Why Arsene Wenger Is Not To Be Blamed

Arsenal FC are a club whose values and ordeals are based on the fact that they prefer playing football, the attractive way. The club is owned by the parent company of Arsenal Holding plc. The ownership of Arsenal is different from other clubs in the Premier League. Only 62,217 shares in Arsenal have been issued and they are not traded on a public exchange. The current ownership of Arsenal belongs to American sports tycoon Stan Kroenke, who holds 66.82 percent of the total shares of the club.

Since Arsenal does not have willing owners like Sheikh Mansour, Roman Abramovich or Tony Fernandes to fund their ambitions, their main source of income, given the stadium debt are from 

 

A. Ticket Sales (which is why they are the costliest team to watch in the flesh), 

B. Champions League TV Revenue (which is why Wenger keeps prioritizing fourth place before all else) and,

C. Player Sales (without which Arsenal’s net profits each year would be in the red, and is why stars disappear each season).

 

Now surely it is impossible theoretically, to keep selling players and fill a stadium with ticket prices like that, and keep finishing top 4 every season. But Arsenal FC does it. It gets harder each season, but they somehow do it in the end. And all credit for this goes to its manager, Arsene Wenger.

 

The problem is that fans (of both Arsenal and other teams) view Arsenal as a team that should be challenging for trophies and not as a feeder club to other giants of world football. Hence they keep calling for Wengers head whenever he fails to deliver. This is insane. All things taken into account, Arsenal should not be viewed as a title challenging club, at least till their debts are cleared.

 

Let us be rational they lose their best players every season and lack the spending power to compete with City, Chelsea and United. They are not a title challenging club and judging Wengers failures by viewing them as such is a flaw.

 

Arsene Wenger is the best man to manage Arsenal FC. Yes, they have gone backwards in terms of competitiveness on the pitch in the last few years, but under someone else, the situation would have been worse, Much worse.

 

Wenger has more than proven his ability when he was given a squad that was not constantly leaking talent to rival teams. He has won the league unbeaten with it.

 

And Wenger was the one who suggested the move to Emirates (to catch up to Uniteds revenue and spending power) and put himself in such a position. No other manager would walk into such a situation, that alone tells you the faith others have in themselves, and how willing they are to think of the club’s long term welfare in exchange for their own trophy ambitions and personal reputation.

 

One call also say that Kenny Dalglish and Brendan Rodgers were, are in similar positions with Liverpool, with the post Benitez Torres Alonso era now truly a thing of the past. They are not able to beat a top half team. Arsenal on the other hand have been trying very hard to be competitive even with losing players like Henry, Pires, Viera, Fabregas, Nasri and Van Persie in the past. It is not easy, repairing a once broken squad and replacing them with wonder kids. Arsenal still manages being among the elite class of world football each year by playing Attractive, Entertaining football which is loved by one and all.

DISCLAIMER: This article has been written by a member of the FootballWorld fraternity and represents the personal views of the writer and not of footballworld.co.in.
Posted by Mohammad Affanul Haque on behalf of FootballWorld.