What is stalling Theo??

[selassie]

The question you should be asking is - how many high profile players walk out on a free? We're a special case so there won't by any empirical evidence to look at. The closest situations I can remember is Gareth Bale but somehow Tottenham got him to sign anyway. Every other club seems to either sell in time or pay their players what they want. But we dont operate like that. It has happened a few times before where we've let the contracts of key players go down to a year. When you operate like we do, alarm bells have to be ringing when there are 2 years left. You sell at any cost or you give the player what you want. Failing that, you bully them into signing. You can't play hard ball when there's 6 months left because the player holds all the power. When he has 2 years left that's the time to freeze them out. Wenger had the right idea but just did it too late. Obviously we all prefer to sort ourselves out and start paying players more, but if we're going to operate in a retarded way, grebbo's plan is the best plan out of the other retarded plans available.

Yep, this.The fault lies with Arsenal and we are pretty unique in the sense that we let our stars run down their contracts, does this happen at Man United or Spurs? No it doesn't, you either pay the player the market rate or you lose...in our case we're losing.

We've been relatively lucky in the case of "Nasri", not so much with "RVP", but whatever we could have got for him wouldn't have made a difference because we wouldn't have spent it sufficiently.We're totally and utterly screwed with Theo, we either lose a 20mill + player on the cheap or more embarrassingly lose him for nothing.You have people like Gazidis, PHW & Arsene boasting about the club being financially prudent and sufficiently run yet we have "marketable" star players walking away for next to nothing and a bench full of flops who command circa 70k per week.Truly laughable, our business model sucks.

[Özim]

It makes perfect sense. The only way to keep our best players is by offering them big contracts when they're crap and no other top team will touch them with yours. "Sign this £80k pw deal Theo or we're selling you to Stoke next week who'll pay you £30k pw".

It's the only way an unsuccessful club like ours can keep their best players.

We've just done it with the Brit pack. The risk is Ramsey, Gibbs etc never improve. The alternative is what's happened with Theo happening with someone like Ramsey eg we didn't get him to re-sign and he suddenly rediscovers how to play football.

I agree with this to be honest, the players we've re-signed (whilst I'm not sure some of them will be any good at all) have signed at a time when they really have no other better options so they're only too keen to sign up.

One good season and their stock goes right up and we're not at the races anymore, some people don't seem to understand that unless we're competing for stuff no player who has any ambitions will want to stick around, especially when clubs with ambitions of success are showing an interest.

[Syn]

Geoff Arsenal ‏@GeoffArsenalAW to offer Theo a long term deal that makes him the clear highest earner at AFC plus a signing on fee of £4-5m.

Cheers Geoffrey.

[Grebbo]

I agree with this to be honest, the players we've re-signed (whilst I'm not sure some of them will be any good at all) have signed at a time when they really have no other better options so they're only too keen to sign up.

One good season and their stock goes right up and we're not at the races anymore, some people don't seem to understand that unless we're competing for stuff no player who has any ambitions will want to stick around, especially when clubs with ambitions of success are showing an interest.

[Grebbo]

Yep, this.The fault lies with Arsenal and we are pretty unique in the sense that we let our stars run down their contracts, does this happen at Man United or Spurs? No it doesn't, you either pay the player the market rate or you lose...in our case we're losing.

We've been relatively lucky in the case of "Nasri", not so much with "RVP", but whatever we could have got for him wouldn't have made a difference because we wouldn't have spent it sufficiently.We're totally and utterly screwed with Theo, we either lose a 20mill + player on the cheap or more embarrassingly lose him for nothing.You have people like Gazidis, PHW & Arsene boasting about the club being financially prudent and sufficiently run yet we have "marketable" star players walking away for next to nothing and a bench full of flops who command circa 70k per week.Truly laughable, our business model sucks.

Ah but you can't have it both ways. Because we're not challenging for the league our best players will naturally want to leave. If you let them run down their contract they will leave. They'd be fools not to. Arsenal is in terminal decline.

However, the one hope you've got of keeping star players is to sign the 'future' star players on long term contracts. This is risky because you end up paying Ramsey and Gibbs £60k pw and at the moment they're a bit shit. But Wenger does have a gift of spotting young talent so history has told us that most of these young talents will come good. Some will also remain shit and you're stuck with them on £60k pw and that's the risk of this strategy.

The bench full of flops on £70k pw could have been/could be star players.

Man U only keep their star players because they're the best team in England. They'd soon leave if they went 8 years without winning anything. Spurs must have offered Bale a get out if he re-signed for them, like they did with Modric.

[Grebbo]

The mystery for me is how on earth did Liverpool get Suarez to re-sign??!!

He must have a gentleman's agreement he can leave if he wants otherwise it's a mystery given how shit Liverpool are and how good he is.

[Power n Glory]

I explained why that question is useless. We don't work like other clubs.

When Rooney started making noise, Utd had to pay up because they couldn't afford to lose Rooney after losing Ronaldo. They signed him up quickly. But they have RVP now and let's see if Rooney runs his mouth again. Isn't Nani stalling on signing a contract and he's been frozen out?

We're pinned to a corner and if it's about money it makes no sense to lose him on a free. The difference between £75k and £100k is minor, a few million in a year. That won't break us. Losing another key player, that will reopen some old wounds and get a few more players questioning the clubs ambition and logic.

[Marc Overmars]

Cheers Geoffrey.

Good. I hope it's true.

[Power n Glory]

Ah but you can't have it both ways. Because we're not challenging for the league our best players will naturally want to leave. If you let them run down their contract they will leave. They'd be fools not to. Arsenal is in terminal decline.

However, the one hope you've got of keeping star players is to sign the 'future' star players on long term contracts. This is risky because you end up paying Ramsey and Gibbs £60k pw and at the moment they're a bit shit. But Wenger does have a gift of spotting young talent so history has told us that most of these young talents will come good. Some will also remain shit and you're stuck with them on £60k pw and that's the risk of this strategy.

The bench full of flops on £70k pw could have been/could be star players.

Man U only keep their star players because they're the best team in England. They'd soon leave if they went 8 years without winning anything. Spurs must have offered Bale a get out if he re-signed for them, like they did with Modric.

Paying over inflated prices for young players is silly in my opinion, especially for the British core. As I read somewhere else, players like Jenkinson and Jack would probably be happy playing for Arsenal even if they were on the dole. They'd play for peanuts. Young players in general will play for peanuts and just want the chance to play in the first team. It would make more sense to keep them on low wages for as long as possible until they have shown thy are worth the money. It shouldn't be based on potential and it's misguided thinking it protects us from poacher clubs.

If City, Chelsea etc wanted to offer Jack a massive contract we wouldn't be able to compete with that offer. They can easily trump £85k a week if they wanted to. In essence what we're doing is pay over the odds for 2/3 years when a player is still developing. It doesn't make sense to me and this isn't true loyalty if we're already rewarding players with cash incentives when they haven't even paid their dues on the pitch. If these players were to really hit the heights, the top clubs would be offering way more than their current deals and the only way to stop them from leaving is to match the offer or offer something competitive at least. This preemptive strike thing we have going on is silly. We're just fattening up our wage bill and when one the vultures come circling for new talent we have nothing left in the pot to give because we've needlessly blown millions on potential.

[Cripps_orig]

Pisses me off how you can always be so bloody right.

A week ago I laughed at you saying Theo is the best of our British contingent....

Just fuck off, man.

I hate being right