Arsenal AGM

[Olivier's xmas twist]

Managers shouldn't be involved in these kinds of decisions and it's unlikely Fergie/Mancini etc are. Leave ticket pricing to the marketing department.

Our ticket price increase was a real own goal by the club given that it brought in only around 4.5M and we made a 18M profit on transfers this season. We already had the highest prices in the league IIRC and raising them does nothing apart from piss off fans, a lot of whom are already on the fence about attending games.

So you think they are not told and its just sprung on them?

[Olivier's xmas twist]

Why comment and defend it if you thought it wasn't true?

Said it might not be true as i had not seen the link and expected you to post it.

[Power n Glory]

Said it might not be true as i had not seen the link and expected you to post it.

Go read Le Grove. Google Le Grove and find the AGM one. This ipod is too fiddly to copy and paste links.

[Boss]

So you think they are not told and its just sprung on them?

Has very little to do with them, so yep.

[Fist of Lehmann]

Unless Wenger specifically states it elsewhere, this is what I think Le Grove is talking about (~10:40 mark)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrNXDAZIYZQ

"I know as well that in the modern world ticket pricing is a problem. We spoke about that alot at the board before that decision has been made, but just to keep the players we have to put our wages up so high that the financial situation becomes more and more difficlut for us"

From that alone it's difficult to ascertain how much involvement he had in the decision, but given his justification of it he is at the very least outwardly complicit.

Why is Wenger involved in deciding ticket pricing? Wenger speaks about the need to keep hold of players in the face of spiralling wage demands. It's self-evident that money affects the ability to build the team. Whether that is justification for involvement, however large or small it may be, I neither know enough to care or care enough to know.

The question in my mind is why?
Why is he talking about the need of extra funds to service player wages when we know that:

a) We have a combined Wage and Transfer budget
b) Funds garnered from players sales are reserved for this budget
c) We started the summer with a £30-£50m 'warchest' (speculatively)
d) We made a transfer profit and we didn't even manage to spend that

With gates stable at around £93m a price rise of 6.5% is little more than £6m. A sum that SwissRamble claims could easily have been offset had one of the minted board members swallowed the £3m in fees associated with Kroenke's buyout.

So why the line about needing a paltry £6m for wages when we did not even spend our transfer surplus let alone the supposed warchest?
And at the AGM why wouldn't they talk about about Tom Fox's bonus or what the criteria for it was?

Tom Fox, if you need reminding is Commercial Director, the guy who on seeing the 40,000 waiting list for season tickets said “As a US sports executive… you think, you’re not charging enough for tickets.”

Both Wenger and Gazidis have spoken about the long discussions over the ticket price hike, presumably to propogate the idea that it was not a decision taken lightly. Then again, maybe they were undecided as to how much they could get away with.

[Syn]

Whether or not Wenger 'should' be involve in pricing strategy, the point about whether Fergie or Mancini would be involved...they're not involved because they're too thick to be involved. Or, at least, there's never a consideration to involve them because they don't have the credentials to be involved. Wenger, on the other hand, is clued up on economics.

Too much is being made of it...as it so often is with the pathetic false outrage from fans when we don't have a clue what's going on.

[Power n Glory]

Unless Wenger specifically states it elsewhere, this is what I think Le Grove is talking about (~10:40 mark)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrNXDAZIYZQ



From that alone it's difficult to ascertain how much involvement he had in the decision, but given his justification of it he is at the very least outwardly complicit.

Why is Wenger involved in deciding ticket pricing? Wenger speaks about the need to keep hold of players in the face of spiralling wage demands. It's self-evident that money affects the ability to build the team. Whether that is justification for involvement, however large or small it may be, I neither know enough to care or care enough to know.

The question in my mind is why?
Why is he talking about the need of extra funds to service player wages when we know that:

a) We have a combined Wage and Transfer budget
b) Funds garnered from players sales are reserved for this budget
c) We started the summer with a £30-£50m 'warchest' (speculatively)
d) We made a transfer profit and we didn't even manage to spend that

With gates stable at around £93m a price rise of 6.5% is little more than £6m. A sum that SwissRamble claims could easily have been offset had one of the minted board members swallowed the £3m in fees associated with Kroenke's buyout.

So why the line about needing a paltry £6m for wages when we did not even spend our transfer surplus let alone the supposed warchest?
And at the AGM why wouldn't they talk about about Tom Fox's bonus or what the criteria for it was?

Tom Fox, if you need reminding is Commercial Director, the guy who on seeing the 40,000 waiting list for season tickets said “As a US sports executive… you think, you’re not charging enough for tickets.”

Both Wenger and Gazidis have spoken about the long discussions over the ticket price hike, presumably to propogate the idea that it was not a decision taken lightly. Then again, maybe they were undecided as to how much they could get away with.

That's a good post and hits a few points I'm driving at.

[Niall_Quinn]

The £6million per year is £60mill plus interest over 10 years. Tidy even if everything else stays flat. Money men won't look at things the same way as fans.

[gunsofashburtongrove]

My understanding of the whole story is when Wenger, Dein and rest of board signed up for the stadium they all agreed on not being able to spend for a few seasons, relying heavily on developing youngsters and limited top salaries. We achieved our primary goal of increasing the income from gate fees, how ever to fund the project they got into not so great commercial deals which were while not being high value was structured favorably. Unfortunately what happened next was the advent of Chelsea and a a steep increase in revenues of clubs like Real, Barca and Mancs. A lot of clubs started developing strong international scouting networks as well (not a strong point of English clubs before). The original plan could have been a few years of transition and then returning back to winning some trophies if not world domination. The unexpected events mentioned earlier coupled our inability to increase revenues meant that we not being able to compete with other top teams in terms of wages, gradually dawning on every one that we will develop great players but struggle to hold on to them. This i think is the point of disagreement that Dein had with the board, Dein wanting to get in investors who could help us through. Wenger is from what i gather on the Dein boat. Looks like he wanted t re-jig the whole team retaining only the top players, while the re-jig and and introduction/promotion of some young players worked what didn't work is retaining some Cesc and Nasri. Extending Cesc was always futile he did try for a gentle mans agreement for one season. The real disappointment for Wenger could have been losing out on Nasri and then losing out on Mata(again realiable people claiming we were in for him) due to wages. While we may have budgets to spend 20 to 25 mil on player fee we don't have budgets for huge salary. Despite of this we are still 4th or 5th on the highest salary league, largely as every one knows due to the relatively high average salaries that we play, again a problem when you see that a lot of performers were below average. The AGM has not provided any info in changing any of that. In hind sight we could all point at mistakes that could have been corrected, but i think i will take what has happened in the past 7 years including the lack of trophies.Its not an easy job building a new stadium(as others are finding out) and i think we have done an admirable job. What i'am worried about is in 2014 when we will improve our commercial revenues there is no saying what could happen to the other clubs for all that we know they could improve it further. The expectation on FFP bailing us out is misplaced. We know how Shitty has chosen to interpret it. Wenger has already made a public statement saying UEFA will struggle to enforce this (more of message to our board than anyone else). Footballisticly i would love to see honest, committed performances from the team which i think this squad will give as opposed to some other teams in the past which were supposedly high on quality.

[Xhaka Can’t]

That is a pretty good analysis.