Middle Class opposition to "Conspicious Consumption"

[Fist of Lehmann]

Some of our supporters are behaving in precisely that way, praising our "self sustainable" model of not spending beyond our means, as if this short term sacrifice is necessary and crucial to maintain our long term financial health. This ignores that the fact that we're a football club first and foremost, and securing financial returns should not be the only goal of a football club.

I don't know how many people on GW praise the model of self-sustainability.

This has always been the unified stance of Arsenal's senior management in the face of calls for squad investment. We always spend within our means.

And yet despite the fact that our board contained some of the wealthiest men in Britain, none saw fit to help the club with it's stadium debt. Soft loans or a rights issue could have generated free cash for the club. But the former requires them to put their hands in their own pockets while the latter would perhaps have diluted their shareholding, and consequently their power.

So while beating the "self-sustainability" drum might seem like taking the moral high ground, for all intents and purposes it's more a convinient pretext to raise ticket prices and generate profit from player sales.

With Kroenke now having acquired the board's shares this is unlikely to change, in fact, expect to see the little man squeezed even harder.

And as for that last sentence - securing financial returns should not be the goal of a football club full stop. Financial returns should be a means to an end.

Does it matter if those financial returns come from the footballing business or another business altogether? Outside investment in football is nothing new, but when a club does not have to live with the consequence of it's financial mistakes it can happily throw any amount of money at the problem.

Before the uber-rich, every club had to live within it's means to a degree because no-one had unlimited outside funding. Beyond that it was skill, talent and hard work, all the things you needed to cultivate to succeed. Now success can now simply be bought, just like any commodity. Just like the Premier League trophy.