Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. Supporting the Lord Wenger in all he does » Youth projects, failures and Arsenal

by Walter Broeckx

Yes this is Untold Arsenal but to start this article I will have to turn your eyes to one our rivals in London as Ajax will loan their Serbian striker Miralem Sulejmani out for one season and give him to West Ham United. A fairly modest headline in the transfer period. The fact that West Hame is taking him on loan is yet another indication that there is not much money around by most of the EPL teams.  There is not much movement in the transfer market and apart from City who doesn’t need to care about money the other teams are not buying like mad. No real big super stars coming in for the moment.

But this loan-transfer is somewhat important and could teach us a lesson.

Ajax is certainly for those who followed football since the seventies a name that rings a bell. It was a team that with Johan Cruyff had not only one of the best players in the world in those days but also a team that was built on an new and fresh style with attacking football and based on skill. And most importantly it was built on their own youth. For years Ajax showed the world how you have to educate young players in a certain style and play the same tactics from the youth teams up to the first team.

They had great players and they formed the foundations on which Holland played and lost unfortunately, two world cup finals against both the host teams Germany and Argentina.

Ever since that period Ajax has developed great players and some of the best in the world. Our own Dennis Bergkamp was one of them. Van Basten another all time great. Rijkaard, De Boer, just to name a few but there are many, many more starting from the seventies. But the most important thing was that whenever one of the big names left another youthful player was standing ready to fill the gap.   

Don’t worry I will link this with Arsenal in a moment. Back to Sulejmani. He is a Serbian striker and international  and he was a player for whom Ajax paid 16,5M euro in 2008 to buy him from Heerenveen. He was the most expensive player ever bought by Ajax in their entire history. He was very untypical Ajax that still is relying on their youth program for most of their players. But somehow in 2008 Ajax felt the need to act like the big boys and pay lots of money for a player.

16,5M euro in the Dutch league is an enormous amount of money. I think you could compare this with the double in the EPL. But Ajax did it and the result was that in the two years he played for Ajax he never lived up to this amount of money that was paid for him.  In total he played 68 games for Ajax and he only scored 10 goals.  You could say that each goal cost Ajax more than 1,5M euro.

But now Ajax decided to let him go on loan. In a way it is like admitting failure. It is saying: Well, after all he wasn’t worth the money. We made a mistake.” To make things worse Ajax have had some bad financial results over the past years. They are losing a lot of money (some 30M euro last season) and they are having trouble to keep their head above water. And that for a team that was known all over the world for the good education they give their youth, just look at Vermaelen.

Maybe Ajax will return to the way they have operated in the last 40 years or so and will  be looking more to bring in their own youthful players and give them the chance to become good and not the highly paid for player who doesn’t deliver.  And by doing this they could be hoping to have better financial results in the future.

So what is the link with Arsenal the impatient reader will be asking himself. We could learn a few things from this. The first thing  we can learn from this is:  demanding the manager and the board to break transfer records is not a certain guarantee for success. They did not win the league with buying Sulejmani.

Another thing is that you can never be sure that a player is a success or not. In this case Sulejmanin had played two years before in the Dutch league so he was familiar with the league, everybody knew him, he didn’t have to adapt to the league and still he failed. 

Another thing is that Ajax is suffering one of its biggest, if not the biggest, financial crisis in their existence.  How long they can survive is in doubt. If they don’t qualify for the champions league they could be in very big trouble in the near future. Is it a coincidence that they suffer this crisis shortly after paying the biggest amount of money ever for a player?

Am I saying that we shouldn’t buy any players? NO. I’m not against us buying players. But what I’m not doing is to start crying and order Arsenal to buy players and to splash the money around. No I am asking to be very careful with spending the money. There is an old idiom in Dutch which is saying that you can only spend your money once. Once you have spend it, it is gone.

So once again I underline that I am not against us buying players.  But those thinking that if we spend 50 million in one transfer window and all our troubles would be gone are believing in fairy tales. It could go terribly wrong. And what then?

So I just trust the people who are working on the transfers at Arsenal.  They look at players for more than 1 minute on a you tube compilation, on which even I could look great. No forget this, I wouldn’t look great not even in a 7 second you tube clip. Oyr scouts will see if a player not only has the required technical skills but also the right mentality to play for us and to blend in the team. The management has to see if he is affordable and worth taking the risk.

So let us not pretend to know who to buy and at what price a player is available. The numbers mentioned in the papers is just what it is, paper talk to fill up the “Cesc is going to Barceloanus” gap.

And let us take a look at Ajax to finish this article and remember that their biggest success was in the periods when they almost completely trusted their own youth system. And then look at our own youth system and look at the fact that 3 players who had a big part of their education at Arsenal have just become internationals for England. Two of them almost learned everything at Arsenal.  Why don’t we give them the chance to become better. A chance that could be lost when we buy player X, player Y or player Z for a record breaking amount of money. And with those 2 or 3  at the start of their Arsenal career AND an international career how can anyone dare saying that our project youth has failed.

Like we have said over here on a few occasions before: it is only just starting!