Morning all.
The Chelsea saga rumbles on and it will until the club is sold and Roman Abramovich is history. I read an article by Jamie Carragher who felt it necessary to defend his comment about Man Utd and how the club should prise Thomas Tuchel away from Chelsea in the summer. Hypocrites is what Carragher called the Chelsea fans who strongly objected to his view.
And the reason l think it’s a little bit hypocritical of Chelsea supporters is because if teams – such as Manchester United with the manager, or other clubs with the players – are going to take advantage of the situation that Chelsea are in right now, Chelsea have been doing that for 20 years.
That was the big thing of Roman Abramovich coming – ‘we can throw our money about and get who we want’. The first thing they did was go to Manchester United and take Peter Kenyon as their CEO. ‘We’ll go to Liverpool and take the best midfielder in Europe and destabilise that club for two summers’ – they didn’t get him. ‘We’ll get Ashley Cole, an Invincible who has won everything at Arsenal. Yeah, we’ll go and get him. We get caught tapping up? Doesn’t matter, we’ll pay the fine’.
He’s right, that’s exactly what Chelsea did. Transfer fees went up enormously, wages increased dramatically, and when Chelsea came calling, I don’t think many football players said no. It wasn’t just first team players either as Chelsea signed up young talent too, no doubt just so other clubs couldn’t, then send them out on loan. If I could be bothered to search the internet, I strongly suspect the percentage of those youngsters signed, but never played first team football, would be high.
If that wasn’t bad enough, In came new owners at Man City and they did the same although I’m not sure they’ve abused used the loan system in a way Chelsea did over the years.
Ashley Cole was a huge loss for Arsenal and to this day, I still don’t know how or why the club agreed a deal in which Gallas was part of. Perhaps that’s the worst deal the club has ever sanctioned. But it was Man City who waved their cash around under the noses of Clichy, Nasri, Adebayor, Toure and even Sagna in the end, and they went running off to Manchester to win trophies. Yeah, right!
As Carragher said though, Arsenal weren’t the only club to lose players to Chelsea. Nor City and Newcastle Utd have already paid over the odds to sign a Premier League player. £30 million for a 30 year old striker? Still, Newcastle won’t care if come May, they’re still a Premier League club which is looking likely. As for Eddie Howe, he might still be at the club in a years time or he might just be find himself out of a job if things don’t go the way the new owners expect them to. How many managers have come and gone at Chelsea since 2003? How many at City before Pep? There’s no such word as stability, nor building a squad over time really. Rome might not be built in a day at Arsenal and other clubs who try to adhere to FFP, but at both Manchester clubs, Chelsea and now Newcastle, it really is built in a day. A day being one transfer window.
But, what perhaps gets lost in all of this is the clubs who sell players to wealthy clubs, also benefit, albeit indirectly, because its they who receive big money for their players. Often, an amount unobtainable had that player moved to any other club. Arsenal were labelled a selling club at the time of good players going to City but without those sales, I wonder if the club would have been able to remain in the top four without them. £25 million for Adebayor was 2/3 players for Arsene Wenger. Same goes for Nasri who City bought for a similar price.
Don’t get me wrong, I hate that football clubs are allowed to be owned by people like Abramovich etc but then I’m not keen on foreign ownership full stop, but at some stage over the years, a number of clubs in England have done ok out of them.
Tin hat firmly in place..
See you in the comments.
Much ofthe problem is that of the money generated by these sales so much of it goes out of the game in agents fees
For example Daily Mail quote.In the FA’s annual document on intermediary fees, City paid £24,122,753 to their players’ representatives, despite only making one signing between the period February 1 2018 until January 31 2019.
And the figures for 2020 show
Net total paid to agents/intermediaries
West Brom – £4,222,059
Burnley – £4,458,520
Crystal Palace – £6,760,093
Southampton – £6,804,154
Leeds – £7,034,943
Sheffield United – £7,081,018
Brighton – £7,496,038
Aston Villa – £8,928,343
Fulham – £9,347,927
West Ham – £9,689,567
Newcastle – £11,349,953
Leicester – £12,518,018
Wolves – £12,598,466
Everton – £14,071,886
Arsenal – £16,462,480
Tottenham – £16,520,177
Liverpool – £21,652,589
Manchester United – £29,801,555
Manchester City – £30,174,615
Chelsea – £35,247,822
The money does trickle down but so much disappears on the way .
Agents have been used as means to weaken clubs and destabilise players and have been paid handsomely for it .
They need to be curtailed.
Morning Rico And All
Rico I am only throwing ping pong balls so they don’t hurt or dent your tin hat.
If we were to ban foreign ownership should we then ban foreign players in the PL.
As for coaches I am still not fully convinced about Arteta but I am glad that the club has given him a few chance and not gone down the path of other clubs and keep changing coaches / managers every 6 or 12 months. That being said I still don’t think the club done the wright thing by Emery.
Agents are making far too much money out of the game. Sly lot who start rumours just to inflate their fees.
Morning Geoff, Potter, all.
Thank goodness Geoff. I think there’s a difference between ownership and players, I don’t think ownership will every return to being British either but at least something could be done about who owns them, if the FA wants to.
Interesting points there Rico, as good as you’ll read anywhere in the Arsenal blogosphere, the Chris Wood transfer was a classic, in one foul swoop Newcastle paid probably double his worth, strengthened their attack but critically weakened one of their relegation rivals, typical Chelsea tactics. Burnley simply couldn’t refuse given the position they’re in, they took a financial gamble and I personally hope they stay up.
I blame Peter Hill Wood for the Ashley Cole debacle, David Dein agreed a deal with him but Hill Wood vetoed it pushing Cole into the arms of Mourinho, it was a stupid decision by the Board which mirrored how his father Denis Hill Wood dealt with Liam Brady many years before, we have a history of being mean to ourselves…
Good morning Rico, I doubt that more than a handful of Arsenal supporters are entirely happy with the ownership of Arsenal FC being in the hands of the Kroenke family. I confess at the time of the ownership battle I preferred Usmanov over Kroenke if only for the reason that he had been a shareholder in the club and probably had more knowledge and understanding of football than the Kroenke clan had of soccer. Of course, there was also the chance that he would become our own source of untold billions to spend on the best players in the World. Does that make me a hypocrite?
Right at this moment I can only say how relieved I am that Usmanov failed in his bid to buy the club outright as otherwise we would be in the same unenviable position as Chelsea.
https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/past-times/3102815/charlie-george-dundee-united/
Thanks Kev. I too blame the club for the Cole deal, and all those involved in it.
Morning Cicero. Same here, I favoured Usmanov over the Kroenke family because of ambition and the want of better signings but I still wonder to this day whether or not Arsene Wenger really pushed hard enough to get them.
Also there was the battle for the shares which now that Kroenke has them all, he’s backed the manager. Just not in a way Chelsea etc have.
Too many people have too much to say about who we buy, keep or sell. Instead of leaving it up to the manager to select who he would like the club to buy and sell then the finger can only be pointed at one person for failing or winning. while showing support for the club / owners for getting the players the manager want’s
Re Ashley Cole,I too agree with you and Kev so that’s a hat trick .Penny pinching in Hill-Woods case . The board was divided just as much as the fans were , some for Dein others for Fiszman but it’s now an old story and we are where we are with Stan and junior because of it.
Hello Rico, first time comment but i want to put it out there. There needs to be changes made to FFP, we see that certain clubs are finding ways around this, thus i think the fair way would be, to take the mean (average) revenue from all 17 clubs in the premier league (exclude promoted teams), and punish anyone who goes over this. This way no matter how inflated clubs say they get, it will lower down if they are at the top end. and if they deal with numbers that seem way too fishy well it doesn’t take a genius to see some investigations are needed. I.e 1st position (city) gets 10 times the revenue of the next best club in revenues
Exactly Potter.
Hi Fizz and welcome. I wonder if FFP even exists anymore. It’s weird how championship clubs etc get deducted points for over spending yet the so called big clubs don’t. They just get an embargo, or at least that’s how it seems. Yet for my local team, Reading, their point deduction looks like it will cost them their place in the championship.
Fizz, the cornerstone of financial fair play (FFP) is what’s known as the “break-even requirement” which requires every team participating in UEFA competitions (238 clubs in 2020) to keep losses down to no more than €5 million over three years So it’s a UEFA thing, neither the FA nor the Premiership have any say in how FFP is operated.
Should the Premiership wish to put in place a salary cap or any financial restraint, they would need fourteen of the twenty clubs to vote in favour. I can’t see clubs such as Manchester City, Manchester United, Newcastle United, Liverpool, Chelsea, Tottenham and even Arsenal going along with such an idea. Turkeys voting for Christmas comes to mind. 😉
Chelsea v Arsenal
Wednesday, April 20 (originally Saturday, February 12)
Kick-off: 7.45pm
TV: Sky Sports
We can also confirm that the following fixtures have been rescheduled as a result of TV selections:
Arsenal v Manchester United
Saturday, April 23
Kick-off: 12.30pm (originally 3pm)
TV: BT Sport
West Ham United v Arsenal
Sunday, May 1 (originally Saturday, April 30)
Kick-off: 4.30pm
TV: Sky Sports
Manure knocked out of Champions League.
New post up.