Over to you, Arsene

1,794 comments June 8th, 2013

Ivan Gazidis takes a lot of stick from Arsenal fans. Our perceived lack of ambition is generally pinned on the multi-accented CEO, who is free of the emotional complications most reasonable fans still feel with regards to Arsene Wenger.

The refrain was heard frequently at the Emirates last year: “Ivan Gazidis, what do you do?”

In the light of this week’s extensive Q&A, I’d like to pose a response: what more can he do?

Gazidis’ primary duty has been to put the club on a secure financial footing. With the new commercial deals signed and settled, he has done that. It is not Gazidis’ responsibility to decide how that money is spent. It is Arsene’s.

Gazidis has been explicit. There are funds available. Big funds. Here are a few choice excerpts from Thursday’s mission statement:

“Could we spend £25m on a player and pay him £200k p/week? Of course we could do that. We could do more than that. We have a certain amount which we’ve held in reserve. We also have new revenue streams coming on board and all of these things mean we can do some things which would excite you.

The key to this summer is going to be making the right decisions without damaging the great team unity and spirit which we have – adding to that appropriately and I think we have the right person to do that in Arsene. I think he will make the right decisions and I think we will go into this next season with a lot of excitement around the team.

So certainly we will take a step forward this summer, how bigger step will depend on how well we are able to execute over the next month or two.”

It’s bold stuff. As a fan, it’s impossible not to be excited by Gazidis’ words. The financial landscape has shifted, and Arsenal have been raised aloft to join the likes of Bayern Munich and Manchester United.

Dreams become plausible. Before yesterday I would have dismissed the link to £20m Gonzalo Higuain as ‘pie in the sky’ stuff. Now, it’s tempting to believe we might just pull it off.

If there’s a nagging concern, it’s that Arsene may not be able to shake the shackles of a decade of prudence. Talk remains cheap. Arsenal are using the rhetoric of a super-club. Now they need to act like one, too.

A significant part of yesterday’s news was Gazidis’ allusion to a new contract for Arsene. Personally, I wouldn’t be in such a hurry to hand him a new deal. The final day euphoria has masked an otherwise disappointing season. The club’s trajectory is worrying. I’d have waited to see how Arsene fared this summer and in the first part of next season before broaching the subject a new contract.

Some will argue it’s vital to have a manager tied to a long-term deal to win over new signings. That’s nonsense. Robin van Persie joined Manchester United with no guarantees over Alex Ferguson’s future. Similarly, the players who come and go at Chelsea care little about the short-term tenancy agreements of the Stamford Bridge dugout.

In modern football, few players are a disciple to any one managerial messiah. Money and medals matter far more.

Perhaps Gazidis feels it’s important to present a united front. I can understand that, with a couple of caveats.

The first is that this contract must be breakable. Conventionally, a three year deal for Arsene means exactly that: three years. In his Arsenal career to date, it’s been explicitly clear he’d never be sacked and similarly that Wenger himself would never walk away from a contract.

With that in mind, if our downward trajectory continues, his signature could swiftly become a sentence. If Gazidis and Wenger agree a new medium-term contract, it must be on the understanding that it may have to be suddenly cut short if things don’t improve.

The second stipulation is that Gazidis and Wenger have already had a discussion about transfer targets in which the manager has show willingness to break a habit and actually spend what is available to him.

Gazidis has done his job. Player recruitment is Wenger’s bag.

Over to you, Arsene.

AGM: Angst, Grumbles and Moaning

1,158 comments October 26th, 2012

Before you read this piece, I highly recommend the excellent write-up of the AGM by Hayley Wright for Arseblog News.  It gives you all the relevant detail on the piece, and makes sense of everything that follows this.

We’ll never know now, but if Arsenal had gone in to this AGM on the back of two victories rather than two defeats, I suspect it would have been a rather different affair.  Not in terms of content: many of the points raised by the shareholders yesterday would remain valid.  I can’t help but feel, however, that the tone would have been rather different.  Reports of yesterday’s meeting sound more like a stroppy teenager questioning a belligerent parent than any kind of constructive debate.

In the rather catty dialogue, both parties are at fault.  The heckling and jeering from the supporters who were present simply does not help.  Nor does the patronising and dismissive tone employed by chairman Peter Hill-Wood.  By the end of yesterday’s events things seem to have taken on a pantomimic tone, and the result is a plethora of headlines about “revolt” and “restless natives”.

I think it is possible to ask probe and even pressurise, to drive at the heart of the matter, and ask the questions that sorely need to be asked without resorting to the bitter register adopted yesterday.  I think that a man standing up and asking how he is supposed to explain to his ten-year old son that Robin van Persie has left is adopting emotive language that adds little to the debate.  His ten year old son will cope.  There are plenty of men entering their forties now who survived Liam Brady’s departure for Juventus, and most of them seem to have escaped any lasting damage.

Whilst I don’t doubt that some of the fans present at the AGM are experts in football finance, I do feel that the majority of our fanbase seem very quick to forge opinions on the economic policy of our club without the necessary expertise to undertake such a role.  I would refer such fans to the Q&A with Tom Fox and Mark Gonella, our Head of Marketing and Head of Communications respectively.  From my unashamedly ill-informed perspective, this new team do seem to know what they’re doing.  Granted, their appointments could have come sooner, but it’s better late than never, and news of a forthcoming £25m kit deal with Adidas is evidence of the work they’re undertaking.

I have to say that as a rule I’m far more interested in events on the field of play.  It’s when economic matters impact upon our performance on the pitch that my interest is piqued.

In general, I’m a fan of the “self-sufficient model”.  It is not just admirable – if FFP does come in to play, it will swiftly become necessary.  However, I do understand some fans’ concerns that our penny-pinching is leading to stagnation.  The question has to be asked: Self-sufficiency is all very well, but what exactly are we sustaining?  A competitive team?  Not really.  The status of the club?  Barely.  We’re sustaining a very functional, very well run business.  We won’t be going under any time soon; everyone gets paid on time; debt is minimal.  But all the while we tick over, trophyless in fourth spot, our stock falls just a little.  Talismanic players continue to leave, and we’re perceived as a feeder club to Europe’s giants.

Arsene, of course, would argue that we’re not truly ‘trophyless’.  In an intriguing speech, he said:

“For me, there are five trophies – the first is to win the Premier League, the second is to win the Champions League, the third is to qualify for the Champions League, the fourth is to win the FA Cup and the fifth is to win the League Cup.

I say that because if you want to attract the best players, they do not ask: ‘did you win the League Cup?’, they ask you: ‘do you play in the Champions League?

I say that as well, because recently we had a meeting in Geneva about when a manager is in some situations, what does he do? For example, a guy came out with a problem. He said ‘I played the semi-final of the Europa League at home and three days later, I played the decisive game in the championship to qualify for the Champions League.

And I was thinking ‘what do I do?’ Do I go for the semi-final of the Europa League? Or do I go for the qualifier in the Champions League?’ And the whole meeting was about that decision.

What came out as a 90 per cent conclusion, is that all the managers said ‘if you take care of you, you go for the semi-final of the Europa League. If you take care of the club, you go for the Champions League position.’ And that’s what we do, always.”

It’s an interesting debate – one that’s almost too big to open within this blog.  In Arsene’s defence, I’ll say this: every so often, such as in the light of Wednesday’s defeat to Schalke, I’ll hear fans saying: “Maybe it’d be better if we didn’t qualify for the Champions League one year.  That’s shake things up at last; show the board.”

Let me tell you now: no good would come of such a thing.  Would you rather win the League Cup and miss out on the top four?  Really?  I’ll give you one last chance to rethink that before I hit you with this: that’s what Liverpool did last year.  It got Kenny Dalglish sacked.  It meant the players they bought in the summer were from clubs like Swansea and Heerenveen.  They missed out on a player from Fulham – to Spurs, of all people.  They currently sit 12th in the table.  It is not a recipe for success.

Top players want to play in the Champions League.  And we need to top players in order to win a trophy.  The problem we currently have is that there are three sides in Britain who are comfortably better than us.  No Arsenal player in his right mind would move to another club other than that Chelsea, United and City.  From this position, we need to move up once more in to those echelons, not down to join the Liverpools of this world.  I think we’re one disastrous season away from that happening, and it doesn’t bear thinking about.

To move up, of course, requires investment.  I still believe we have the right manager.  I still, just about, believe we have the right board.  But whichever of those two entities truly holds the purse strings (and my firm belief remains that the reluctance to spend comes primarily from Arsene) needs to loosen up a bit.  Cazorla and Podolski show you don’t have to spend crazy money to get quality players.

If the AGM had been a month or so ago, it might have been a very self-satisfied affair.  The new signings looked inspired, we were defensively solid, and being talked about as genuine contenders.  That AGM would have been misleading: it would have overlooked some of the crucial issues that it was essential to raise yesterday.  But by the same token, a couple of bad results shouldn’t cast an ugly light across the entire club.  Arsenal don’t need saving: they just need to get a bit better.  Starting tomorrow.

Pssssst.  I found a few (a very few) of these in a cupboard.  Half a dozen, to be precise.  If you missed out on them last time, grab yours quickly.  But don’t talk too loudly about it.  We wouldn’t want to jinx anything.

Gazidis speaks, and no news is probably bad news

761 comments June 6th, 2012

Arsenal’s multi-accented marvel of a Chief Executive, Ivan Gazidis, has given an in-depth and intriguing interview to Arsenal.com.  It is certainly worth a read.  There’s a glowing tribute to Pat Rice, a bit of insight in to our commercial activity, and a tubthumping message to the Arsenal fans about our prospects in 2012/13.

There is, most pressingly, a little bit about RVP.  It goes something like this:

“Robin sat down with us at the end of the season and we had a good discussion. What we agreed at that meeting was that we would keep all the discussions we had over the summer to ourselves and make announcements when it is the right time. We have to respect the fact we have agreed to keep that among ourselves. Robin is clearly focused on the Euros at the moment and we wish him well, and at the right time we will make the right announcements. But at the moment we are not saying anything.”

It’s hard to gleam much from that.  If your glass is half-full, you might read something in to Ivan’s use of the word ‘announcements’ – the only likely announcement of any kind would be that Robin has agreed a new deal.  If it’s half-empty then you might ask why, with the entire club in suspense and season ticket renewals still open, if you had something positive to say would you not just say it?  If Robin really does want to focus on the Euros, and knows he wants to stay at Arsenal, then surely having it signed, sealed and settled would only help him concentrate on the task in hand.

It’s very clear that he wants to keep his options open, and the longer he does so the slimmer our chances of retaining him become.  My opinion about what will happen with Van Persie changes as frequently as the engravings in Salomon Kalou’s hair, but at the moment I find it very hard to foresee him agreeing to a new deal.  Arsenal would then be left with the same choice they faced with Samir Nasri: keep him for a year but lose him on a free, or pocked £25m.  Possibly more.

There is, I suppose, the possibility that Robin is holding Arsenal to ransom, waiting to see how our transfer activity unfurls before committing.  However, he’s unlikely to see any seismic moves take place between now and the end of the European Championships.  Gazidis himself says:

“I think the way that the window will pan out is with some activity before the Euros, particularly with respect to the European players who are playing, the quieter period while the Euros are actually taking place and then a period of activity afterwards.”

So even in the best case scenario, we won’t have any resolution for months yet.  It is going to be a long old summer.

Gazidis will come under the microscope again at this evening’s AST Q&A.  I imagine he’ll mainly be repeating himself, but if any interesting tidbits come out of that I’ll try to let you know.


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