Morning Everyone,
Quiet this morning in terms of Arsenal related transfer news, but I expect it to pick up as the day goes by..
Last night the results of the Arsenal Supporters Trust survey were released, you may be surprised or not so much with the percentages.To tell you the truth, its as I expected for basically all of the questions. The link will take you to an AST website page, but you will have to look near the bottom of the page for the download link for the actual results.
To summarize the important parts for you:
- 82% of respondents thought that Red and White - Alisher Usmanov's company - deserve their place on the board.
- 75% are not happy with Silent Stan's vision for the club.
- 60% of the respondents are happy with the 'self-sustainability' model, 40% want outside benefactors/investors to pump in their own money.
- 83% want new appointments to the board, fresh faces to drive the club forward.
- 72% want David Dein back working at the club.
- Not so good on the footballing side, with only 1.5% highly satisfied with performances, while 20% were satisfied and a combined 78.5% slightly satisfied or unsatisfied.
- Despite these troubling results, Arsene Wenger is popular man with 77% in favour of his continuance at the club.
- 89% of respondents ranked Wenger and staff as being good at introducing, or rather continuing the entertaining, attractive football being played.
Its all good and well that Arsenal want to be self sustainable. I, as a fan, get a good feeling when I think that we don't have to rely on one figure to pump money into the club. When that one figure gets bored, or dies, or loses that money, how will the club continue to survive? I mean look at Man City. They've been buying top notch or average players for ridiculous prices for years now. Samir Nasri wasn't a top player, yet because we knew they had unlimited cash to spend we charged them 10mil more than he was worth. And they didn't look twice, they just snapped him up because they know that money is no object. They've spent well over 500mil on players and wages, and that's why they've won the Premier League. They didn't earn it, they didn't deserve it, they just payed more than anyone else for it. And they couldn't even cleanly beat as average a Man Utd squad as there has ever been to it. That shows you that it is not about the players you have. Sure, you do have to have some level of quality on the pitch, but as long as you have that winning mentality, that desire and passion to win, you'll always be in the running for the top prizes.
I'm not saying that Arsenal are run properly. We can call ourselves self sustainable but that doesn't really count for anything unless FFP does kick in, which I doubt it will. There is too much corruption and money for the big boys to get knocked down. There needs to be changes to the way we are run as a football club. We need to get fresh faces on the board. We need to get direction, and that direction has to be from the top. We need to fix the way we hand out high wages to below par players. We need to use all the money available in order to bring top notch players in. When Fabregas and Nasri were sold last summer, unless Arsene wasn't given all of their sale money to reinvest, we could have bought in quality replacements.
We need to be more ruthless. We cannot keep having faith in players who are consistently injured. Abou Diaby for instance. Why is he still at the club earning 50k a week for doing nothing? Even when that injured player you had faith in returns and gives you a world class season, he's just going to leave for bigger money (sound familiar?), because that's what talks nowadays.
Maybe I'm wrong and FFP will save the day, and we will become the model club for all others to follow, but I very much doubt it.
In other news, Laurent Koscielny is reportedly being handed a new 3 year contract, to add to the existing one which ends in 2 years, which will carry him through till 2017. That's more like it, at least we are acting now and not next year.
Nothing else worth going into today, there were a few bits from David Dein about Robin Van Persie and PSG are not after him. Also, some player called Msakni turned us down, we cannot even attract an unknown from Tunisia.
'Till Tomorrow
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