Stop Dragan this Out: The Wenger Succession Thread

I keep reading these thoughts as an excuse for why we are no longer elite. The truth of the matter is that it was the board's, Wenger and Gazidis job to predict these. We historically screwed the pooch on sponsorship deals, got equal TV money and the board allowed Kroenke to get in charge over other billionaire's who ego wanted Arsenal to dominate and didn't have a large track record of bumbling franchises. These failures are each fireable offensives in my opinion but collectively have brought Arsenal way below where they should be. These factors were not set in stone, other clubs were able to predict and benefit from these changes. The collective leadership at Arsenal are multi-factorial failures.

 

But would I take him over Wenger at Arsenal? Why yes, actually yes I would. Seven days a week and twice on Sunday.

 

Please don't take this the wrong way, but this is looking at things with an awful lot of hindsight. Based on the information available at the time, I'm not sure that I can find that much fault with the club's decisions that were made between 2002 and 2006. The club started making plans for the stadium in 1997, years before Abramovich and the Man City guys entered the picture, and it's not as if these acquisitions were all that predictable then: Abramovich likely bought Chelsea as insurance against Putin's capriciousness, and the Man City guys bought their club with an eye to building a "brand" for Abu Dhabi.

I see your point regarding the sponsorship deals, BUT they were relatively high value deals at the time they were made. We've discussed this ad nauseum, but the main issue with those deals was that they were too long. Without knowing why they were made with that length, you can't say that they were bad deals: if they were made as a condition of stadium financing, for example, it becomes a much more defensible proposition than if the additional length was used to justify a higher annual value. But again, I don't think anyone seriously anticipated that commercial deals would be worth six times as much less than a decade later.

Regarding Kroenke, I'm not sure what to make of him. His history suggests that he doesn't interfere with the operations of his teams all that much, but all of his teams tend to operate in a fairly risk averse manner (like the Nuggets never paying luxury tax). That MO won't work at Arsenal in years like this one, where you have five other teams that are good.

The big miss, in my opinion, was the club's misplaced reliance on financial fair play: it's hard to believe that they really thought that UEFA could actually pull that off, just because of the amount of money at stake.

By my count we've bought seven players in the past four years that would have been record breaking signings for us in 2012: Ozil, Alexis, Chambers, Welbeck, Xhaka, Mustafi, and Perez. That's hardly failure: perhaps not as good as we could have hoped, but if you were expecting Arsenal to be competing for the likes of the Pogbas and the Mbappes of the world, a quick look at the club's financials would tell you that Arsenal would need an extra 100 million in annual income to pull that off. That was never on the cards.

Finally, we're having this conversation because the results on the field aren't nearly as good as we would like. Instead of blaming everyone, we need to be blaming Wenger for this: the failure to build a coherent midfield in the six years after Fabregas and Nasri left is why Arsenal haven't been competitive for anything other than the odd cup. We can talk about tactics and poor coaching, but a look at the players we've trotted out says it all. Outside of the year that Arteta was phenomenal and the times that Cazorla's been healthy, Arsenal really haven't been good in years.

 

If only neg rep still exsited.

 

Even I would not do that lmao

 

Interesting thoughtful post Mebe, but I wanna react to this...

I think this may be another 20-20-hindsight issue. I don't know about you, but when FFP was first being touted and Arsenal was proudly citing that we were better positioned to thrive in that world than most other clubs, it seemed plausible to me. Yes I had my usual skepticism about how UEFA was going to be able to implement FFP without watering it down. But UEFA is a powerful organization who holds the purse-strings to the coveted UCL disbursements. So it seemed at the time that they had the desire & fortitude to really do something with FFP, not to fairly quickly abandon it, as is what seems to have happened?

So yes, Wenger is prone to old-fashioned thinking, and naivety in certain situations like this. But I'd be lying if I didn't say that a good part of me likes the live-within-your-means approach to running our club, instead of the sugar-daddy-financial-arms-race world that many of our chief rivals live in. And forgetting about FFP specifically, if we can be reasonably successful without being dangerously leveraged, or beholden to some unscrupulous Russian oligarch, then I'm OK with that. The problem is that most fans, myself included, would agree that we haven't been "reasonably successful" enough in the past 12 years. But that's a topic for another time & place.

I read this with a slight smile, recalling that you were one of the last converts to #WengerOut, sometime this season. I was a little late to that party also, but more like 1-2 years ago.

 

The length of those commercial deals likely cost Arsenal between 200 and 400 million pounds over 3-4 years. Think about that, and the run on effects it has for our commercial deals in the future.

 

I would. Only post I ever neg repped was the BlueNGooner fantasy. Suggesting Fat Sam manage Arsenal tops that.

 

Not sure I agree with this. The Emirates deal was something like seven years, a hundred million quid for both stadium and shirt. If we'd signed a five year deal instead, and reupped in 2011 instead, assuming the same deal signed in 2013 (5 years shirt, 8 years stadium, 150 million total), we're talking ~ an extra 15 million a year for two years.

The Nike deal is a little worse (~5 million per year, iirc), but the going rate in 2011 was something like 20 million per year. We're talking an extra 15 million starting in 2011 for the kit as well. So we're talking an extra 30 million a year, or 75 million total (because Nike's deal expired in 2014). And again, we don't know what circumstances led to negotiating deals for that length: if it was done to secure financing for the stadium, it becomes very hard to criticize, because the AAV was on the high side when the deals were made.

 

Source?

 

You mean you wouldn't do "neg rep" or Big Sam? I'm guessin the latter.

 

I probably should have been more clear. Was meant more of an aggregate between players that had to be sold, costs to replace them, loss of revenue from re-upping deals from an already low position.

 

Happy to beg rep fcuk fat sam

 

I think it was more the up front payment. That's a really lucrative deal by 2006 standards (~13 million per year?). That would have been a half-decent deal in 2010 too. But the up front payment (which was not available for the squad) meant the club wasn't getting a ton from Nike annually.

 

Sure, but my point was more: that wasn't a bad deal by any means.

 

How bad of an exodus of players would we have if he was fired?That is one thing that amazes me from all these stars, they all want him to stay. The man hasn't delivered an EPL title in over a decade, makes no sense...

 

How many players have we lost out on sure to Arsenal's results? If they get a manager who wins and we spend cash, then players will flock to Arsenal. Sadly I don't see tat happening.

 

I would take these statements with a little bit of salt. No player is going to say that they want the manager out.