A fallacy quashed?

[Power n Glory]

Terry - we had a convo last week about Wenger's involvement with contract negotiations, the policy, player value and such. I hope you now get the point I was originally driving at.

[Kano]

from what i recall you said he makes the final call and i said he was involved but didnt push the button?

that convo went nowhere really so ive no interest in digging it back up in detail

[Power n Glory]

from what i recall you said he makes the final call and i said he was involved but didnt push the button?

that convo went nowhere really so ive no interest in digging it back up in detail

Damn right because at no point did I say he made the final call but we'll leave that alone.

[selassie]

I watched the AST meeting and this is what I gathered. AKBapologist has missed a lot and Gazidis was stressing a different point.



This quote has been misrepresented. For starters, the point in bold shows that Wenger is involved with the transfers and people can't keep making excuses for him as if when negotiations are taking place, he's out of the loop or off on holiday. The valuation of the player, how much of a priority it is to sign that player for that position is all discussed. That's what Gazidis was getting at when talking. At the meeting, a fan suggested Wenger shouldn't be involved in the negotiations because he ignores the market value of players and it's why we end up signing no one in most cases. He also said that the fans pay the going market rate for season tickets at Arsenal and have no choice but to pay, we can't dictate the price. Wenger should do the same and bite the bullet when it comes to transfers.

Gazidis replied with the above quote and also came back with an example. If Wenger had his eyes on a specific player and Gazidis went out and spent the whole budget on this one player, Wenger wouldn't be happy because there are other players we'd need to sign and budget for.

Can you see the problem? In most cases, we don't spend all the money and don't sign players. He did say we have money left over from unused resources. He also said it's up to Wenger to identify the key areas that need work and to set the priority on who to spend on, what position and how much. That makes sense and we shouldn't have a club where board members make decisions on who we buy. We have limits of course. We have to budget. But as seen with the goalkeeping situation at the start of the season, Wenger wouldn't budge on a couple of million because he didn't think it was worth it and the position wasn't a priority because he had faith in Almunia, Fabianski and Schezney. He won't be desperate to make certain signings if he believes we already have the quality in the club and that relates back to his quotes about signing 'super quality' players and killing talent.

When going for Alonso, I believe he had Whilshere and Ramsey in the back of his mind. It's no secret. We know his feelings on 'killing' talent and this is why we're not as active as we should be in the window. He could be thinking of Young Jack and Rambo now as we discuss Cesc and Nasri's futures. He did test them both out during the end of the season.

We all know we don't have unlimited resources and we've never thrown our hat in the ring to bid for players that would cost a fortune. Last winter, guys like Babel, Sessegnon, Steven Pienaar, Makoun, Sidwell, Curtis Davis went to other clubs for less than £10m. Snta Cruz, Ireland and Martins went to other clubs on loan. But the problem is, Wenger has too much faith in his current crop. I hope that changes this summer.

This.

p.s. This pretty much explains everything I was trying to explain earlier and backs up my point about Arsene operating in his "Own Transfer Market", a market that simply doesn't marry up with the "Current Transfer Market". It's not about spending 30million, it's about him being flexible with his Player valuations.

[LDG]

A squashed phallus.

[Fist of Lehmann]

Hmmm yes, you make an interesting point.

[Toronto Gooner]

backs up my point about Arsene operating in his "Own Transfer Market", a market that simply doesn't marry up with the "Current Transfer Market". It's not about spending 30million, it's about him being flexible with his Player valuations.

The problem with this is whether Wenger should be flexible and the valuation put forward by fans? Or the valuation put forward by the player's club? Or agent?

For example, Barcelona wanted to pay around 33 million for Fabregas but Arsenal put a valuation of 60 million on him. Should Wenger be "flexible" and agree to Barcelona's price?

[Coney]

A squashed phallus.

I'm so glad I was not the only person who thought that when I first saw the subject title.

[budesonide]

The problem with this is whether Wenger should be flexible and the valuation put forward by fans? Or the valuation put forward by the player's club? Or agent?

For example, Barcelona wanted to pay around 33 million for Fabregas but Arsenal put a valuation of 60 million on him. Should Wenger be "flexible" and agree to Barcelona's price?

no; wenger should move with the times and work with the general market valuation! Is today's market infalted? Absolutely!

But, if it is an urgent position you need to fill then once in while you have to bite the bullet and pay slightly over the odds for the quality you needed to keep competitive.

Letting the deal for xavi alonso die over a couple of millions was stupid imo! So was letting the deal for schwarzer fall through over just a million pds. Xavi alonso would have been massive massive for the club imho. And if we had bought a worldclass striker around the same valuation to top that then who knows?

As cripps said back in the thread, Man U bought rio,rooney and a couple more for big money over a few seasons and have since being supplementing them with fodder.

And no, no-one is saying splash a 100million in one go or on one player.

We pay the highest ticket prices around on the market; so the club should give an indication of wanting to compete in today's market IF the squad needs it desperately enough.

[AKBapologist]

1) I don't think we can afford to spend 30mill a season (net) on transfers, the last club to do that year in and year out in the EPL, who weren't mega rich was Liverpool - they would have had to go into administration if they weren't bailed out.

2) If we could, we certainly wouldn't have needed to raise ticket prices - for an under performing club who are already the most expensive sport venue in the world to raise ticket prices to do so whilst not financially needed to and having a surplus of +Xmill pounds a season would be nuts. As proven by fans and media reaction this summer.

3) We can probably dip into a one off fund, as explained by swiss ramble (http://swissramble.blogspot.com/2011...er-budget.html), but that fund would include first years worth of wages, fees, legal etc, so we can either add several 0-10mill squad like players, or one or two 30mill *stars* depending on how many we sell.

Furthermore, if you look under the bonnet, there are some underlying issues that suggest that the financial picture is not quite so wonderful as it has been painted. In fact, if you exclude the £11 million property profit and the £38 million made from player sales, then the remaining football profit in 2009/10 would only be £7 million. That’s still very respectable, especially as it is net of £14 million interest payments, but the interims really bring the ongoing challenges to the fore.

For the first six months of 2010/11, the club actually made a loss of £6 million, largely because property profits fell to £3 million, while the profit on player sales sharply declined to £4 million, mainly from the sale of Eduardo to Shakhtar Donetsk. In fact, the pure football business produced a loss of £13 million.

To be fair, part of that is due to timing differences with two less home games than the previous season and TV merit payments, but it does suggest that the business model is not quite as robust as previously thought. There has been an undue reliance on player sales with an average £25 million a year being generated from this activity since 2006. Good business, but it makes it hard to build a winning team.

4) Which means because we've been living within our means, we've been extremely restricted in what we could do in any transfer market and I doubt any manager would have had the latitude to do spend a whole lot more than we had, regardless of whether he valued certain signings more than AW did.

There's this repetitive fallibly going around, probably born out the believe that we're a "big club" and made year over year profits (actually, most of it was from one time development sales) - that we can spend money, maybe not Chelsea or United money, but liverpool or Tottenham money on new signings every year and be ok... I honestly don't think we can, and when average managers can become world beaters by cherry picking stars, when statistically, we've had a smaller (playing) squad than our rivals, when we've the average cost to quality ratio has risen whilst our spending power has stayed the same, I believe this to be our biggest disadvantage over the last few years. The ONLY things we can hope for is for the FFP to be successful and other clubs to be forced to cut spending, or failing that, a sugar daddy to step up to enable our club to continuously operate at a loss.