ARSENALISM©

With the current news stories that the media are loving regarding VanPersie, Song and now Walcott there is an underlying issue that needs to be addressed. It’s evident that something is wrong with the ‘basics of business’ side of Arsenal Football Club. Turning a profit, perhaps mocks that statement but there are some clear cases of bad practice. Having mediocre players on good contracts making them hard to get rid of is flawed. Allowing the better players to run their contracts down and therefore allowing them to in effect hold the club to ransom is foolhardy. Not paying competitive wages for those players that make a difference (not to mention failing not buying players that make a difference) is myopic. Having endless faith in player’s potential is wooly-thinking when time and again that faith is not rewarded. Revenue and expenditure are skewed in this business model that we have, because in regards to a Football club your assets are your players and the failure to invest in g...

Arsenal Football club has had a recent history of great strikers; Wright, Bergkamp, Henry, Van Persie, who's next to take up the challenge? Who knows. Will it be Giroud, or Podolski or Chamberlaine? I rather suspect that unlike Man City, Man Utd and Chelsea we may not have a great striker until such time as we loosen the purse strings and buy one. In the meantime Wenger is gambling on a communal sharing of goalscoring responsibility; a risky strategy for a club looking to win a trophy. Wenger loves a project as we all know and I guess we are now entering the start of 'Project Distribution' Lets see if it works...

Mitigation is used to excuse or explain unpalatable facts and the manager and board of Arsenal regularly utilise mitigation to defend the indefensible decline at the club.  Arsenal finished third behind the 2 Manchester clubs thus securing a ECL place again. Arsenal have qualified for the ECL 15 seasons in a row. The balance sheet is a bright black. The club has a self sustaining credo and a Financial fairplay  proof policy.  Great. All good achievements I'm sure most would agree, however the magic word is context.  Finishing third with a huge gap between us and the top two says more about the general poor quality of the league and are we in a better position to finish higher this time around? Is it better to have qualified for ECL again or would a trophy and Europa league (like Liverpool) have been better? Arsenal would have a better opportunity of European victory in the Europa as far as I'm concerned as general when we have faced a crunch game in the Champions...

Song moves to Catalonia. Fair enough. He's a decent player in his position but hardly a Gilberto Silva. The question is more about him getting too big for his boots; if what I hear is to be believed.  Good Buisness? Yes. But only if the incoming funds are spent on improving the squad. Song is perhaps the only member of 'project youth' that had any decent sustained levels of performance. Certainly he contributed more than Denilson,Bendtner, Diaby, Eboue and the others.  What the future holds for him I neither know nor care. Another one bites the dust. 

  “Ego-maniac traitor, you never did understand you fell in love with your ego, it did not fit into plan” -Low life: Public Image Limited It would be easy to pour derision and bile on Robin Van Persie; yet another captain to desert us. It would be easy enough to feel angered by the manoeuvring that made staying untenable. We Arsenal supporters are a long suffering bunch and we have an annual hate figure, or at least an annual figure to feel disappointed by. Truth is that these situations go hand in hand with egomaniacal footballers who view success not just in terms of trophies but in how far they can take their saleability; their value as a commodity if you will. Since 2005 we have lost five Captains Vieira, Henry, Gallas, Fabregas and Van Persie (in that same period Liverpool have had one captain) and that tells a story far more tangible than the convoluted and secretive reasons behind our assets being stripped. It tells the story of a club whose appointed lead...

And so, as a preamble to another season of the bloated, overhyped and cash engorged Premier league we were subjected to the Glutton Bowl between the two most avaricious clubs in the country. If ever a game summed up the state if football it was the Russian oligarch's playthings against the Middle Eastern Sheikh's trinkets in the community shield. It was all there; mercenaries, red card challenges, deception, malice, cheating, inflated egos and everything that the Olympics weren't. The lessons we took about sport from the London games are meaningless in the Premier League. So out of step are the clubs and players that they operate above the morality and spirit of sport. If the community shield between the club that bought the Premier League and the club that bought the Champions League is an indicator of the arrogance of the modern football world then we are in for a bleak season of petulance, greed and rotten core values. Of course my support for the Arsenal rem...