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