Five Yeses and a No is Still One No: Contracts

Wednesday 2^nd of September 2009, Arsenal secured a 4-5 year new contract with one of the most promising young players around. He had captained his country for all ages from under 15s. He was our most capped player of the 2008-09 season and had already scored a screamer on the opening day of the 2009-10 season. All people at the club were excited to have him playing for the club until 2013 at the very earliest. Arsenal are still paying (a proportion of) his contract to this day, despite him not playing for Arsenal in over a year and a half, being almost fully fit. That’s right ladies and gentlemen, Denilson is alive. For two seasons in a row now, Arsenal have decided to let Denilson play for another club, without getting any money for a transfer. Arsenal are still paying his wages because he simply doesn’t want to take a pay cut with another club, and no other club wants to pay him what we are paying him. It is harsh to blame him for not being good enough for the club, nor for wanting to take a pay cut after he was issued with this bumper contract in 2009.

Handing out contracts binding players for too long is a risky move, it’s not just Denilson, but players like Bentner and Carlos Vela are further examples of players who have been sent out on loan for two seasons in a row, despite being of an age where they should be playing regular first team football. Admittedly Vela is now gone, but Bentner, Denilson, and Park are all deploying their services for another team, with Arsenal paying some of their wages. Not only the loanees, but the likes of Chamakh, Djourou, Squallaici that are being paid a full wage, from a contract that they signed when they showed some degree of promise, which is now just money wasted.

The news of the 5 British players who have been awarded new contracts is almost definitely good for the club. Each of them has shown their potential and how they can improve over the next few years. However, simply “learning from mistakes by offering players new contracts” is an absurd idea. Giving players new contracts is not something that is new to Wenger, and is something that happens incredibly often, rarely making the news for more than about 3 hours. Of the players that played in the game against Wigan, only Sagna and Walcott have not signed new deals in the last 15 months.  The decline of Ramsey, which has spanned from the end of last season to the first half of this one (essentially 2012), is a difficult one to deal with. Wenger obviously feels that it is a run of either form or confidence that is holding him back rather than unfulfilled potential. The death of his national manager and the removal of his captaincy can’t be a good thing for any player, and maybe Wenger is giving him the benefit of the doubt. Drawing comparisons between Denilson and Ramsey might be a bit harsh to the Welshman, but could still be proved to be valid.

Whether or not Ramsey is part of a set is something that remains to be seen. While the recent transfer policy has been guided towards experience over potential, these players’ contract is a sign that Wenger has not forgotten about the idea of developing a team from youth. The last generation of youth players was officially terminated with the sale of Alex Song.  Clichy, Denilson, Diaby, Song, Nasri, Mannone, Djourou, Bendtner and Fabregas were all supposed to be part of another “golden generation”, playing together for years and winning trophies. Now these players are all 24-26, in the supposed prime of their careers. None of them play regular football for the club, and they have mostly all split up into different clubs and countries. You can see Wenger’s rationale by tailoring his new generation to be mostly British, giving an extra incentive to stick together at the club. It helps that both Wilshere and Szczesny have said that they have intentions to spend their entire career at the club and Jenkinson is a massive Gooner. I know this means little in the current era of football, with agents and their relationship with the oil rich clubs; however, with financial fair play hopefully coming in reasonably soon, maybe a cohort of other British players will help the likes of Oxlade Chamberlain to stay at the club.  Whether or not that will help Theo pledge to stay or not is another matter.

Robin Van Persie, Gael Clichy, Alex Song, Samir Nasri, Theo Walcott, Mathieu Flamini (I like lists o.k.): all of these players have failed to work out a contract with the club with one year remaining on their old one. Clichy and Song were in a different category, the speed of the transfers and the lack of media coverage about Arsenal pursuing a new contract shows that Wenger did not value them as highly as they valued themselves, and was happy to grant them a transfer when the right offer was made. When it came to Nasri and Van Persie, it was obvious that those players did not want to be part of the club anymore. To generate £49 million for an injury prone 29 year old and a player who has proved his worth for ½ a season out of the three years we had him is phenomenal business sense. I think that even if Nasri had 4 years left on his contract, Wenger would have been forced to listen to a £25 million bid.

At the end of the Wigan game, Jamie Redknapp said “Arsenal haven’t got anyone but themselves to blame” about players being in the last year of their contract. That is bollocks. For anyone who genuinely believes that Arsene Wenger would let Van Persie, a player who he has always shown a great deal of faith in, run down his contract out of choice is just plain stupid.  For Van Persie, as much as I hate to say it, it was about winning things before he retired. Signing a 2-3 year extension would have been the last big contract of his career. He felt that we could not do that, and that is the most depressing thing about the whole saga. With Nasri it was different; it seemed much more about the cash than success, as it normally would be for a 23 year old. When Nasri would have first been offered a new contract, Wenger would not have thought he was worth the same amount that he did. Arsenal had control over Nasri, and chose to not give him the huge wages. We did not have control over Van Persie.

Wenger will know at all times how long each player will have left on their contract, and constantly be thinking about renewing it. The idea that it was in this summer that Wenger first came to Walcott about the idea of signing a new contract is unfathomable. Walcott has been saying no to a new contract for probably around 2 years now. Why that is, however, is an odd one. Whether it is about money, success or his position it is hard to judge. He says he wants to be played as a centre forward, but it is more than that. He has been played as a forward for two games in a row now; Wenger is willing to listen to the idea of playing him there. He has also said that he is willing to pay him the “money he deserves”, whether that is a discrepancy in what he thinks Walcott deserves and what Walcott thinks he deserves is probably part of the problem. I think his agents would have seen what players like Nasri are doing, and seeing what he could get paid elsewhere. If financial fair play is coming in, that might provide Theo with extra incentive to try and get as much money as he possibly can from this contract, as he probably won’t be able to command such a high fee when clubs have to be more responsible. Hopefully Walcott will look around in January and come to the conclusion that Arsenal is where he should sign, I think that is much better in the long run than him signing before he knows how much (or how little) he would get elsewhere. If he were to go in the next few weeks it is difficult to see what Wenger would do. That, however, is a different topic for a different blog post, but just putting it out there, I am a huge fan of the potential of Ryo Miyaichi.

While it is a good thing that these players have signed new contracts, it would be worse than awful if any of them refused because they thought they were too good for the club. It is bad enough that Walcott thinks he might be. Personally, I hope that it will humble him to see that he isn't THAT good, and the likes of Madrid and Barca will not be falling over themselves to get his signature. He has been playing better this season, scoring as many goals as he did last season already, but he is by no means a finished product, and hopefully won’t get too carried away with that. Hopefully he will sign, the whole squad will gel and Arsenal will win every available trophy for the next decade at least. Why not?

That's it from me, thanks for reading; don’t forget to follow @studentgooner

Wenger: Should He Stay or Should He Go

The only way to radically change this team’s mentality would be to alter things massively. Getting rid of Wenger would no doubt change everything. This is definitely an overplayed reason for keeping him, but who would replace him? People looking into the “he hasn't won anything in 7 years argument” seem to be looking at an incredibly specific frame of history. If the history of not winning things for 7 years matters, then why does that history of winning 7 trophies (plus 4 Community shields) over 16 years not? If we are going to look at Wenger’s reason for having this job, it should be looking at going forwards. Is Wenger the man who can lead Arsenal on to the most success?

Whoever has the job will have limited funds to spend on players, the same way that Wenger has always had. I find it very hard to believe that any manager would not spend money on players if they had it. It has now got to the stage where it seems like brilliant players may not even make the difference. Say we did sign someone such as M’Vila in January, would he have helped us to beat Bradford? Probably not, the midfield we have is possibly one of the best in the league. Arteta, Cazorla and Wilshere are all thought of as a more than adequate midfield. The real question is: why isn't it working? On paper, our starting line-up should be sound. Looking at our front three, we have the top goal scorer in the French league last season, the youngest ever European to reach 100 caps for his country, and a player who, that now we risk losing, seems like he has always been the best winger in England. The defence is a more difficult with our recently appointed captain looking incredibly shaky. Looking at the Bradford game, however, it is not the defences’ fault that we only scored one goal in two hours of football against a league two side… with that goal coming from a defender.

A large amount of the blame for this season has to go down to the players failing to perform how they should. While all of the fans are quick to say that Gervinho had a shocker against Bradford, I would not personally say that his game and Oxlade Chamberlain’s were all that different. They both had a few dribbles that went reasonably well, beat a couple of people then lost the ball much more often than not. It is just easier for people to say that Gervinho is awful because they never said he was that good in the first place. Not entirely relevant to this blog, just a point worth making. Lukas Podolski, more often than not this season just disappears in a game. Don’t get me wrong, I am a big fan of him as a player on the whole, I just think that he has been not living up to his expectations entirely. We seem to be a team under-performing rather than a team who is not good enough.

The only person I can realistically see Arsenal affording and wanting to replace Wenger (in the long run) would be a reasonably similar swap in terms of mentality and style. Jürgen Klopp has done phenomenal things at Dortmund, winning successive league title and beating Munich in the FA cup equivalent final in 2009. He is used to promoting and nurturing players from youth, and is largely responsible for Mario Gotze’s (someone Wenger has always been very keen on signing) great success. While signing players like: Hummels (one of the best young defenders in the world), Lewandowski (one of the stand-out players in euro 2012), Kagawa (sold to united last year), to do great things. I could have gone on about some of the great transfers that he has made… but this isn't a Dortmund blog. The point is, Klopp is doing for Dortmund what Wenger did for Arsenal, singing players from across Europe that nobody else had necessarily heard of, and getting the best out of them. Oh yeah, and winning trophies.

Another possible name linked to the Arsenal job is Pep Guardiola. It is incredibly difficult to see why he would want to come. As much as we, as Arsenal fans and listeners of English punditry would like to believe, Barcelona do not think of us as rivals and copiers of the game they play. They are far too arrogant and self-absorbed to really pay enough attention to the rest of Europe in their league games. Admittedly in the games that we have played them in recently, at the Emirates at least, we have given as much as we have gotten. But they think of us no more as rivals than we do of Swansea, who like to pass the ball and cause us some trouble. The fact that we had and essentially raised, Cesc was no more than a loan as far as they were concerned. Guardiola is much more likely (in my opinion) to be looking for the Chelsea job when it becomes available in the summer. They have more money to spend on players and himself, a young squad with large potential, and much much more money. They also have more money.

If we have no money they don’t we get a manager who is renowned for getting the best out of players? Someone who is English maybe, has lots of experience of premier league? What about ‘Arry? no, no, no dear god NO. He would be an utter disaster. Hiring that illiterate oaf would probably be the biggest spit in the face to Wenger that Arsenal could give him. He is the anti-Wenger; runs clubs into the ground financially, has virtually no concept of tactics, “writes” for the Sun, managed the spuds and is just utterly clueless.

Sacking Wenger now for the sake of it would simply be a mistake. There needs to be a plan of how to go about replacing him. Ideally Wenger will chose his own replacement and oversee the whole operation… then again, ideally we would be winning every trophy we went for every year, but hey, we aren't  There are no suitable replacements for Wenger, that would be willing to take the job at short notice, which is both a testament to how good Wenger is as a manager, and how much Arsenal are struggling at the moment. If we are unable to attract the best players, it is difficult to see how we would attract the best manager. However, if someone had said in 1996 that the best man for the Arsenal job would be the manager of Nagoya Grampus Eight I would have laughed in their face. Partially because I was 3 at the time and the name sounds kind of funny, but I would have thought that it would just be a step too far for a relatively inexperienced Wenger to take over at Arsenal. I would have been wrong.

Thanks for reading and don’t forget to follow on twitter: @studentgooner

Blind Faith is Still There… Just

As a relatively young Gooner , Wenger has been the only ever present in my years of supporting Arsenal Football Club. He has seen chairmen, players, sponsors, assistant managers, even stadiums come and go, and it is evident that he has been a huge influence in all of the changes, and has possibly done more for Arsenal football club than any other individual.

As far as a typical Wenger season goes, 2012/13 has already achieved two of the three “givens”. We have qualified for knock out stages of the Champion’s League for the 13^th year in a row, while reaching the quarter finals of the league cup for the 10^th year in a row. The only box left to tick is both the most important and arguably the hardest, qualifying for the Champion’s League. I am sure none of you will have heard, given how little the media have chosen to mention it, but this is actually Wenger’s worst start to a season. Up until Saturday I was entirely sure that we would finish fourth and qualify in August for the Champion’s League, while now I might have to downgrade “entirely” to “fairly”.

The start to last season was equally abysmal, something happened and we seemed to remember how to play football. As much as I hate the “winning mentality” cliché it seemed to happen. By December last year, we had already beaten teams like Norwich, Stoke, Swansea and Sunderland, as we should have done. All of these teams we have dropped points to this season. Something seems different this season. While it is easy to say that Van Persie is what is missing, it is more than that. On Match of the Day, Vincent Kompany said that Arsenal were the toughest team that City have faced all season. It was encouraging, not only because it made ‘arry look like more of an illiterate moron than he is, but it showed that when we click, we are nothing short of phenomenal. The games that we have played well, (Liverpool, City, Southampton and large chunks of the Spurs game amongst others) we have looked like one of the best Arsenal sides in years. However, that is not the Arsenal side that we see week in week out. What is the most depressing thought is that we have had very few injuries for the majority of our poor games. While you could say Diaby looked good in our first few games, being so reliant on a player who has been injury plagued for years is foolish. It is also very easy to overestimate Diaby’s ability when he is not on the pitch to prove you wrong.

It is hard to see where the consistency will come from. The midfield trio of Arteta, Wilshere and Cazorla look incredibly deflated and overplayed. Ramsey has little to no confidence, Oxlade Chamberlain has not been at his best for most of this season, whether it is the overwhelming pressure of expectation or simple bad form it is hard to tell. It is far too early to genuinely look at starting either Coquelin or Eisfeld as replacements.  Rosicky is the only ray of hope that the midfield can try to cling on to, making the main three fight for positions and bring a little creative ease to Cazorla.

Perhaps what made the Swansea game worse is that a win would have taken us 2 points behind Chelsea in third. Their managerial trouble, Spurs’ flop record and the fact that West Brom are only really their by accident (I know they have played well this season, but not even the most optimistic Albion fan is expecting them to be there at the end of the season), we could have been in a promising position. It is not just the 3 points dropped, but the way in which we don’t look like we have the potential to capitalise on our run of easy games. We should have had a genuine chance to be 3^rd by Christmas, if the team eventually does pick up and perform. While neither Spurs nor Chelsea have a particularly difficult December either, it is hard to see them taking all of the available points. It is by no means too late to achieve qualification; we need to start performing.

We need a spark, something to create a run of form that will push power through and keep us fighting for Champions League qualification and possibly more. From previous seasons, I genuinely believe this will happen. Where it will come from is hard to tell, we can’t realistically expect a new signing for at least 6 weeks, if at all, only Diaby and Rosicky are coming back from injuries, and our next big match for the fans to encourage the players is probably City in mid-January. All games before this the team will expect to win, as we were this weekend against Swansea. We simply cannot afford any more games like that. It seems easier said than done to just say, “win the easy matches and the form will come”.  Hopefully it will be Steve Bould’s rant at the players that will create an atmosphere that makes the players scared to lose. If not that then something will have to make us win our next few matches. We have to qualify for the Champion’s League, anything else would be a failure to what some people think are already too low expectations. That is what Arsenal do. It has to happen.

A small voice in my head keeps on popping up questioning it. “What about Liverpool and “the big four””, “Chelsea finished 6^th last season” “this is Wenger’s worst start to a season” “if we can’t beat Swansea at home, who can we beat?” and other irritating truths I try not to listen to. This is where Wenger’s record comes into play. No matter how late or close he leaves it, he has always done it. Last season we did our best to cock it up at West Brom, but got there eventually. Admittedly this is probably the season at which he has looked most likely not to, but until Wenger gets to the point where we haven’t qualified, he deserves the faith and belief to think that he will do what he has always done.

First attempt at a blog by @studentgooner.