Yes, I know, we should all expect this sort of thing from the tabloids, but the sad fact of the matter is that many people simply read headlines and don’t actually look to see what has been said and so misinformation spreads and becomes ‘fact’ in the public domain.
Yesterday the Sun reported that Tom Fox, Arsenal’s chief commercial officer, had implied that winning was NOT vital, in fact, the was their sub-head. What did he actually say? Well, this:
“Arsenal Football Club is not only about winning.
“We have a large and engaged fan-base around the world who want to feel as if they belong to the club, and want to feel proud to belong to the club. That’s my primary business.”
Of course, the Sun’s introductory sentence read
A TOP-RANKING Arsenal official has risked supporters’ fury by insisting that winning is not everything.
Arsenal football club is not only about winning said Fox. Where in that statement does it say that winning is not vital or important or everything? In fact, in case that wasn’t clear enough, Fox even added
“
Obviously nothing instills pride in our fan-base more than winning, but there’s many things we do that make our fans feel proud.
“Developing young talent and finding those players in the marketplace make our fans feel proud. Whether it’s Serge Gnabry, who is a 17-year-old player in our reserve squad, whether it’s Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, whether it’s Theo Walcott, we look at these young players and have faith in our manager to develop them as the players for the future.
“And the fans come to a stadium that the club built really at a time 10 years ago when the board decided to build that stadium. Everything was going our way, it was Manchester United and Arsenal. But we made a very bold decision and we built that stadium on time and on budget — that makes our fans very proud.
“When they see that we can attract — even though we haven’t won a trophy in seven years — one of the top global brands in the world for the type of money and financial commitment they’re making, that makes our fans feel proud. So our brand is defined by more than winning.
“Football can be a fairly mercenary commercial environment. Football clubs go into the market and they really do business with whoever wants to pay them the most money. By the time this current shirt deal expires with Emirates, they would have been on our shirt for 13 years. That says a lot about how we run the football club and what’s important to us as a football club.
“So it’s not just about finding the best commercial opportunity.
The entire point of his comments was about Arsenal fans having other things to be proud of in the club at a time when they are struggling to get results on the pitch. That even though the club is not winning fans can still feel proud of the club. In what world is this a bad thing? He wasn’t saying that winning wasn’t important or vital or the main aim of the club. He was talking about the changing (and changed) landscape of football these days and how if you don’t operate from a commercial point of view you suffer and knowing that your brand will be worth more when it is winning, why on earth would Arsenal think that winning is not important?
But, again, why let facts get in the way of a story eh? If they’d even done a quick Google search they’d have found Fox saying this to the Arsenal site
“We want to win and we want to continue to build a great organization around this great brand.”
That pretty much sums up what he was trying to say in this Sun piece before they decided to twist it all over the place. ‘Arsenal are not only about winning’ is not the same, as some people have tried to tell me this morning, as ‘Winning is not important’ in the same way that ‘Christmas is not only about presents’ is not the same statement as ‘Presents are not important.’ Or another example – ‘Owning a shop is not all about sales’ is not the same as ‘Sales are not important.’
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Originally Posted by ollie the optimist
I'm not too sure how many of your average fan would agree with hardly anything written there.
