Transfer targets in January

[Fist of Lehmann]

http://angryofislington.com/2012/01/...e-plain-truth/

So by this chap's reckoning, in summary:
We have about £40m in surplus
Some to all of it available to the manager
We won't spend above our surplus
We may save against the loss of CL money next year.

It's an extremely risk averse policy, particularly if we chose to reserve some of that surplus against the £25M-£40m we risk missing out on.

Also it's not as if a Jan splurge isn't unprecendented either. You would think that our financial situation now would be stronger than when we lumped on Arshavin.

Though tbh, if we don't sign anyone, nothing would surprise me less.

[LDG]

We're fucked until we get a better sponsorship deal is how I read into it.

They're in a tight corner are our board. They can't really up the ticket prices, they can't negotiate any new sponsorship deals untill next year, we can't borrow, they don't want to spend, we won't get into the CL.

The only option, IMO, is to gamble and spend some money. But they won't. So we're fucked.

[Syn]

I don't understand why we'd have to wait for a new sponsorship deal. That we can attract a massive sponsorship deal isn't up for debate. We definitely can. Our ability to borrow shouldn't be too affected by that, as far as I can see. FOL said it - the club is very scared of risk. I understand that to a certain extent, but for all this talk of sustainability and long term planning, I don't know how they can plan growth based on the idea of the club sliding down the table. Many league home games were going on general sale not long ago. I'm not suggesting they don't know what they're doing but I don't think there is a long-term vision. It's ad-hoc, 'lets try our luck' type stuff.

[Niall_Quinn]

There are so many holes in that analysis from angryofislington it's shocking. There's no point laying down headline points without clarifying them with the small print. I'll go through it when I'm not having a day on which I absolutely HAVE TO do some work instead of camping on GW. But in summary what that list reveals, if it's a fair reflection, is our board is 100% INCOMPETENT. 100%! Not just incompetent but naive and unqualified. But that's highly unlikely in reality so:

The cuntish shareholders banked at least £500mill of Kroenke's cash, all representing a return on close to zero investment. The greedy, greedy, cunts. True supporters of Arsenal, instead of the leeches we have, would have taken half and told Kroenke to kick the other half into the team. Even if it was in the form of loans. But they took the lot. This tells me they had every intention of bailing because they knew what was coming. How did they know? Because they engineered it. The greedy, greedy, anti-Arsenal cunts.

They fucking know last year and this are the final opportunity to kick money into the team before financial fair play comes into effect. Kroenke will certainly know that too. This was a chance to do what should have been done at this club a long time ago, replace the great players we have lost in the past with proper players rather then the general dross that fuck around making the "did I mention" wages go up. How much are we paying that cunt Chamakh, for example?

These guys stink. They fucking reek. Seen their sort before, they're not the same as us, they don't think the same way, the don't have human thoughts or emotions. The are like fucking me-me-me machines, everything to them is an opportunity to exploit. They'd whore their own mothers out if it made financial sense. Fucking hate them.

[Fist of Lehmann]

I've no idea what is involved in procuring a sponsorship deal. Presumably you eventually run out of parts of your club to pimp out (and I mean that in the prostitution sense not the bling bling sense).

But raising ticket prices is always seen as the path of least resistance, free money if you like. The only thing you have to balance off against ticket price increases is the rate of attrition you are likely to cause and that is statistically quite predictable. Safe, in other words.

With little movement in other revenue streams something has to offset spiralling wages.

It does feel as though the board are trying to cut their cloth until the commercial deals can be renegotiated, and hoping Wenger can work the oracle in the meantime. Hence the long period of limbo-like existence and talk of 4th not 1st.



Edit: Or you can think as NQ does and picture PHW rubbing his naked body with £50 notes.

[Coney]

Edit: Or you can think as NQ does and picture PHW rubbing his naked body with £50 notes.

Please don't post this kind of thing when it is my lunch break.

[Niall_Quinn]

and hoping Wenger can work the oracle in the meantime.

I believe that has been the board's entire strategy, the full amount of thought and attention they've paid to what goes on on the pitch. Turns out Wenger hasn't been able to do that. So their brilliant master plan for the football side of things has hit the shitter. But the other stuff went just fine, which is the main thing. And Kroenke and his crew are lining up Chinese and Africans to buy shirts. So things may not be so bad in the short term after all. There is still a good opportunity to rip one last pay day out of the club before the inevitable occurs. Like you say, there are sponsorship deals to negotiate. After that runs the course I suppose the plan is to hand the carcass over to Usmanov when the last drop of blood has been pumped out and the last scrap of meat stripped from the bone. Then it's up to him to supply the bandages and arrange a blood transfusion, if the laws of the game still permit it.

[Boss]

Our raise in ticket prices brought the club 4.5M in revenue (only) and pissed off at least 60,000 people, if not much more.

Surely there are far better ways to make 5M. We made 17M profit in the transfer window alone.

If our commercial deals are so bad (which they are - Liverpool will get 25-50M per year from their new deal with Warrior Sports for kit sponsorship, while we get 8M a year from Nike) I'm not sure why we couldn't ask the companies that sponsor us to either renegotiate or break the deals and get in new sponsors. It's been done before. Not sure what the purpose of our all new supposedly very good commercial team is when they've done fuck all apart from a tour in Asia (which brought us relatively nothing) and a few billboard sponsorship deals.

Astounding how bad the mismanagement of the club is from top to bottom, I really can't fathom how we expect to stay competitive in English football if we continue with this.

[Power n Glory]

We keep fucking about and we won't be able to attract a better sponsorship deal. Or we put ourselves in a bad position when it comes to renegotiating. Was just reading about Liverpool and they couldn't come to an agreement with Adidas.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2...?newsfeed=true

But, the upside to this story is that they have a new deal with some American Sportswear company called Warrior Sports and the deal is worth more than Man U's Nike sponsorship deal. It's worth £25m a year. Maybe we'll land on our feet if Nike try to low ball us with the price. Just have to make sure the idiots negotiating these sponsorship deals know how to shop around and can get the best deal possible. I can't believe this sponsorship nonsense either. It's the same crap we had while at Highbury. At least with new blood on the team, we should be able to get better deals. The people responsible for the bad contracts at Highbury probably negotiated the new terms for the Emirates deals.

But anyway, if we can't raise money through sponsorship deals, then we have to look elsewhere and it boils down to player management. Wenger has to be a lot smarter with his buys. He's wasting money with Park, Almunia, Squallci and co picking up a wage. We also can't afford to buy players like Ox for £10m plus and not play them. He should be getting more games off the bench. If the wage bill keeps going up then he's going to have to trim the squad. It's too big and poor in quality to be such a drain on our resources. That's bad management and they need to have a look into that. A lot of money going into a blackhole and they need to start holding Wenger accountable.

[Niall_Quinn]

We keep fucking about and we won't be able to attract a better sponsorship deal.

I'm betting a lot of the deals were locked up before Kroenke signed on the dotted line. Expect good news soon in terms of sponsorship. Also expect none of the income to be spent improving the team.