- Have Arsenal only got one world class player as Carragher suggests or is he talking nonsense as usual?
- Both the Media and the refs can make reputations and destroy them
By Tony Attwood
One reason why football is such a dodgy industry to be involved in comes from the fact that certain aspects of the media love to knock specific clubs.
Take the recent headline for example, that “Raheem Sterling could face jail time after dangerous driving and drug charges” – which appears in the Telegraph. That has a picture of Stirling wearing Arsenal shirt. (And you can see the picture and headline even if you are not a subscriber to the paper – it is there on line, available to anyone who looks).
Now below this the paper does say in a much lower, much smaller headline “Former Manchester City and England forward will appear in court next month and faces custodial sentence if convicted” and there is no mention of Arsenal there, but it is the picture that many will see and can lead to an association between the player and Arsenal. Indeed it is a viable question to ask, why, if the story has no Arsenal context, is he shown in an Arsenal shirt? The answer I suspect will be “I don’t know, we just happened to pick that picture” but that is not good enough. Pictures, especially when associated with criminality, have an impact, and need to be chosen with care..
Of course I am not suggesting that one picture over one story will directly affect everyone’s view of Arsenal with this sort of negative portrayal delivered often enough it can have an effect. But there is the issue of subconscious association. If you see two items or issues linked together often enough, they become firmly linked in your mind – it is very hard to avoid that. That is how advertising works after all.
Now the contrary argument could be that Stirling did indeed play for Arsenal, and that is true: he played 17 times, on loan. But that is as nothing compared to 95 games for Liverpool, 59 for Chelsea and 225 for Manc. And yet the Photo Editor or the Picture Editor would have deliberately chosen to show him in an Arsenal shirt in relation to this negative story. One wonders why.
But again one may ask, will one picture make that much difference to anyone’s perception of Arsenal? For many of us who know who played for whom, no, of course not. But with Arsenal constantly associated with negativity, as we have shown in other reports of late, the effect does build up, and the notion is always there: – Arsenal cheat, Arsenal are associated with players who cheat. So associating Stirling, going to prison, and Arsenal just emphasizes the fact: you can’t trust Arsenal.
Of course I am not suggesting that every reader will look at the picture, read the story and think “typical Arsenal always associated with dodgy dealings”. But what we are looking at here is a cumulative overall effect.
Having that player in an Arsenal shirt for that story, might be an unfortunate coincidence, but when this sort of thing happens a lot one begins to wonder.
Of course this repeated negativity in media reporting can have an impact on all clubs – although some far less than others. So for example the sale quite recently of a part of Liverpool is said by some outlets to value the whole Liverpool club at £5.5 billion, and because of the regular positive image-setting of Liverpool FC in the media, this is perceived as a good thing.
Of course that story doesn’t directly affect Arsenal because the club is not for sale, but where the image knocking is as consistent as it is with Arsenal, it can leave those who don’t study the whole effect believing that decent profits can be made from investing in football.
This is especially so when we see that there was an 8% increase in Premier League revenue in 2024/25, taking the league’s turnover to £6.8 billion.
One argument put forward by websites like Premier League Now is that this is because of the promotion and relegation system throughout football – but of course English football is hardly unique in this regard.
But there is a simpler stranger reason for a worldwide interest in investing in Premier League football, and that is the belief that although most clubs are not making a profit at a moment, they could be making such a profit if only they were managed properly. And the people who believe this tend to believe it is they themselves who cold make this happen.
Thus this belief that “my club” could do better if only it were properly run is spread by the media – and the writers therein give the impression that they (the journalists) know what should happen, but it is only the current idiots running the club who can get it all so wrong.
If we take a look at the financial results of Premier League clubs since the COVID crisis shut down the notion of large crowds attending matches, losses have not just been a part of football, they have been getting bigger and bigger. If one takes the whole Premier League as a unit, its losses which before COVID could be around £200m a season, but are now just on £800m a season.
This quite obviously cannot go on, and eventually we are going to run out of very rich people who are willing to buy a football club in the mistaken belief that the previous owners were idiots but they can put matters right. There is no reason why people keep on thinking that where everyone else has failed they can buck the trend and make money out of football, but that’s what seems to happen.
Sometimes such entrepreneurs look at the likes of Read Madrid, Inter and ManU and think, if they can make a profit, then I can make club X into something just as profitable. Sometimes they look at Liverpool and Chelsea and think – they make a profit sometimes and not other time – all they need is proper control and they would make money all the time.
And even if they look at the whole Premier League and see that as a league the vast majority of clubs make a loss, their past experience as successful business people makes them think they have the magic touch even though the PL over all has lost money for over seven years in a row.
Worse (and this is the bit I suspect the entrepreneurs often miss), is the fact that not only has the league as a whole been losing money every year since 2019, there is no pattern to those losses. Some years they shoot up and some years they go down (as with a billion pounds losses in the year 2000).
So what does that mean for the future. I’ll try and explain in the next article. But here is an opening thought: losses cannot go on forever, and most of the PL clubs are making a loss.
