If people who buy football clubs can’t see they are being stupid, who are we to tell them?

 

 

• The key question that is never asked in the never-ending attacks on Arsenal
• Arsenal in Europe as Tottenham are ranked below Bodo/Glimt

By Tony Attwood

If you have been supporting Arsenal and reading Untold for a while, you might recall that in the past, especially in the days of Wenger, we have had a number of situations in which journalists and correspondents have suggested Arsenal get a disproportionate number of injuries.   

And now I think of this again today as Real Madrid’s squad seem to have had no fewer than seven ACL tears in recent months.

Looking for explanations, I began to wonder (as indeed many others have done) if it is something to do with their pitch, as Real Mad are apparently playing on a newly installed retractable pitch at the Bernabeu Stadium.

And what raised this issue now is that it appears that Real Madrid and Tottenham H are two clubs with a crazy amount of ACL issues.  So I started looking at what links these two venerable old competitors.

What particularly fascinated me was the point that not only is this just happening now,  but also this is the time when clubs are starting to experiment with playing different sports in the same stadium.

As you will probably remember, when Arsenal moved from Highbury to the new ground, there was no talk of incorporating any sports onto the pitch other than Arsenal FC football matches.   But of course, when the huge amount of money that it costs to build a new stadium is taken into account, such cautious thoughts can go out the window as clubs search in desperation for new sources of income.

Now I must also add that, as a person with a certain amount of experience in businesses outside football, I find the notion of spending a fortune on something backed up only by the view that “of course it will be all right,” rather odd.  I guess I was one of those people who thought instead that “if it can go wrong, it will go wrong”, and so we always worked with some caution as we expanded the business.  Although maybe that’s why I didn’t end up with a multinational corporation on my hands.

But increasingly, I get the view that people who have been successful elsewhere come into a football club in the belief that, having been successful in another industry, they can do it in football.   The old “it’s not rocket science” phrase is quoted with the thought that it’s easy: get a good manager, buy the right players, and well, what can go wrong?  Top of the league in a couple of months.

Of course it is not as simple as that, and the difference between Arsenal and other clubs, as I have tried to show, is that Arsenal discovered the truth of this in the 2018/19 period with Emery as manager.  He didn’t only buy bad players – of course not.   But he did buy Pepe from Lille, and then kept on playing him when it was clear he could not justify the €80m that was paid.   In the end, Pepe was dropped and ultimately given away.  And of course, the manager was sacked.  Not just for paying an Arsenal record fee for a poor player, but for continuing to play him when it was clear he wasn’t up to it.

Of course, Emery wasn’t a useless buyer of players – he got Saliba for €30m – but he couldn’t quickly see his own error and admit it.  And this starts to make me think that it is more than likely that new owners of PL clubs do get persuaded by managers that just buying some expensive players can take a club up the league.  As we know, it is not as simple as that.

Thus, today we have vast amounts of money wasted and squads bulding with unwanted players.  And yet the owners go on and on, so that since October 2020 Nottingham Frest, to take one example, have had seven managers Perira, Dyche, Postecoglou, Espirito Santo, Cooper, Read, and Hughton.

And they are not the only club taking such a weird and seemingly self-destructive approach.  Tottenham have had Turod, Frank, Postecoglou, Mason, Sterllini, Conte, Espirito Santo, Mason, Mourinho, and Pochettino.

Now, of course, having multiple managers is not the only reason clubs fail.  West Ham have only had four of late: Espirito Santo, Potter, Lopetegui and Moyes.  But they seem constantly affected by the memory that they were given their stadium on an insanely low rent, and so somehow they think nothing has to be paid for.

But consider Chelsea: eight managers in the last six years.  Rosenior, McEarlane, Maresca, Pochettino, Lampard, Potter, Tuchel, Lampard.   

And it goes on and on.   Manchester United have had seven.  It’s getting boring writing them all out, but you know what I mean, just as you know that Arsenal has had one manager since 2019.

There are two lessons here.  Changing managers frequently does not bring success, and good managers don’t always get it right straight away.  We might recall that in his first two and a half seasons, Arteta’s team came 8th, 8th and 5th.

But the demand for success now and the simplistic thought that “if you can’t do it I will get someone else who can,” dominates football.  Hence the continual failures.  

And of course, there is the fact that not every player or manager is ready to move just because some multi-millionaire says so.  Another is that the squad the new manager inherits is so horribly unbalanced and will take a long time to sort out.   Yet another is that the club has no wonderful up-and-coming youngsters who can be given time in the first team.   None of these things is the new manager’s fault, and yet, insanely, new managers get blamed for not turning a club round in a matter of months.

Yet managers do take up the option of managing a club which has an owner with impossible and ludicrous expectations, not least because they know that if they fail and are sacked, the compensation fee will be enough to feed the family for the next decade – and quite probably pay for the new house they’ve just bought.

The system, in fact, is crazy.   Billionaires who buy clubs think that, having become mega-successful in one business, they can automatically do it again in football.  And the simple message is: no, they can’t.

But then if they can’t see that simple reality, who are we to stop them?