WENGER OUT

[TF S4DK]

Spend some f****** money!” Arsenal fans chanted as their team lost again last Sunday at Chelsea. The cry echoed around the world on Twitter. Its target, Arsenal’s manager Arsène Wenger, had heard the argument before.

 

Wenger, now 63, arrived at Arsenal in 1996 and led the club for eight glorious seasons. He has since led them for eight inglorious ones. Arsenal have won no trophies since 2005, and now stand a miserable sixth in the Premier League. The Frenchman is becoming a figure of derision. Many fans complain that Wenger refuses to buy the expensive players who could compete with Chelsea, Manchester United, or Barcelona, even though Arsenal have £153.6m in cash, an unheard-of sum for a football club. (Management firm Deloitte estimated last year that Premier League clubs had cumulative debts of £2.4bn.) Supporters are urging him to buy before the winter “transfer window” closes on Thursday. He stands accused of practising football’s version of austerity – at a club that looks a model of financial good health.

 

Wenger and Arsenal retort that the football economy is a bubble: clubs are spending beyond their means and risking collapse. The argument is at bottom one about the football business. Has Wenger, almost the only actual economist in football, called the football economy right? Will Arsenal’s prudence finally pay off one day?

 

Wenger was born in the Alsace in 1948, three years after France retook the region from Germany. His parents ran a café in tiny Duttlenheim. Today Wenger appears upright, tense and often angry in public but when I hosted him at a sponsors’ evening years ago, I found that in private he became a jolly mime and raconteur. Those café skills obviously ran deep.

 

Wenger, who graduated in economics at Strasbourg University in 1971, has a mathematician’s brain. The subject taught him about valuations and the importance of data. To other managers, £15m might be simply “a big number”, but not to Wenger. When he weighs up potential signings, he judges like an economist pricing assets as much as like a coach seeking quick wins.

 

Wenger is taking such abuse now partly because, in his first seasons in London, he set the bar so high. He transformed Neanderthal English football. He ditched Arsenal’s traditional prematch meal of baked beans and Coca-Cola. He used stats to track, for instance, after how many minutes a player lost speed and needed substituting. Crucially, he knew football globally. English football in the 1990s was so insular (indeed xenophobic) that many managers didn’t even watch World Cups.

 

In this world Wenger was bound to triumph. It just so happened that the best young footballers then were French. Wenger had the pick of them. Stars such as Patrick Vieira, Thierry Henry, Robert Pires and others turned the club long nicknamed “Boring, Boring Arsenal” into the best and most exciting in England. Wenger’s scouts were everywhere and he bought cheap. The total he paid for Henry, Vieira and Pires was less than the £23m he received from Real Madrid for a troubled young French teenager, Nicolas Anelka. It was David Dein, Arsenal’s then vice-chairman and the man behind Wenger’s appointment as manager, who negotiated the transfer fees and salaries, and if he wanted to pay a few pounds more than the stringent Wenger thought fair, he would pay it. Dein, a former sugar trader, had shown his eye for a chance in 1983 when he bought 17 per cent of Arsenal for just £292,000.

 

 

In 2004, Wenger’s “Invincibles” – perhaps the best English team ever – became English champions without losing a match. It was their third championship in seven seasons, even though rivals Manchester United were much richer. Then the Invincibles lost at United in October 2004 and nothing has been quite the same since.

 

By then, football was already changing. A Russian oligarch named Roman Abramovich had bought Chelsea and begun spending fortunes on players. But the change didn’t merely involve money: everyone in England had copied Wenger. The pioneer was falling victim to catch-up.

 

Abramovich’s Chelsea began winning titles. Wenger hated the idea that some random sugar daddy could buy himself a championship, as if it were a holiday villa. He complained that Chelsea were using “economic doping, because their resources were artificial”. Wenger appears to share the widespread French suspicion of rootless international capital.

 

In those years he either made or went along with two fundamental decisions: one, Arsenal would build a big new stadium to boost revenues. Two, Arsenal would remain financially conservative. They wouldn’t spend riskily. These are the hallmark policies of the latter Wenger years.

 

The Emirates Stadium opened in 2006. Mostly, it has worked out: the 60,000 seats sell out almost every match, for the largest regular crowd in London’s football history (the old ground, Highbury, held 38,000). Arsenal’s ticket prices are the highest in English, and probably global, football, with this year’s cheapest season tickets costing £985. Consequently, Arsenal now earn £3.3m per home match, about double the amount of their London rivals Spurs. Their total revenues last season were £243m, sixth in European football.

 

And yet moving stadiums was scary. Most of the £430m required was borrowed. Suddenly, this most conservative English club was drowning in debt. Things got scarier when the financial crisis hit in 2008, just as Arsenal were raising revenue by selling converted flats at their old Highbury stadium. Every season, Wenger had to sell players partly to pay off the Emirates mortgage.

 

With hindsight, Wenger’s cautious spending policy was predictable. It’s his nature. Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland A’s baseball team and hero of the book and film Moneyball, told me in 2010: “When I think of Wenger, I think of Warren Buffett. Wenger runs his football club like he is going to own the club for 100 years.” The wilder side of Wenger’s nature was Dein, but he left Arsenal amid board ructions in 2007 and, since then, Wenger has been freer to be himself. That has often entailed refusing to sign a player who cost a touch more than Wenger’s own valuation.

 

Austerity is in Arsenal’s culture. Once known as the Bank of England club, it has been cautiously run for decades. That tradition must have attracted the current majority owner, the American Stan Kroenke, who treats sports clubs as serious businesses. Ivan Gazidis, Arsenal’s quiet-spoken chief executive, son of a South African anti-apartheid and anti-HIV activist and doctor, told me last week: “We don’t spend more than we have. In football that is seen as conservative. That tells you a little bit about the environment we’re in.” Arsenal’s “policy of sustainability,” Gazidis adds, “should be familiar to more people given the economic state of the world, but football has continued to be a little bit of a bubble.”

 

In fact, the environment of overspending rivals probably only encouraged Wenger’s caution. Many pundits have long forecast a great reckoning, of football clubs ceasing to exist when they couldn’t pay their debts – especially after the financial crisis hit and even some big banks went under. Michel Platini, president of the European football association Uefa, said in 2009: “If this situation goes on, it will not be long before even some major clubs face going out of business.” Stefan Szymanski, economics professor at the University of Michigan, with whom I co-wrote the book Soccernomics, suggests now that Arsenal were waiting for the moment when prices collapsed and they could snap up great players on the cheap.

 

But that moment never came. It turned out that football clubs weren’t like normal businesses. In normal business, if you rack up unpayable debts, you close down. However, football clubs rack up unpayable debts and live. No English club has folded for good since tiny Wigan Borough during the Great Depression in 1931. All the rest survived the Depression, the second world war, recessions, corrupt chairmen, appalling managers and now the financial crisis. It’s a history of remarkable stability.

 

True, smaller British clubs are forever going insolvent (though the only Premier League club ever to do so was Portsmouth in 2010) but then they do deals with their creditors, usually repay a small fraction of debt, and march on. No creditor or bank manager wants to kill off a beloved ancient institution. And, anyway, at bottom a club is just a name. If the club’s holding company folds, a new limited company is simply created using the old club name, and the club marches on. Football clubs survive even when they go bust. That’s pretty sustainable. Asked if he expected clubs to start disappearing, Gazidis says: “I don’t see an immediate prospect of that, especially in England.”

 

Against such a backdrop, Arsenal’s cautious spending seems exaggerated. If the club thought that big football clubs were as vulnerable as other profligate businesses, it was wrong. Clearly it shouldn’t have copied Leeds United, which amassed a particularly spectacular debt mountain that eventually required the sale of almost Leeds’ entire team and ended in a fall to the third tier of English football. However, Arsenal chose the other extreme. The “Swiss Rambler”, a British financial professional based in Switzerland who runs a respected blog on football finance, calculates that since 2007 the club has made total profits of £195m, of which £178m has come from selling players. On his blog, he estimates: “Arsenal could safely spend £50m to £60m from cash resources.” That itself might not dislodge the two Manchester clubs – “Although the stadium took us forward, it didn’t take us forward far enough,” says Gazidis – but such spending could get Arsenal closer.

 

Red and White Holdings, which represents Alisher Usmanov, an Uzbek-born oligarch ranked by Forbes as Russia’s richest man, and Farhad Moshiri, Usmanov’s British-Iranian business partner, who own nearly 30 per cent of Arsenal’s shares between them, also wants the club to spend more.

 

Arsenal’s wage costs have risen sharply in recent years and last year reached £143.4m, or 61 per cent of turnover. Gazidis thinks spending a bigger slice of turnover on wages would be to enter “dangerous territory”. But the Premier League’s average wages-to-turnover ratio is 70 per cent. And Manchester City, Chelsea, and Manchester United pay comfortably higher wages than Arsenal. (Manchester City spent 114 per cent of its revenues on pay in 2010/2011.)

 

Separately from economics, Wenger made another fundamental misjudgment. He dreamt of building a team produced in Arsenal’s youth academy, rather than bought as adult stars. This is another truth of football: it’s almost impossible to predict whether a great untried teenager will make a great adult footballer. Only once a teenager has achieved success in actual professional football – as did Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney or Gareth Bale – can you know he is the real thing, and by then richer clubs than Arsenal will be chasing him.

 

Some think a prince is now riding in to prove Wenger’s conservative strategy right after all: “financial fair play”, as Uefa’s new policy is called. It essentially requires European clubs to stop spending more money than they have. The Premier League is considering similar rules for England. The European FFP “rules” are full of loopholes and, even when they take full effect in 2018, may not require clubs to break even but FFP does already seem to be limiting clubs’ spending slightly. Spending on transfers by Premier League clubs dropped 23 per cent from 2011 to 2012 to £550m, says Deloitte.

 

But it is unlikely that FFP will transform football. More probably, says Szymanski, clubs and Uefa will both give a bit. Uefa’s main concern will be to stop penniless clubs becoming insolvent. Clubs with sugar daddies, such as Chelsea and Manchester City, who face less risk, may be cut more slack. In any case, some clubs are already finding ways around FFP. City have signed a 10-year deal believed to be worth £350m with Etihad Airways for stadium naming rights and shirt sponsorship – a flabbergasting sum.

 

Critics note that Etihad, like City’s owners, comes from Abu Dhabi. They question whether the deal allows City to inject money from an outside well-wisher despite the FFP restrictions. However, Uefa might struggle in court to prove the £350m was excessive, or that Etihad and City’s owners were linked. Presumably, then, such deals will be left to stand. In the end, FFP may change football less than Arsenal would hope. Gazidis says: “Are there loopholes in the way FFP works? Quite possibly. FFP is not part of our strategy.”

 

In short, neither a collapse of the football economy, nor a sudden blossoming of Arsenal’s youth academy, nor FFP is likely to come along and save Wenger. On the upside, Gazidis does expect Arsenal to get richer, as longstanding commercial deals expire and are replaced by bigger ones. Arsenal’s revenues look set to hit £300m next year. Meanwhile, interest costs on the club’s debt have dropped to a manageable £13.5m, with net debt at £98.9m. The burden of the stadium is lifting. “We’re coming through a period of risk to a period of less risk,” acknowledges Gazidis.

 

However, other clubs are finding new revenues too, as countless Asians and Americans start switching on to the Premier League. Contrary to the doomsayers, English football’s economic rise may have only just begun. That probably means Arsenal’s new revenues won’t be enough to lift it back into prizewinning zones – certainly not in time for Wenger.

[The Somalian]

Did you here about the fight down Brighton today between our fans those loyal to wenger and those who want him out?

 

[Seth Rollins]

Handbags mate. Nothing big.

[Drift]

did you swing?

[TF S4DK]

 

Arsenal's second biggest shareholder Alisher Usmanov insists club legend Thierry Henry is desperate for him to buy the north London club outright – and, in a swipe at Arsenal's transfer policy, the Uzbek billionaire has also accused manager Arsene Wenger of 'building a team' for his rivals.

 

Robin van Persie, Samir Nasri and Ashley Cole are among just some of the high-profile stars to have joined Arsenal's Barclays Premier League challengers during Wenger's tenure.

 

Van Persie quit the Emirates last summer to join Manchester United in a £24million deal with Nasri joining Manchester City the previous year, and Cole opting to quit the Gunners for Chelsea in 2006.

 

And Usmanov, who holds a 29.9 per cent stake in the club after buying former vice-chairman David Dein's shares, believes it is time for change at the Emirates Stadium.

 

'I like many footballers, and I'm in contact with some of them. Perhaps my favourite of the last ten, 15 years is Thierry Henry. He's pushing me to buy all of Arsenal's shares, but I cannot predict the future,' Usmanov said.

 

'The greatest achievement of Arsene Wenger is to have created two teams: the one that now plays for our rivals, and the one that is trying to be among the best in the Premier League.

 

'That's why I say it's not enough to merely flatter the coach, but to give him the possibility to buy the best players, superstars. But not just stars, but those chosen by Wenger.

 

'It's unthinkable that the shareholders get well-paid while, for small clauses in contracts, we lose key players, symbols like Robin van Persie, Mathieu Flamini or Patrick Vieira. We should have increased their salaries when they started to be courted, started to look elsewhere. I don't know why we didn't propose that to them.'

 

Speaking to French newspaper L'Equipe Usmanov admitted that he holds 'no relationship' with majority shareholder Stan Kroenke, and that his passion for the north London club came to fruition with Wenger's Double winning side of 1998 – a team he believed as good as Barcelona.

 

'In my opinion, that team was as good as the current Barcelona side,' Usmanov said.

 

'It wasn't a question of money or prestige. It's a choice [to invest in the club] dictated by my emotions, those provoked in me by the club. And Arsenal's current situation remains an interesting investment.'

 

Usmanov rates Wenger among the world's best managers but reckons his talents are being restricted by Arsenal's notoriously tight transfer budget.

 

He added: ‘For me, he's one of the best coaches in the world, but it's not easy for him.

 

‘I think he deserves that players are brought in at Arsenal when they're needed.

 

He added: 'The best players, and not being satisfied with selling our best players to our rivals. If that happens, we can ask everything of him. But, today, he's sacrificed. Because of the policy, and we're all to blame. Everything's in Mr Kroenke's hands, and I hope he succeeds, even if he doesn't go along with my ideas.

 

'All other theories are hypocrisy aimed at covering up weakness. I'm a strong man. If someone needs my help, my money, my know-how, anything I possess, I'm always ready.'

 

 

[Lenny]

Should be on the board.

[Seth Rollins]

Alie.

[Heero Yuy]

Ain't happening unless the whole board gets taken out godfather style.

[youcleanwepaint]

if arsene did go...who would as your new gaffer then??

[A walmart bag]

Excluding the CL the only tough games we've got coming up are Spurs away and Utd home. I can see us getting 4th place and the season being deemed a semi success and the cycle will start all over again.

[anelka]

Arsenal boss Arsene Wenger admits he regrets not signing Real Madrid defender Raphael Varane during his time at French club Lens.

France Under-21 international Varane, 19, has featured frequently for Jose Mourinho’s side in recent weeks and could start in tonight’s Champions League clash against Manchester United.

Wenger has been hugely impressed by the youngster’s progress at Madrid following his 2011 arrival from Lens.

But with his impressive track record for nurturing young talent from France, the Gunners boss admits he still wonders why Varane isn’t playing for Arsenal.

“A quick word on my fellow Frenchman Raphael Varane, the 19-year-old Real Madrid defender who could face United: I’m happy for him because he’s carving out a role at one of the world’s best clubs, which is remarkable,” Wenger said in his Eurosport column.

 

“Yet at the same time, when you are in charge of a club like Arsenal, you have to wonder why this player is not playing for us. He was at Lens, and we might well have caught him there.

“It was a risk for Real Madrid to sign him at his age, but when you have such a talent, you can overcome everything.

“He has benefited from suspension to Sergio Ramos and injury to Pepe, but nevertheless Mourinho has chosen him to step in.

“His next challenge is to manage the increased media exposure on him, especially now he is in the French national side.”

Bet he said it with that stupid wry smile..

 

Varane, Cabeye, Ben Arfa, Hazard, even Sissoko considering the price the barcodes paid

 

What's the point of having the French connect if he can't get the product?

[TF S4DK]

He's started to stall with the French players.

 

Varane was cos he like Ferguson wanted Jones instead...

[Badman]

WTF surely this is a knee jerk thread right? RIGHT?!

[Fighting Weight]

Needs to dead the 'I coulda signed so and so' hype

[TF S4DK]

Why tho?

 

I think its good, cos at the time we was linked to him, and now Wenger is confirming what we was told. I think Arsenal fans need to know that the club tried, even if they failed, cos at times people are thinking Wenger sitting on his hands deluded by the quality of his squad, refusing to sign anyone.

[Kuffir]

Excluding the CL the only tough games we've got coming up are Spurs away and Utd home. I can see us getting 4th place and the season being deemed a semi success and the cycle will start all over again.

 

 

8 seasons on loop

[Turkish]

There is a difference between trying to sign someone and enquiring about or admiring there talent.

 

It would be good if the players themselves state we are/was an option and they are talking to us, not this old c*nt continually pulling wool over our eyes.

[TF S4DK]

You see...

[kerser]

He needs to do the honest respectable thing as a man and resign.

 

Need a big clear out (coaches/backroom staff ect), and loads of new faces in

[Benicio del Toney]

Who to take manager role?

[mark_INIESTA_davies]

Who to take manager role?

 

TF.

[O Fenomeno]

[kerser]

I  dont even know who

 

But just someone that is willing to buy real quality players (that can make a difference) and spend some of the money that Wenger always says is available but never spends lol

 

Also we need a manager that isnt scared to get rid of shit players(arshavin djourou squillaci Chamakh, yeh he's loaned some of them out now but they shouldnt even be on Arsenals books at all) , although i think thats more of a personal thing in some cases, i.e when they are collecting their big wages they are happy to sit in reserves or play the odd game here n there when needed.

 

I just think it is time to move on, Wenger has had his day, he isnt upto the job anymore

 

But defo if we dont finish within 4th place/win the champions league(highly unlikely anyway) i think he should 100% go.

[Benicio del Toney]

Brah you need a replacement before you can say that shit.

 

Shoulda got avb when you had the chance.

[mark_INIESTA_davies]

Tony what do you think of Chris Hughton, Very good up and coming manager.