

How depressing  to see teams win titles that are solely build on the money from the owner of the clubs is something that we have experienced the last weeks.

Manchester City, Chelsea…two clubs that have been spending money that is not theirs. And winning things that way. Their fans won’t mind it but the rest of the football world looks at it and shakes their head in sadness.  A sadness enhanced if they also play a park-the-bus kind of football. Indeed one of the greatest players of the world, Cruyff, was disgusted by the way Chelsea won the Champions League. And he surely would not have liked a Bayern victory because he dislikes Bayern. He said it was a sad day for football.

Where are the days that the league was won on the field? Those days have been left behind us for the past 8 or 9 years when Chelsea won the league after Abramovich opened his wallet and paid out more money each year than Chelsea could make in a few seasons on their own.  Since then the football world isn’t the same any more. Clubs put themselves in debt and became totally dependent of the goodwill of their owner. If the sheikh or the Russian owner has enough of it, those clubs are gone in a minute.

Some people will say: it will never happen, they are too big to fall. Tell that to a Glasgow Rangers supporter these days. And they didn’t even have a foreign sugar daddy who used it as his personal toy. Bad management and a belief that the money will come from somewhere, anywhere. And it does until you start selling the income from tickets for the next three years to pay for last year’s debts.

I don’t think I need to remind you that the Arsenal board is doing all it can to avoid such scenarios. Because the only certainty these scenarios give in the long run is that they bring uncertainty. Some will prefer this and take the cups in the short term success period. But a real supporter of the a club only wants the best in the long run. If that brings some titles great, if not we will have the certainty that in 10, 20, 30 years time we still will be able to support our club. Do the others have that certainty today? Maybe they forget this in the heat of the success but one day they will wake up in tears.

But with mad spending Chelsea won the CL, with mad spending Man City won the league, with mad spending Real Madrid won the league (it would have been the same with mad spending Barcelona if they would have won it), and so things look rather bleak for the others. People who want Arsenal to spend money we don’t have will say: see them, it is the only way to success now.

And yet there is hope for teams that want to work in a different way. Because this weekend Montpellier won the French league. They came in first before PSG. PSG, the French version of Chelsea or Manchester City.  In French terms they had spend an enormous amount of money on new players to bring the title back to Paris. But they failed.

The little club Montpellier won the league and that was the first time in their history.  They had won the French cup in 1990 or somewhere around that period. And in those days the president of the club tried to buy a few big names. But it all ended in tears and relegation a bit later. And then he vowed to work in another way. The sensible way of only spending what you got. And now they have beaten PSG for the title on a budget of only £29M.

If you only think of the fact that last summer PSG spent £37M on one player (Pastore) you can get the picture. The biggest money spent by Montpellier was £1,7M two years ago on Giroud. I think this makes it clear that on paper Montpellier had no chance at all to win the league. Let alone come close.

And yet they did it. The small town team beat the big city team. The small money team beat the big money team.  So it can be done. And this is why this victory of Montpellier is a beacon of light in the football world. One to treasure. It brings hope to all the other teams who are living within their means. Hope for teams like Arsenal also.

Of course Montpellier only had to beat one big money team. Arsenal has to face at least 2 of them. So it is a bit more difficult. And I don’t know about the refs in France but maybe they are a bit more even when they do their games, compared to the PL where the most attacking team in the league doesn’t get a penalty at home for more than one year. You know such little details could be helpful when it come to winning a league.

The most important lesson we could learn is that if all people who are part of the project believe in it, you can move a mountain (as the idiom goes in Dutch) [and almost the same in English – Tony]. So let us take the example of Montpellier and believe in what we do at Arsenal. The good guys can win if we would all support our club and give our support to the ones who have to do it on the field.

Or are we just going to sit on the ground and start crying before it even starts? Last season after 7 games nobody believed in Arsenal ending in 3rd position. And yet we did it.  We did it because the players believed they could do it. Maybe if all would believe in it, anything can happen.