Saturday, July 2nd, 2011 « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. Supporting the Lord Wenger; coach of the decade
By Tony Attwood
For Arsenal to win the league this coming season we need four things to happen.
Quite obviously the team needs to play well. I know it is patently obvious, but sometimes I like the obvious. Equally obvious is that the under 10s say there’s no chance of that, and they are doing everything they can to undermine Arsenal, by scaring off potential in-comers through their stories about how every player at Arsenal is useless.
Which leads to the second point: we need to find some sort of way of dealing with under 10 element of the Arsenal support. Like the guys who say “I’m not racist but…” they churn out the “I don’t hate Wenger but…” stories, and it is having a strong effect. The Bergkamp in Italy story is a reminder of just how this sort of action can harm players – and we can see how it is making it less likely that players will re-sign for Arsenal or come to Arsenal.
The only way we can deal with these people is to expose the effects of their actions. Since the effects are wholly negative, they can be readily seen as the enemies of the club’s success, and we need to keep reminding anyone willing to listen that this is the case.
Third we need to beat the other top teams by 10 points or more in fair play, because there is no fair play. We are in the world of ref match fixing, so we need to compensate and do far better than our rivals in order to win the league. At least we know that the match fixers know we are watching them and will be highlighting each and every one of their awful decisions so there is a chance that matters won’t be quite so flagrant this coming season.
But there’s a fourth element that needs to be considered, and that’s what I want to focus on here. What we really need is for Uefa to show that they are seriously going to utilise the financial doping rules. Sadly however it looks like Uefa is backing off.
When Michel Platini launched his financial fair play initiative he said (amazingly) that Mr Abramovich of Chelsea had asked for it. He suggested that the benefactors like Mr A had asked him to control wage inflation. Otherwise they thought the big spenders would be stuck in an endless spiral.
This was a worrying sign, and that worry has been justified as on the eve of the new regs coming to pass Mr A spent £74m on Torres and David Luiz. Oh and £5m compensation for Carlo Ancelotti. And £13.3m to Porto for Andrés Villas-Boas. (That’s £739m since he came to power. Quite a lot really). And it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that there might be one or two more pounds spent before September 1. (I hear today that they want to buy Nasri).
The word from west London is that expenditure fits into the strategy created by Ron Gourlay: namely the club will break even next year, and will use the youth system to bring through new players. I could repeat that but it would be as odd looking second time round as it is the first. Just read it again. But sit down first, if you aren’t already. Oh and remember that “this year” was “this year” last year too. It just moves forward a year, each year.
There’s another issue. The Chelsea squad is getting old, and the wages bill is 82% of income. Yearly losses are still around £80m and could go a lot higher which put the club utterly outside of financial fair play.
One might have a little faith in the future of this project if Platini did not continue to say that the financial doping rules had already caused clubs to reduce their spending. You only have to look at the spending of Man U, Chelsea and Man City in the last nine months to know this is a bunch of turnips.
The fact is that I really had some hope for this arrangement up to about a year ago. Then we heard that Uefa had not, contrary to our hopes, put a big team of lawyers and accountants in place to handle the issue. It has been obvious from that moment that Uefa was never serious; can you imagine the legal and financial team Chelsea, Man C, and Man U will put together if anyone even begins to suggest they can’t play in the Champs League?
Although this coming season is the first one that counts for the records, no one is actually going to check the club accounts until the summer of 2013 and even then over the next two years the clubs can still make a loss of €45m. Of course Chelsea and the rest will struggle to meet that criteria, so edges are being smoothed down to help them.
First off, clubs can then ignore the wages of players signed or put on a new contract before June 2010.
Nevertheless Chelsea will get rid of some of their older players, and the question everyone is asking is (apart from the under 10s of course, for whom the concept is a little bit complex), what will this do to the value of players in general? A bit of a glut usually means a discount – which is another reason why a lot of transfers are being held up.
Chelsea has another problem: it has virtually no chance of increasing matchday income. No new stadium, the marketing has been huge already but to limited effect, and really there isn’t much else to do. There isn’t much sexy attraction to the club to bring in overseas supporters, and that “one in seven people in the world is a Chelsea supporter” as the club proclaimed two years ago, didn’t help them much. Man U has had worldwide support since before it was fashionable, just as Real Mad and Barca have. Arsenal gained it through their reputation from the 1930s and the attractive football we play. But Chelsea? Like Man C, a bit of a wasteland.
So, will we get financial fair play? Yes, the regs will come in. Will they have any effect. Not with this type of attitude from Uefa. Sadly, a great chance wasted.
Refs and scandals: the latest update
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