Some developments at Arsenal this morning and I’m curious what your thoughts are.
First, my best guess is that we won’t see any (English) football restarting until late 2021. Simple fact is that teams in England can’t even practice right now and while “playing behind closed doors” seems like a viable option that means practices, which means close contact, plus there’s the 400+ staff required to run a game, and there’s the not-so-small issue of players in close contact with opposition players.
Until we have a vaccine plus widespread antibody testing, there can be no football. If you have a different opinion please post it in the comments. I know that Bundesliga says that they plan to restart in May and that they have been practicing but Germany is a very “follow the rules” country, they have the most comprehensive testing system in the world (outside of Korea), and their death rate is among the lowest in the world (percentage of people dying when they have contracted COVID). All of this is true, however, they still need to figure out the health and safety, hygiene, and other protocols needed to make sure that players, their families, referees, and everyone else don’t get ill and spread the disease to a larger circle.
I’d say they are ambitious at best and wish them luck but I’ll be surprised if they can pull this off. To play football they have to test everyone, with 100% accuracy, because if even one footballer or a footballer’s family member dies from COVID because of these games, that would be tragic and open them up to lawsuits. That would be beyond tragic, it would be simply madness.
That brings me to today’s news about Arsenal. Apparently, Arsenal have asked the players to take a permanent 12.5% pay cut. “Asked” is actually the nice way to put it. According to a published article in football.london by James Benge, Raul Sanllehi told the players to either take the 12.5% cut now or face further cuts in the future.
This is a hollow threat as far as I know. Sanllehi cannot cut guaranteed contracts and all of the players are on guaranteed contracts.
But the players have refused and I can understand why; Josh Kroenke and the administration wants a permanent pay cut for Arsenal because the wage bill is slightly out of control. Last summer JK spouted, “It’s no secret that we have a Champions League wage bill on a Europa League budget right now.”
Benge wrote this of the player’s attitude: “Some within the first-team fear that Arsenal are using the current situation to get a handle on a wage bill that has grown dramatically at a time when they do not have the Champions League football to fund it.”
Forcing through a cut now smacks of the most disgusting opportunism. The club seem to be using the NHS, non-playing staff salaries, and the pandemic to get the players to agree to an across the board massive cut in salary. Meanwhile there are zero indications that the board are taking a cut or that the billionaire owner Enos Kroenke is going to put in his own money or do something like what West Ham are doing and issuing a rights offering to raise revenue.
It’s illustrative to see that Kroenke just purchased a “ranch” in Texas for $700m. I say ranch but it’s actually closer to being a small nation than a ranch: it is it’s own money-making property with herd of farm animals and around 1000 oil-producing wells. This ranch is 510,000 acres and to put that in context, Luxembourg is 639,000 acres.
Some might be tempted to point out that Kroenke is leveraged to the max with all of his sports franchises and that could be why he can’t put money into Arsenal. I’m not sure I can agree with that. His teams in the NFL, MLS, and NBA are all franchises. They have collective bargaining and can stage lockouts and force player’s unions to take massive salary cuts if they need to. Moreover, those leagues will not be going anywhere. They will not go bankrupt.
The same isn’t true for Arsenal. If Arsenal miss payments to players or the stadium they will go into administration. That seems to be the main card that the owners/admins are holding – “we don’t want to pull a Leeds”.
Administration is sometimes a dicey situation in England because the club could conceivably be “wound up” which means there would be no such a thing as Arsenal or it would have to change its name to Dial Square or something. But I find that doomsday scenario extremely unlikely with a property like Arsenal. They have one of the biggest money-spinning stadiums in world football, they have a built-in rabid fanbase with millions of supporters (more like brand ambassadors, each with their own YouTube talk show) who will buy any dross the club puts out (see the last 4 years), and they are in the most profitable league in world football. In the event that Enos and Josh can’t make their payments, someone would jump in and buy this club in a second. To be a bit crude, any billionaire in the world would eat the corn out of our shit to buy this club.
Actually, I would welcome a Kroenke default. It would get those leeches out of this club forever.
For the player’s part they are holding out on a pay cut until they can get assurances that the cuts would go to non-playing staff salaries: “There is a will within the Arsenal squad to give back in order to help their colleagues who are not as generously rewarded as them. Through their PFA representative Hector Bellerin the players indicated a willingness to defer their salary but they want every penny the club hierarchy save there to go to staff.”
We have had this conversation on here many times and you probably know where I stand – I’ve followed American sports my whole life and with relatively few exceptions American sports-owning billionaires are among the most greedy, reprehensible, billionaires on the planet.
If what the players are saying is true, this is unusually disgusting by even Kroenke’s own very low standards. Basically, this billionaire is asking the players to fund him, it’s like a tax or a tithe. This man has put the square root of zero dollars into this club, instead buying an incredibly profitable property at the perfect time and sat back and watched it decay. And now it seems like the players are concerned that he’s using a crisis to get through salary cuts that they have wanted for a LONG time.
I hope this story is completely wrong. I hope that the owner and managers give up their own salaries, that Kroenke puts in some money, and that if the players give up salary the non-playing staff are paid in full for the foreseeable future. But if this was the club’s opening gambit – threats and public bullying in the newspapers (players are now being called greedy snakes in almost every online forum) – I feel safe doubting that we will see even a modicum of decency from this owner and his management group.
Source: https://www.football.london/arsenal-fc/news/arsenal-pay-cut-raul-sanllehi-18083226
I think “late 2021” (August? November?) is an overly pessimistic prediction. None of us can know, of course, but I’d be surprised if football didn’t start again this year, whether that’s in June or in August / September, whatever. We’re also in the dark about whether the 2019-20 season will be completed. But no football until over a year from now? I don’t think so.
The only way there will be lawsuits is if clubs force matches when the government and/or the FA/UEFA/FIFA has issued a moratorium on such activities, and I don’t think the government (UK or US) is going to mandate stay-at-home orders for more than another few months at the most (let alone the 14-18 months that would carry us into late 2021). Much will depend, of course, on how the virus and our response progresses.
On the Kroenke’s, agree with everything you say. I don’t think they’re the worst owners in sport, but they are utterly reprehensible people.
I would like to make you a bet, pick any one of the following:
-2019/20 season will be abandoned
-The EPL will not start again until 2021
I don’t see these as pessimistic predictions, I actually think they are the right things to do.
The right thing to do will depend on a number of factors that have yet to be confirmed, including the ability of health infrastructure to handle the number of sick (so when the numbers come down such that this is manageable as far as patient treatment is concerned, I expect society to open again in its various states / countries). So no, I don’t predict that society will be on a lockdown for over a year, which is why I think football will be back before late 2021. Wuhan is no longer on lockdown. They were on lockdown for about three months total. The UK is, what, a month or two in? What leads you to believe that it’s reasonable and right to expect another twelve to fifteen months of societal lockdown?
There’s a massive difference between stay at home and allowing 60,000 people to gather in a stadium. Wuhan is not on lockdown but they also have extremely detailed monitoring of all of their citizens. People have to have their temperatures checked before they can leave, people eat 6 feet apart, anyone who is sick is locked in their houses. It’s not full lockdown the way that they were a few weeks ago but it is an extremely managed opening. I can’t see the USA or UK being able to do anything like that.
FIFA has already said their will be no international football until 2021 and I guarantee the Olympics are off.
And here’s the big problem, the tests are about 50% or less accurate in terms of identifying this virus. In Germany they are finding that they have to basically test sick people (with symptoms) over and over until they get a positive. The footballers are going to want ironclad promises that they will not be infecting their wives, children, parents, and so on. And the only way to accomplish that is through extremely accurate testing. Which we don’t have.
We also don’t have a vaccine and may not ever develop a vaccine. We are 18 months away from a vaccine and that first round will go to healthcare providers. Moreover the virus is already mutating thus we are at least 18 months, maybe even 2 years, away from having enough vaccine (if we can even develop one, which is not guaranteed) to think about vaccinating footballers.
The only way that there will be football is if one of the following scenarios happens:
1. The UK says “fuck it” and just goes for herd immunity through uncontrolled infection. This scenario would require footballers to agree to this insanity, which they will never do. In fact, I think the wealthy will flee any country which tries this batshit insanity.
2. We somehow get the virus down to zero or nearly zero, enough to be functionally eradicated. This would require the UK government to get its head out of its ass, which it cannot do.
I hate to say it but this virus is here permanently. Even if it slows down this summer, it will be back in fall. We are going to be dealing with mayhem and death for the rest of our lives. There’s no going back to “normal”. This is normal now.
I’m inclined to agree with you Tim. Herd immunity is only a viable/acceptable strategy via mass vaccination. Vaccination at population-scale is at least eighteen months away. Life in the UK, Europe and the States won’t be anything like normal in 2020. China might get back to normality quicker as culturally they are more open to freedom restrictions. Social distancing is here to stay.
So, you think economic ruin is the future? That is what will happen globally with your suggestion of “new normal,” along with way more suffering (emotional, physical) and social unrest. The government just can’t keep printing money for two years as food shortages will start to rear it’s ugly head. Sorry, your scenario is not realistic. A few ways forward are vaccination, probable, treatment, doable, and herd immunity, some people will die, but not the younger people, who are the future.
Let’s try some reasoning here and look at some facts.
Let’s say that we all go back to work tomorrow.
That means we are all going to be infected by COVID within 12 months.
That means every American will be in some state of either recovery or death for the next year or so.
Even if you had the best death rate possible (Germany, 3%) that’s nearly 10 million dead people.
Plus that means 10s to hundreds of millions of people sick, for weeks. Not getting anything done.
Plus that means 10s of millions of people in hospitals, with those bills (if we could ramp up production enough to cover them, which we cannot).
I’m not trying to be cute here but that would utterly eviscerate the economy, if that’s your only concern.
As for suffering, yeah. But the alternative IS WAY MORE SUFFERING. I get that it sucks to stay home but it would suck even harder to go to work and watch your coworkers DIE, your grandparents die, your children even possibly die! And if you’re worried about social unrest, IMAGINE THE SOCIAL UNREST WHEN 10 MILLION PEOPLE DIE. Come on, buddy. Lockdown, controlling the virus, is the only way.
As for production and capitalism – I agree with you that things are going to change. I don’t think capitalism (liberal capitalism) works in this situation but I’m not smart enough to figure out a way around this all. I know what my high school literature books tell me would happen: we go into a WWII-like economy where people are either forced into labor (for the greater good) or induced (though nationalism). I think it’s more likely that the governments of the world get together and maybe just abandon all debt. How do we keep things going? I mean we have to figure that out. It’s not going to be long before “thanking people for their service” wears thin and we get people rising up against a system that has been oppressive for a LONG time.
Every country is suffering. Some a lot more than others. The USA has it relatively easy. We all need to think of a smart and humane way out of this. That is not “just go back to work.”
I think there will be football this year in some form or another.
Ultimately money will trump the safety issue, if not totally ,then at least within the “reason”.
Like Bun says, once governments open the economy up football will follow suit.
It doesn’t seem like the Europeans are as litigious as people in this country, and players and their family members could contract the virus from other places outside of football too.
It would be a hard case to prove.
I’m glad I’m not the one making this decision though.
I’m not sure why we are worrying about Champions League or Europa League revenue. I can see the EPL starting again under restricted circumstances a while before travelling across international borders to far flung European destinations. Maybe the proposed cuts are based on sustained reductions in revenues, but I thought there would be much more internal discussion about this before going public. There are so many uncertainties right now, this seems too early to be real.
But its the players who are doing much of the job if they dont perform what will the kroenkes do and if they are not motivated how will they execute there duty haply/
Thanks for the post Tim. You may be right about football being shut down until 2021.
I think our wage bill has been poorly managed throughout this entire decade. Arsene and Ivan did a miserable job our allocating resources.. The Ozil contract will probably turn out to be one of the worst in the history of world football for any attacking player in terms of dollar paid for each goal and assist. The out of control wage bill is probably the reason the club felt it couldn’t afford another underperforming long term high dollar contract for Aaron Ramsey. All that said its crazy for the Kronke’s to use this crisis to help solve the wage bill. I don’t blame the players for being upset if he cuts their wages
Do players not already get lower wages as a consequence of not being in the champions league? If so, would this not be a double punishment?
Its only been part of a season but if the rumors about Aaron Ramsey’s wages at Juve are true then his contract will actually rival Ozil’s for being a terrible value in terms of how few goals and assists are created per dollar of wages.
I was and still am a fan of Aaron Ramsey but the club definitely made the right decision and avoided another wage mistake by letting him walk. The mistake was not selling him when we had a chance.
Under Kroenke and Dannny Fiszmanthe club has made a virtue of its policy of living off its income rather than relying on the largesse of an oil-state, oil-rich gangster or running up major debt. It may indeed be the case that Stan is aiming to use this crisis to shave an overgenerous wage-bill but there are undoubtedly significant finncial pressures on the club and his lack of altruism and generosity do not lead one to expect a bail-out from our saccharine-daddy. The postulated unspent reserve (if it exists) may help sustain the club through a short lock-down but there is little doubt that in the absence of the normal income streams associated with match-days, the belts will have to be tightened even further than was anticipated a few weeks ago because of the poor season. The gesture by executives to cut their salaries by 30% for 12 months stands in stark contrast to the players’ refusal to take a 12.5% pay-cut for a year. The report that the players’ suggested a salary deferral rather than a cut is laughable as it simply piles further future debt on the club and is hardly a sacrifice for anyone on tens of thousands of pounds per week.
This shutdown will bring an existential threat to many British football clubs. Small lower league clubs may be sustained by the generosity of the communities of which they are a key part but those who have overstretched themselves will be in considerable financial difficulty and we will certainly see some clubs fold. The major ongoing expense for almost all is the wage-bill of their first team squad and many have already taken pay cuts.
Whilst some players at Arsenal apparently feel no great bond with their employers, many have professed their love for the club and surely recognise that while they are not playing, their contracted salary is not being fully earned and actually puts the club’s financial future at risk. It’s time they stepped up to the plate, in my opinion.
the proposal from the club was a 12.5% permanent reduction across the board for all players.
In that case the answer to the question posed by your title is ‘yes’.
I wonder when the principle of contract frustration under contract law will raise its ugly head as it is fairly clear that if the current situation continues for much longer the contractual arrangement between the club and players is very different to what was agreed at the time and has been “frustrated” by an event beyond any parties control
Interesting question. I suspect that would apply to all the players in England/World Football and would have to be something taken up by the courts.