Sorry for posting so often – and potentially breaking up discussions in the comments – but the Super League story rumbles on and I guess I have more to say.
That is the entire thing about this blog; when I have something to say I say it (often wrong!)
That’s also the reason why the number of posts have dwindled over the years. I guess I find I have less and less to say about the club as we have evolved from the team I saw at Highbury in 2006 to the corporate investment vehicle that we are now. And all the beautiful things I said about the club back then, and Wenger in particular, have already been said. So, I don’t feel like repeating myself.
But here we are now. In a different world.
Mikel Arteta gave his pre-match press conference for the game against Everton and as was probably expected, he wasn’t asked about the football hardly at all. Arsenal have a major injury crisis headed into this match – we have no senior, reliable striker available, for example – and yet he wasn’t even asked what his plan was for the forwards in this game. Maybe he would say “I don’t know, we are still evaluating” but I thought it was at least a question that one of the journalists should ask.
But they asked almost exclusively about the Super League. And it was an interrogation of sorts, albeit in very respectful language. They wanted to know what he knew, when he knew it, and what the Kroenke’s have said.
I feel Arteta did his best to answer honestly if not a bit slippery. It’s kind of unfair that he’s the one who even has to field these questions. He didn’t start the fire, but here he was putting out the flames.
The only surprise from my perspective is that he let slip that the Kroenke’s have been planning this for months and had communicated with him that something like this was in the works:
on whether he agreed with joining the Super League…
“I didn’t know anything about it. I was informed during the last few months that there were some conversations, but I didn’t have any detail to evaluate or have an opinion on it. Obviously, before I could start to read and understand what was happening, the project was dead already.”
https://www.arsenal.com/news/arteta-everton-team-news-villarreal-and-more
But I don’t get the sense that he knew more than something very basic like “Mikel, we are in talks with several of the big clubs in Europe about a new competition starting in Fall. We can’t give you many details right now but don’t want you to be surprised.”
The rest of his answers were reassuring at some level. The owners have spoken to him and apologized, asking him to pass that on to the team. Vinai spoke to him and the team and also apologized. So, we get the sense that at least they know that they fucked this up. That’s good!
Josh Kroenke is also going to attend the Arsenal fan forums tonight. I’m not sure if he’ll answer questions or just give a speech or what’s going to happen here but it’s commendable – in that it’s the least he could do – that he’s at least going to attend. He’s going to have to sit there and hear it from some of the most passionate fans I know. And these aren’t just rabble-rousers: most of the fans who attend these meetings are working professionals who have risen high up in their personal life and understand a thing or two about how corporations should be run. If he is able to hear them, there will be some really great suggestions, and not just “when will you resign?” Though, some of that will come out as well.
And let’s be realistic here. There are a lot of structural problems at Arsenal which led them down the path toward the Super League. When the owners say they did this because they were protecting Arsenal, I believe that they believe that. They saw (and probably helped push for) an opportunity which would either mean permanent financial stability, or if they didn’t take it, instability.
Now, part of that is down to their own financial model. They don’t treat Arsenal like a sporting venture – they aren’t interested in spending their own money to make sure that we can compete. It is an investment for them. One which they don’t want to pump funds into unless it’s absolutely critical. The loan that they took out to cover the losses and to buy Thomas Partey isn’t going to be paid down by Stan Kroenke selling off the Texas ranch or something. Paying it back is part of his business costs. Which means it’s part of Arsenal’s costs. When they “authorized” the club to buy Partey, they were just saying it was ok to spend us into debt.
Which raises a fundamental question for me, one which I’d love to see them have to answer: how much debt is Arsenal currently carrying, what are the payments on that debt, and who do they go to? And here’s the thing that all fans need to understand: that’s not Kroenke’s debt, that’s our debt. Unless he decides to personally sell off some assets and retire that debt, we are the ones who have to pay that back. Yes, I understand that the club will pay that back, but our ticket prices, our subscriptions to SkySports and Peacock are what pay the club which is what they use to pay that debt. We pay that debt – what Kroenke does is skim off the top.
I’m also curious what the ramifications are for Arsenal after they pulled out of the Super League. Surely, the 12 clubs who signed on had some kind of agreement with JP Morgan Chase? Are they all just able to drop this idea without any penalty from the banks? If there’s a penalty, who pays it? And if there isn’t a penalty, did we really drop out of the plan or have we merely shelved it?
As for the plan itself, I think it does raise some fundamental questions which need to be addressed.
Why are UEFA running club competitions at all? I get that they are there as the umbrella organization for the 55 different European country competitions, and their job should be spreading football across those countries via their international competitions. But the fact that they are running the Champions League, and profit immensely from it, is so weird to me. It would be like CONCACAF running a Champions League, which they also do, but why?
I guess they have to approve of competitions but why are they profiting off this? Like I said in my first article on this topic, I completely understand why the top earning clubs in the Champions League would want to break away: why pay the middle-man? What value does UEFA add to the competition?
Another big question is what they are going to do about the new rules? The new rules give massive power and money to clubs already at the top of the power and money table. This is the virtuous cycle of modern capitalism: earn money, that gets you access to the better places, where you can earn more money, which you then claim is your right, because you earned more money. Very much how inequality is perpetuated in the United States where access to good schools, to good neighborhoods, and so on is driven by generational wealth accumulation.
The Champions League has always done that but at least before it had the veneer of “merit”: you earned your Champions League spot because of your placement on the League table (most of the time). And now, UEFA wants to flip that in two ways: the first is that you get a Champions League spot for how well you do in the Champions League and the second is that you get a Champions League spot for how well you have done in the past in the Champions League.
I’ve spoken about both of these things in the past and people still seem to think that this is “merit” and fair. But let me just give you an example that might illustrate better how they aren’t really based off merit. What if the Premier League decided to change the rules on promotion and relegation to be the same as these rules? Well, they would change relegation so that it would be based off club coefficient, or that one slot would be saved for clubs with a higher coefficient.
In that system, if Fulham were to place 16th and Burnley 17th, Burnley would avoid relegation because they have a higher coefficient. Fulham would be relegated instead. Would anyone in any world ever consider that fair or earned on merit? Just because Burnley’s been in the competition longer?
If the UEFA rules were put in place this season, Arsenal would leapfrog into the Champions League places because – since we are basically mainstays in these European competitions – we actually have a higher coefficient than Chelsea does, despite the fact that Chelsea consistently finish above us in the League table and beat us in the Europa League final just a few years ago. We could finish 8th and bump Chelsea to the Europa League. Imagine that.
That’s not merit in my world. The entire point of the Champions League is that every club should have an equal chance to access the Champions League and that they should earn that right by what they do on the football pitch, in the year before. Not five years prior. Not because they used to be a big club.
And I’m not even touching how this will affect the English game. The extra matches in the new Champions League will have to come at the expense of the League Cup, which is an important revenue share for EFL clubs. And since how well you do in Europe is far more important than where you place in your league, clubs will be rotating like crazy to ensure they do well in the new Champions League. The latter already happens: Arsenal would be fools not to prioritize the Europa League over the Premier League, because winning there guarantees a place in the Champions League next season, which as I have already pointed out is one of the main ways of.. getting into the Champions League.
One way to fix this is much more equality in the distribution of the money. UEFA shouldn’t be allowed to keep a red cent of this competition. And clubs who play in these tournaments should be required to share those profits with other teams in their leagues. There needs to be a much more equal distribution of the wealth. In his “scathing” speech against the Super League, UEFA president Ceferin pointed out that 40 years ago the top clubs in Europe would have been Nottingham Forest, Aston Villa, and Red Star Belgrade and he’s absolutely correct. But what he seems to have forgotten, and what so many in the football industry have forgotten, is that the Champions League money is one of the causes of that changed landscape. It is virtually impossible for most clubs to break into and stay in European football. So while we talk about “merit” we also need to see that up and down the football landscape most fans, the vast majority, are cut off from access to the top table. And that the system as it is written even now – much less how it’s intended to go forward – will only exacerbate inequality in football.
None of that even starts to get at how UEFA have consistently botched their anti-racism work. To the point where I think it’s clear that anti-racism is nothing more than a statement that they make, rather than any meaningful work they intend to do.
We got rid of the Super League, good. But now is the time for fans to stand up and demand reforms from UEFA.
Your blogs HAVE been prolific of late, but you have made some excellent points and your analyses have been very good. There is much to talk about still, and much to think about also, especially concerning reform.
FIFA and organizations under its umbrella should be non-profit.
Premier League ownership should be capped at a certain percentage.
Officiating needs to be thoroughly overhauled and many rules re-written.
Fans who throw bananas on the pitch should be made to choke on them.
Oh, and there should be World Peace.
None of those things are going to happen anytime soon, if ever. The hubris and rapaciousness of ownership isn’t going to disappear either, just because “we won” this round. 2020 was bad enough and the pandemic continues. Owners are desperate for income and debt relief and they haven’t given up on changing the business models of sports ownership to better suit their wants.
I don’t think we’ve saying anything yet and hate saying that.
Please do keep your excellent work. It is very much appreciated.
World peace seems the only realistic target there…
The clubs(through their much maligned owners, of course) make all the investments into the game we love. They build the stadiums; recruit, train and pay the players huge salaries. Many of them are owing the banks to their very necks.But the hawks at the organizing bodies control the money from the game.
I don’t think we have heard the last of ESL.
It is a sad state of affairs that people are actually considering that it is ok for participants of a competition to be the organizer as well.
Just goes to show how bad UEFA is held in regard.
Not that I am saying ESL is any better.
Appropo of nothing, listening to and playing some parts of “Bat Out of Hell” and missing the late, great Jim Steinman. RIP and may he find Paradise By the Dashboard Light.
I was going to post yesterday, but my post was taking so long to type that the “post comment” button disappeared (no idea why) and I couldn’t scroll up to cut and paste it into a refreshed comment box and, ahhh, forget it….
Totally agree that the current set-up is broken and rather than promote fluidity between the ranks of football it promotes a stasis – big clubs stay big, smaller clubs (barring Middle Eastern investment) stay small.
But… they’re all going broke! It’s not working! What I desperately want to see (as a flag bearer for libertarianism here) is that the governments DO NOT bail out any of these clubs and there is no rescue package and that Real Madrid, Barcelona, Juventus et al… crumble into 3rd division football. Other teams, following superior business models, will fill the void they leave behind, there will be a new world order, and lessons will be learned. If we bail out failing clubs, the same way we bailed out banks and auto companies, mistakes will just get repeated over and over. Will the fans suffer in the short term? Yes. But the sport will evolve. Instead of Barca we will have Ajax, instead of Juve we will have Dortmund.
Personally, if we fell into the EFL for a few years because of financial malfeasance and incompetent owners, I wouldn’t stop supporting the club. And the day we climbed back up would provide huge satisfaction.
Your post yesterday said it was going to get ugly. Yes, and perhaps we should look forward to this ugly lancing of the boil. If the big teams die off, so too do the mega-agents, the corporatists (I use that term deliberately, they are not believers in a free market) and the overbloated salaries.
I agree. Businesses should never be bailed out.
The left just agreed with the right! There is hope, don’t give up!
Hallelujah!
I don’t know all the details, but seems like it wasn’t all that long ago that Rangers pretty much went under and were relegated. A team with arguably more history than Arsenal.
Now they are back and have won the league this year. And did OK in Europe.
So suffering consequences doesn’t necessarily mean utter doom.
And it’s not just COVID that has caused this, that only made it more acute. Barcelona were already in deep doodoo. Player salaries and agent fees have gotten ridiculous. And it was largely predicated on either sugar daddy investors or a continuous train of ever increasing TV rights.
As far as today’s Fan talk, sounds like Josh did show up and apologize up and down. So on that front they are at least a little better than Perez at RM, who seems want to continue full speed ahead, and damn the apologies. But Josh also indicated that KSE aren’t going anywhere.
While I’m happy to see fan power recognized, I can’t say I’m optimistic about the future. After all in many ways, the ESL is less of a bad thing than the awarding of the WC to Qatar. Significant numbers of workers have actually died because of that money grab, and that didn’t get shot down.
All excellent posts this week, Tim. Your nuanced view has really helped me see this more clearly.
The one thing that’s struck me has been the surprise and outrage of many people about the ESL. I fully understand being angry, but others have seemed more incredulous. How was this in any way a surprise to anyone? Billionaires do billionaire things. The Americans especially, view the clubs they own as nothing more than investments/assets. They will dream up schemes and jump at opportunities that enhance the value, profitablity and financial future of their investment. People here and in social media have been shouting about things like fairness, sporting ethos and the heritage of the game. Did they not realize these things are simply quaint concepts to the owners? The only time they become a consideration is when they threaten the value or future of their investment. Fortunately, that’s what happened this time. But please don’t anyone believe for a second the same owners aren’t – as we speak – scheming up new ways of cementing their advantage or profting from and furthering the inequity of anything that helps them.
These owners are constantly interacting with other entities – banks, TV networks, sponsors, etc. who share their view of the club as an asset to be grown and monetized at all costs. They look at players, fans, employees etc.as tools to leverage their asset value.
Not sure how anyone ever thought otherwise.
I’m sure you all know that FIFA are in fact a registered charity. (Pretty sure EUFA are too) It has been said that the country that ‘wins thus hosts the WC’ has to pay for 1st class air travel as well as provide 5/6 star accommodation for every FIFA delegate (sometimes up to 300 delegates attend the finals) and provide diplomatic immunity. Oh and as they are a registered charity they pay zero tax
Really great Tim. I have to admit all of this stuff makes my brain hurt and I am glad you do such a great job of discussing the issues in your posts. You are the smart person who clearly thinks this stuff through and can discuss your thoughts in a very eloquent way. I can just agree with what you say and know that I have a ready made informed and well thought out opinion without having to do any of the work myself. Thanks again.
Tim, to the contrary I commend and thank you for posting so often these past few days.
After the fatigue of the last few seasons where passions have certainly lowered, the threat of losing Arsenal was a welcome reminder and stirrer of how much the Club means to us.
I don’t know any of the answers but I do know the following:
1. The clubs should be punished. Even after a couple of day to breathe, I am still of the opinion we should be relegated from the PL. A warning. A show of strength that football is bigger than any one (or 6) club, and an appeasement to the other 14 (and the rest of English football). Plus a financial punishment to the owners.
2. The CL needs reformed, drastically as you highlight above. Now is realistically Ceferin’s one time possibility to do that. Of course I think he’ll bottle / fudge it, but one can always hope.
3. Wealthy people used to buy English football clubs to put money into them. This is not anti-American (a country I like very much, and where my wife hails from) but the Glazers changed that. Comments about “what do you expect from a billionaire / business” are wide of the mark, because there is zero history in England prior to the Glazers of a club being run for an owners benefit / profit. Looking to Spain, it’s also why the reaction there to the ESL was different. Real and Barca are owned by their supporters. The ESL to them was about getting more money for their club (and the lack of competition is not just a recent phenomenon there but the entire history of their league). In England however, it was purely and simply about greedy owners (in fairness City and Chelsea more from FOMO, and Spuds because “holy shit, really, can we come too?!”). And how appropriate that Joel Glazer was the figurehead here. I don’t know what the solution is, but I do know that sport as a business for an owners benefit does not sit well with me, and doesn’t with pretty much any fan in this country. We are simply not culturally attuned to that in the same way that Americans are. So something needs to be done, whether it’s imposing 51% fan ownership, or some other kind of disincentive / poison pill to put off these kind of owners. For the avoidance of doubt I also think the fit and proper owner tests need beefed up, because although we have perhaps a higher tolerance here for Sheikhs and Oligarchs, I’m not suggesting that the void be filled by Dictators and Mafioso.
Anyway, just my thoughts. Thank you once again for providing such a great platform for thoughts and insights.
For anyone who hasn’t read this I’d recommend you read SwissRamble’s excellent recent analysis (link below):
https://mobile.twitter.com/SwissRamble/status/1384043501432709122?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet
The level of debt in football is extraordinary. Basically, it’s been an arms race as to who can spend the most. Per Sam’s comment on a previous post, each time the PL and CL have received additional income from sponsors and broadcasters which has been distributed to clubs, that income has been absorbed in player salary inflation and spiralling agent fees. The biggest challenge for top level football is restraining wage inflation. If there’s any rancour at the state of football this is where people should focus their energies.
Arsenal actually aren’t in quite so poor a position debt wise (8th in the breakaway 12 table). However our biggest shortfalls are 1) we are not (and haven’t been for at least five years) growing commercial income at a comparable rate as our competition. And 2) our prize income from PL finishing placement and not competing in CL are significantly lower each season since 2016.
Unfortunately unless we win the EL this season there is going to have to be a large wage bill reduction and if Edu and Arteta want to spend, they’ll probably have to sell first. If we fail to secure European tournament qualification for next season I honestly think every player will be for sale at the right price.
I think this is a great example of what game theorists would call ‘the prisoner’s dilemma’. I don’t know if you’re familiar, but it goes something like this: two people (A and B) are in prison for the same crime. They each have an indepenent choice: stay silent, or blame the other one. If they both stay silent, they both get a small sentence. If one stays silent and the other one blabs, the blabber walks and the other does all the time. If both blab, they both do the time, albeit a slightly reduced sentence. What’s the correct choice to make?
Although the optimum outcome is to both stay silent, that relies on trust in the other person. If you assume the other person is self-interested and rational, you have to assume that they talked, and so the correct choice is to talk too. If you scale up the number of prisoners, the odds of someone talking only goes up, and when you do the maths the minimax strategy becomes clear: the correct choice is to talk.
How does that apply here? All clubs have a choice: spend within their means, or take on debt to get the best squad they can. The optimum choice is for every club to be sensible. However, if every other club is sensible, any individual club that spends lavishly will have a huge short term advantage (like being the only prisoner who talks) and maximise their returns. That means the least worst choice for every team is to spend more than they can afford. Arsenal’s “Europa league on a champions league wage budget” is stupid, and yet still might be the right choice – without heavy spending our likelyhood of getting into the champions league and all the revenue that entails is pretty small, and the alternative is a slow decline into the mass of have-nots.
This is the problem with all kinds of unregulated markets – the climate crisis is in no one’s long term interest (are any markets offering a short position on human civilisation?) and yet if there’s nothing stopping my competitors burning cheap coal, I rationally ought to do it too. Ditto debt bubbles like the 2008 crash (and the new one that we’re probably in again). The big question for me is whether there exists any kind of regulation that can stabilise the wild inflation in European football without choking the life out of the game at the same time. None of the suggestions I’ve heard so far have me fully convinced.
You raise some very good points. Governance is key.
UEFA’s failure to enforce FFP is probably the key determinant as to the current situation. When you look at the last 4 teams in the CL – club of the state of UAE, club of the state of Quatar, club solely owned by exiled oligarch, Europe’s largest and most successful club heavily in debt. How does any governing body police and reinforce rules against such a powerful bunch? We saw recently that when challenged legally UEFA just wilt. And even if clubs appeared to behave by the rules, how players and agents are remunerated has become ever more complex. Oh for the good old days of Cloughie and Graham and their unorthodox‘making the deal’ strategies.
As for the prisoner’s dilemma I have an alternative strategy. You accept you will never be the gorilla and instead, ape (forgive the pun) Dortmund and Liepzig. Position Arsenal as THE UK destination for the most innovative coaching talent and precocious playing talent. We need to put the ingredients in place to be able to attract the Bellingham, Haaland, Sancho calibre players in order to build back the club as a competitive force. London is a great place to work; we’ve one of the finest stadiums; and we pay well. Where we need to improve is scouting, cutting good deals and a youth-first playing policy. I’m not saying just build a team of 18 year olds but be a bit more ambitious and gamble a bit. Nagelsmann (for example) wouldn’t have stopped Eddie going on loan in January and then not played him until all our other strikers are broken. Less conservative, more courageous.
My biggest gripe with Arteta is that he was gifted the best generation of academy talent we’ve produced, who were already incorporated into the first team by the three previous managers (Wenger gave Saka and ESR their debuts and credit to Emery and Freddie, they continued their development).
Tim, I have read all your posts this week and they have been excellent. The ideas and the writing both — well done and thanks. The commenters today also have some great, thoughtful points. My own views are more selfish and instrumental as a gooner. I want my club back battling for the league title where it should be. I want Josh to recognize that — viewing the issues purely financially as he does — optimally increasing the value of this asset requires infusing Kroenke money over the next several years in order to right the ship. Screw “self-sustaining” for the time being. And put in someone smart and experienced to oversee (or replace) Edu and make sure the money is spent intelligently and that demanding standards are set and enforced throughout the organization. Engage with the fan groups and put a representative on the board. Also put Bob Wilson on the board. (Notice I do not mention Stan because he is a problem and will never be a solution.). Dude, it is still possible to get AFC back to where it should be, if you make these moves now.
Great piece, Tim. You never post too often (though I’m only now catching up) and you always provoke thought. Keep it up, sir!