Football is a passionate game and as such will always be subject to polemic views, especially when driven by an emotive and rabid tabloid media, whose job it is, let's remember, to shift copy, which is why every club that has a few bad results are 'in crisis' and every manager that has a decent season is 'the future of football'. It's easy to get caught up in; certainly I've been guilty of that in the past (and doubtless will be guilty of the same again in the future).
Having read an excellent article by Michael 'Zonal Marking' Cox, in which he asks 'What are Arsenal actually good at?' and having taken a look at the issues raised by the Arsenal Supporters' Trust, I found myself asking some fundamental questions about the state of the club: objective speaking, how are we doing? Where do we stand on the current spectrum of Premier League football clubs? How good a job has the manager actually been performing? What should we, as fans, expect now, next season, and beyond? What is the point of Arsenal Football Club?
It needs no mention that it has been a long time since Arsenal have won anything. For a club of Arsenal's calibre (still the third most successful in English football), 7 years potless is several years too many. In this respect alone, Arsène's recent tenure has been an abject failure. It would be remiss to suggest – as many have – that Arsenal have been nowhere near winning a trophy during that period, however. Two domestic finals, a European final (and a more recent Champions League semi final, our second best ever finish in that competition, let's not forget) and a league season in 07/08 in which we pushed it all the way to the wire, all represent a fair pop in various competitions.
Regardless of the odd cup run, many feel that Arsenal, under Wenger's continued stewardship, are regressing as a club. The blame for this, they feel, lies with manager. But objectively speaking, has he done such a bad job?
Those of you who have spent more than about thirty seconds discussing football with me will doubtless have been bored by me banging on about the peerless SimonKuper and Stefan Szymanski's seminal book Why England Lose. If you haven't read it, do so (particularly if you want some evidence as to why it is preposterous for Tottenham to be granted public money for a stadium). In this book, compelling evidence is put forward that league placing is, in essence, determined by wage spend, a point reiterated by Deloitte in their Annual Football Finances Report.
At this point, of course, I would expect Arsenal fans to point out the litany of overpaid, under-performing players in the current squad. This is, of course, something I agree with. I'm no more keen to pay to watch Denilson than the next man. From a subjective standpoint, too many players have not been pulling their weight. The same can be said of practically every big club and even most small ones, though, now and in the past. There are inefficiencies in Arsenal's wage spend; the question is whether or not these are being sufficiently offset by our 'good' performers. And the evidence suggests that, perhaps counter intuitively, even since the move to the Emirates, Arsenal have performed adequately or better than their wage bill would indicate.
A quote from an anonymous AST spokesman in this BBC article (presumably Tim) that “Our wage spend is 40% higher than the payroll at another club in north London and Arsenal are in danger of being overtaken more than temporarily by those who spend their wages more efficiently” is a strange and unnecessary red herring. Tottenham are without doubt having a remarkable season on a far smaller wage budget than Arsenal's, but whether they can sustain that next season and beyond, once the sharks start circling their underpaid star performers, and without the help of a free Togolese galloping lunatic remains to be seen. It would be statistically incredible if they did; the evidence suggests that without a significant increase in wage bill, it's unlikely. Even should they do so, they are not the barometer by which Arsenal should be measured.
The AST, by comparing our performance-per-pound to Tottenham's, leave themselves open to the obvious rebuttal that Arsenal are outperforming clubs such as Liverpool, who last season at least, had a larger wage bill than Arsenal, or if you are going to base your comparisons on just this season, which the AST have done, then Arsenal are hugely outperforming Chelsea, who have vastly more resources and yet find themselves level on points with Arsenal.
This data, taken from the Guardian, based on the most recent published end-of-year accounts available at the time of writing, shows Arsenal as having the fifth largest wage bill in the league and thus anything above fifth is performance beyond that which you should expect. A similar pattern can be seen since 2005: our wage bill has fluctuated between being the third and fifth largest. We have finished third and fourth. If we want to finish higher, we will have to either a) find as yet undiscovered inefficiencies to exploit, or b) spend more money.
The AST do raise importantquestions about what money we actually have to spend, why it isn't being spent, and what we can expect in the future. I fully expect the club to answer in the most ambiguous terms possible.
Whether Wenger has had money at his disposal since 2005 remains conjecture. As Arsenal fans we've been told the money is there if he wants it, but at times that has been totally at odds with the things Arsène has said directly and the inference of his actions. My gut feeling is that the sort of money we need to be able to compete with Manchester United, Chelsea and now Manchester City, is simply not available. Wenger is a peculiar and obstinate fellow but he isn't an idiot. Prior to the stadium move, he spent relatively freely, and he did so on players that would command comparatively large wages and was richly rewarded with trophies. In the Emirates era, this immediately stopped. I do not think that this is a coincidence. The other, quite obviously unforeseen, aspect is the new ownership paradigm exemplified by Roman Abramovic and followed by Sheikh Mansour. It is very difficult for a club operating on its own resources to compete with such spending and this model has been very much to Arsenal's detriment. One can raise questions about whether leaving Highbury was wise in retrospect, but I don't think that anyone would have predicted that owners would have invested literally hundreds of millions of pounds of personal funds into football clubs at the time the move was planned, and as such a move that was supposed to enable us to compete with Europe's elite in the long run has left us much further back than expected in the short-term.
It is interesting to note the 'money put in by owners' column in the Guardian data. An ominous 'none' in the Arsenal data. Whether or not you feel this is a good thing in the long run is a matter of personal opinion and business ethics, but it certainly hasn't hurt Chelsea or Manchester City in the short-term. Then again, Manchester United have managed to avoid such hand-outs without much (obvious and immediate) harm to their footballing fortunes.
So where does that leave us? Should we look to make changes so that we can once more compete for the league or should we accept our lot in life and be pleased that we are competing at the top end of the table? We've established that Arsenal have performed better than perception suggests in recent years but that is of little consolation to most Arsenal fans. Personally, I find it hard to form an opinion on what should happen at managerial level without knowing whether we have funds to spend. If money has been available (in large quantities) and Arsène Wenger has simply chosen not to spend it, then I think we need to look for a new manager; however, as I've said above, I think that is unlikely. I think one can make a reasonable argument that even if a new manager would have no more money to spend than Wenger has had, that a change in manager may provide fresh insight and thus new ways to compete against greater resources. But equally, we could end up worse off. Any change of manager from one who, previous trophies aside, has been delivering to expectation, is a gamble. The chances are that any change in manager would see those seasons in which we have the fifth-largest wage bill with a fifth place finish in the league.
What is without question is that something needs to change somewhere. At present, we are spinning around in a subsistence vortex; not good enough to win things, not bad enough – despite the broken cannons in the papers – to warrant marching orders. We could continue on this trajectory, of course: collectively buy in to the concept of '4th as a trophy', hope for the occasional good cup run, content with continued Champions League football. It is better than most clubs could ask for. In fact, scrap that, it's what most clubs aspire to. But personally speaking – and I really only can only speak personally here – I think it's not enough. In fact, I think it's a fairly pernicious attitude that is at odds with the point of sporting endeavour. But that's just me. I'm not a man who thinks that finishing sort of kinda ish near the top of the league deserves reward per se and that football has got it's priorities all wrong. But what I believe is at odds with the commercial realities of modern football. The simple fact is that the prize is money – bigger wages for players, greater share value for owners, more money for clubs to spend on better footballers – and winning money requires top four inertia, which Arsenal have happily sustained thus far and to hope to drive up commercial revenues.
We're not a club in freefall; we're a club in stasis, waiting for changes to happen in the world around us so that we can be relevant again. One wonders how long we will be waiting.
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