That would never happen at Arsenal « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. Supporting the Lord Wenger; coach of the decade

By Tony Attwood

Earlier this season I read that when one combines his football club salary, with his promotional earnings and his non-football income, Messi earns around £576,000 a week – which is just a little under £30m a year, and quite a bit more than I earn.

At the same time there is the fact that even with all that talent, and having poached Cesc from us, Barca couldn’t actually win the league.

I was pondering this point when I noted that yesterday play had to be briefly during Blackburn’s defeat to Wigan when a chicken has thrown on to the pitch – a variant on the recent Spanish approach which involves throwing tennis balls on the pitch.

Then there is the fact that after years of Arsenal being threatened with a mass exodus of players because we don’t win things, we are now being told that players who we maybe don’t want are coming back from loan.  We are in fact going to have too many players next season.  Now it seems it is the Tottenham players who are saying that they are leaving if the club doesn’t enter the Champs League.

Bale has been in the limelight for this for a while, and now Assou-Ekotto says that unless he personally approves of the size of the Tinies transfer budget he will leave.

According to one paper the comments will  “spark further fears of a summer exodus of key players” at Tottenham, which makes a change.

Personally I don’t believe 99% of all this stuff.  Of course players leave – largely because they want money, their agents want money, and they think they will be indispensable in the team they are going on.   But I did like Assou-Ekotto’s supposed reported comments on Arry:

“When I met my chairman last January, he told me that if a club bigger than Tottenham came for me, the club would not necessarily be against a departure. With my chairman, there was a gentlemen’s agreement. As he is a man of his word, I hope it will make things easier if a great club comes in.”

Luka Modric also earlier claimed that he had a “gentlemen’s agreement” with Levy when he signed an extension to his contract. Modric said he had had an “open chat with Levy that if a bigger club came in with a concrete offer we would consider it and agree the best solution for all concerned”.

So maybe Tottenham face a summer of the “Gentleman’s Agreement”.

Which is exactly what they don’t seem to have at Blackburn.  Having carelessly got themselves relegated they have had a supposed letter from the deputy CEO to the owner last December, published.

It starts

“Madam,

“I have been your senior officer at the club for 6 months now and I feel that I must now write to you to ask you to make some significant changes to save the club, perhaps from relegation but also perhaps from administration….

It loses its way a bit when the first point of the ten point plan is a requirement that the writer is promoted to CEO.  He also asks for investment of £10m (or four months of Messi’s earnings), which seems modest.

But still, tucked away within this letter is this rather telling piece…

“You may also be aware that HMRC (tax authorities) have been chasing Portsmouth Football Club for a debt they owe. HMRC have made a technical mistake in law and therefore cannot claim the money they are owed. They will make sure of course that the next football club that falls out of line, won’t be so lucky. We need to make sure that this club is not Blackburn Rovers.”

Which is rather interesting given the propensity for clubs to go bust.

The rest of the demands are the usual stuff – no press releases without the top people at the club knowing about them, owners to come to matches, top club execs to be able to visit the owners in India every couple of months, the right of the executive team to hire and fire…  And the point of it all is that these things which you would consider to be normal good practice is any firm are not happening.  The chicken lady has bought her club… and then seemingly lost interest.

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But if that all looks like doom and gloom, consider Rangers.  A year ago it looked a right sorry mess but somehow many of us (including me) imagined that it would be resolved in the normal sort of way.  A fudge, a fiddle, a shedload of cash suddenly turning up, a possible addition of money launderers looking for a new location to move their ill-gotten gains around and off we go again – until next time.

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And up until a few days ago it still looked like that.  But then suddenly the preferred bidder, American Bill Miller, withdrew his offer to buy the club having done his due diligence.   He blamed the administrators and the supporters, and walked away.

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The administrators still say they can find a buyer, but there are also still three unknowns hanging over Rangers:

• What league will they play in next season?
• Will there be any points deductions?
• Will they be allowed to buy in any players?

We already know Rangers will not be in Europe next season and will lose many of their best players as that is part of the deal that allowed the administrators to keep the club going.  The players accepted a pay cut, in return for low cost transfers out this summer.  The future is far from secure (which makes the chants of some Rangers’ fans against the American bidders to seem particularly interesting).

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And to take in just one other club that has had an interesting season, consider Liverpool.  I suppose those Arsenal fans who complain that everything is awful because we have not won a trophy for seven years will find Liverpool’s season rather fine, as they have won a trophy, but I am not sure either their transfer policy or their league record gives that much hope for the future.

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And yet they have the fans’ manager of choice sitting in the hot seat.  The hated past owners have gone, the unliked previous manager has gone, and the even more unliked one before that has gone, and they have their trophy.  But I am not sure that if I were a season ticket holder at Anfield rather than the Ems I would have enjoyed six home wins this season.

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I suppose it is these things that define my thinking on football this year.  A takeover by outsiders (Rangers, Blackburn), the manager that the fans want (Liverpool), spending loads and loads of money on players (Liverpool again), loads and loads of transfer dealings but with players now saying they want to leave (Tottenham) – these are all techniques that have been advocated for Arsenal.

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The journey from winning a famous old trophy, to the lower leagues, is painful but can be relatively short, as Portsmouth have found out.   I put this to a friend who does advocate that new money should be pumped into Arsenal very quickly and that a change of ownership was the key to everything.  I suggested that sometimes, as at Rangers, money is not quite what it seems, and not quite where it seems, and that new owners, like new managers, don’t always deliver.

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“Oh,” he said, “you’re just in a doom and gloom mood.  That would never happen at Arsenal.”

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PS: I finished this article and showed it to my mate, and he made an interesting reply.  “You missed out Villa,” he said.  “Four home wins all season, 36 goals in 36 games, lowest points total in the Premier League ever, poor form endlessly blamed on injuries and youth, seven wins all season.   And this from a club that under Martin O’Neill, Villa finished sixth for three seasons in a row.”

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