Wednesday, November 16th, 2011 « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. Supporting the Lord Wenger; coach of the decade

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“Making the Arsenal” – the book of Arsenal’s rebirth

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By Tony Attwood

If there is a man in football who seems to love his club and be doing all he can for it, it must be Bill Kenwright, who appears to have been pouring money into Everton year on year, with never a sniff of a profit or a return of his investment except for the year that Rooney was sold.

Yet he is now being hounded by Everton’s version of the AAA (the AEE I suppose) with the suggestion that he is making it impossible for the club to be sold.  Protest marches are held – they probably put up big boards criticising him as well.

The argument from the fans quite simply is that too much is being demanded for the club, and that is stopping buyers coming forwards.

There’s been talk that Jain, the Indian company, wants to buy, but nothing much more has emerged.  The owners of the club however say they are talking to others, but the issue is not money but finding the right buyer.

The problem for the fans is that Everton is a selling club (Mikel Arteta, Jermaine Beckford and Ayegbeni Yakubu) with few youth players coming through either to be sold on elsewhere for a nice fee when they make it, or to play in the first team as they mature.   So their purchases are loan signings and free agents as the bank won’t lend them anything to buy a big name.  Besides, big names go to big clubs, and Everton isn’t that big any more.

The debt is around £45m – far less than Arsenal’s and secured by the ground – but the biggest problem is the ground.  Arsenal’s debt is secured by a new ground which can still be argued as the best the country. Everton’s by an ancient millstone.

According to the club 85% of income goes on the training ground and academy, paying the players, the coaches, the scouts, the support teams, team travel and accommodation along with rent and other overheads.

The other 15p in the £1 funds everything else.   Which means there isn’t much else.

Worse, earlier this year Everton’s bankers (those vampires at Barclays) started to pull the club in.  They  reduced the overdraft facility, which meant no more buys.  They did manage to sell the old training ground for £9m after a total cock up in terms of failed planning permission and untold PR disasters in terms of rows with elected council members.  Barclays took the money to reduce the debts; Everton saw not a penny.

So it is another club in which effectively the bank decides who one can buy, and as we reported in an earlier review, the club is even suffering from hoax buyers claiming to represent everything from ICI to oil billionaires and wanting to buy the club.

The problem is Everton is a middle of the road club these days, and wants to be more.  But to get up higher the club needs either a new model of trading (as Mr Wenger introduced when he came in and transformed the old squad with new diets, and new players largely unknown in England, brought in from Europe), or a huge new investment (like Manchester City or Chelsea).  Indeed Mr Kenwright has said that the people who bought Man City could have bought Everton, if only Everton had had a decent stadium.

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So the Kenwright out movement grows.  From having rescued the club from nowhere-land (note the clever Beatles reference) in 2000, and having been inducted into  Everton’s Hall of Fame in 2009, and having endlessly been praised for bringing David Moyes to the club and allowing him to run the team, the fans (or some of them) want him out.

The Anti-Everton Everton now criticise the rest of the board, just as the Anti-Arsenal Arsenal do at the Ems – the only difference in fact is that AEE like their manager, AAA hate everyone except David Dein.   They say that in criticising the chairman who funds the club they have the best interests of the club at heart.  They say that Everton has become a soap opera, and blame everyone for the fact that new investors come along and vanish – without taking into account that most of them are media inventions, created to fill a few pages.

They have a go at Keith Harris who was brought in to find a buyer and can’t, and they are angry that money from transfers is going into Barclays not into purchases.

Probably what kicked the whole thing over the edge was… well, us.  Arsenal.  We got Arteta – and what a bloody good purchase that has turned out to be for us, stabilising a part of the team which had lost three world class players (although at least one of them is coming back next year, and a second one has shown that his promise was more than promise).

Everton fans know that Arteta can, on occasion, turn a game even when surrounded by ordinary players.  Now with good team around him, he is shining far more than he could ever do at Everton.

The trouble is (and this is where I sympathise with Everton supporters who have turned on the owner) that there is nowhere to go.  The ground is worthless in terms of redevelopment, the banks will show no mercy – because they are run by bankers not by people, and no one wants to buy a club that doesn’t have much success at the moment, and still needs a ground.

When there’s nowhere to go, all you can do is blame everyone else.  It doesn’t make it better, but shouting a lot is at least a viable alternative to drinking too much.

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