by EliteKiller » Sun Jul 14, 2019 12:43 am
The problems at Arsenal are fundamentally different from all our main rivals ....
We experienced huge increases in income from the stadium and share value in the first years of the Emirates 2006-2009 .... at the same time we increased our ticket prices to way above those of our rivals, again maximizing our income. For reasons only they understand the shareholders, directors and management decided not to invest this new income into the playing squad but to expand our cost base in non-football personnel, wages, debt payments and building a cash war-chest. We became the model for self-sustaining clubs, Wonger and soon Gazidis were heralded as financial geniuses all was right with our world.
But this policy was wrong, very, very wrong ...
When you buy assets at a price and those assets then appreciate in value, any collector or investor will want to acquire as many assets as possible. Football is a bit more complicated that collecting stamps, because in football those assets are players who need to stay healthy, require wages, and get old ... so there's a balance in buying young, paying the right salaries, and selling at prime price or at least selling before all value is lost. But the principle is the same as stamp collecting buy lots, buy cheap, sell high.
Of course you also need a collection of player as good or better than all your rivals ... hence we have the transfer market.
For a decade or more our transfer policy has been flawed we've paid to much for average players, overpaid in wages, and allowed players to leave cheap or even for free ... we are so far out of line with our rivals it's ridiculous ...
We've spent net more on players since 2006 than all but Utd and City, we've spent more on salaries than all but Utd and Chelsea, however we've made less selling our players than nearly half the clubs in the EPL ...
We have received the 3rd highest income yet seen our annual profits steadily decrease, until right now we are looking at our first loss in living memory ... and it get's worse we had the 1st or 2nd highest value squad all through the Arsenal v Utd years, now we have a squad valued at 50% of Man City, valued below Liverpool, Chelsea. Spurs, and Utd so just what's gone wrong?
Well it's pretty simple .... we maximized our revenue in 2006 since then, whilst we haves seen massive increases in line with our rivals on TV deals, all our other income streams have just increased at an inflationary rate marketing, match-day, catering all just ticking along. At the same time three new top six rivals have seen those income streams grow massively City, Liverpool, Spurs all seeing revenue jump by over 100% in a decade ... and Man Utd have remained Man Utd with such a massive income that it still just about supports their miss-management, ours no longer does.
So bottom line when we were had our chance, when we were ten years ahead of our rivals we failed to convert that into squad value, now the game has caught up we are making little or no profit, whilst our new rivals are now making over 100m .... and worst of all we have a broken squad and beleaguered management with no resources to fix that ... it's the mother of all clusterfucks the perfect storm of mistakes.
What can we do? Even if he wanted to Kroenke can't put in the 100m a year needed to keep up with our rivals, not that he probably would anyway, so what else can we do ...
We need to start buying cheap and selling high, not one or two players but ten or fifteen a season just like all our rivals do, we need to cut out the deadwood the players on high salaries who just don't deliver, we need to manage contracts ruthlessly, no more running down value, and we need to sell players for top price Bale, Coutinho, Ronaldo all clubs do that it hurts but it needs doing ...
Of course we can recover we're a huge London club in the biggest league in the world with all the fundemental bits to be successful ... after a decade of doing it wrong getting it right again will be a long, slow process it will require us to keep the faith because chances are it's getting worse before it gets better ....
