Sunderland 2-0 Arsenal: Let The Autopsy Begin

Over the course of the next few days you will be told that now is not the time to analyse the season. The line will be that we’re still in fourth and there’s Champions League qualification to fight for, so we must re-focus, bounce back, show some sort of reaction and all that jazz. I disagree strongly. Of course I’d rather we finished fourth, and it should go without saying that, from a financial point of view, qualifying for the Champions League is better than not. But even if Arsene does successfully pull another qualification rabbit from his hat, it will be a mistake to view this season as anything other than what it is: failure.

Failure because, even if we do finish fourth, the difference between this season and the others since we moved to the Emirates is that at no point have we looked like a team capable of winning silverware. And I’m not just talking about the Champions League – the domestic cups have also looked well beyond a team of our brittleness. Don’t misunderstand me: I’m not saying we deserve silverware. Success on the pitch is not about ‘deserve’. But what I do think is that a club carrying the fourth highest wage bill in the league, £40m higher than its neighbours, ought to be capable of putting up a fight against its rivals.

And we aren’t capable.

Which is especially worrying with the visit of you-know-who looming. As Daniel Taylor notes in the Guardian – which I urge you to read without getting your knickers bunched about media bias – against the other four clubs realistically fighting for the Champions League Arsenal has only won once this season – the 5-3 against Chelsea, which now looks like an odd statistical outlier – and lost on every other occasion. Even before you start factoring in losses against Fulham, Swansea and Blackburn, it’s painfully clear not just that this is a team that has regressed, as you’d perhaps expect after the sale of Cesc, but one that’s been in regression since 07/08. If I had told you two years ago that Tomas Rosicky* would be an integral part of the team in 2012 you’d have been astonished.

(*Not because I particularly dislike him, or think he’s awful, but we surely all know what he is and isn’t capable of.)

I’ve felt since the summer that this season represents a moment of genuine existential crisis for Arsenal. Which sounds poncey, but I mean it in the literal sense: what does Arsenal exist to do? Is it just to harvest cash from the Champions League group stages, thereby ensuring we’re a profitable far-flung outpost in our American owner’s middling sporting empire? If so, how depressing.

There are several other arguments routinely trotted out to explain why Champions League qualification is vital for the club…

1) “Without the Champions League we’ll find it impossible to keep our best players!”
There’s truth here: not qualifying will certainly make it harder to keep the Van Persies and Vermaelens, but the reality is Arsenal has lost its best players year after year while qualifying for the Champions League. I’ve no doubt it’s a lure, but it clearly isn’t a magnetic enough one on its own.

2) “Without the Champions League we’ll find it impossible to buy the best players!”
There are a couple of responses to this. Firstly, we’ve never shopped from the kind of shelf that players like Hazard and Götze currently sit on. Either would cost in excess of £30m – more than double our record transfer fee. Perhaps the penny has dropped, and this summer we’ll embark on a vastly expensive buying spree. Ask yourself if that really feels likely though. Secondly, many of the kind of players we have signed I would argue would have come to Arsenal regardless – for the wages, the history of the club, living in London, the chance to work with Arsene and any other number of factors. Or do you really expect me to believe we couldn’t have signed Santos, Koscielny or Squillaci without the guarantee of Champions League football? Mertesacker was in a team flirting with relegation. Chamakh was being realistically linked with West Ham. Arsenal, even without Europe, was an upgrade.

(Incidentally, Suarez and Modric both signed for clubs not playing in the Champions League. Deals can be done if you’re savvy and willing to spend.)

I find it a depressing indictment of the amateur accountants we’ve all become that when you start talking about the importance of the Champions League no-one ever gives “because we might win it” as the answer to why it’s so cherished. No surprise, perhaps, given that in 14 years of qualification we’ve only been eliminated at the final and semi-final stages once each. Valencia, with two sets of runners-up medals, arguably have a better record.

No, the reason the Champions League is so important to us, is financial. On Monday the ever-diligent Arsenal Supporters Trust will publish a paper setting out exactly how important qualification is to Arsenal’s books. I don’t doubt they’re right (even if I will probably have to self-harm in the toilets at work while reading it.)

More interesting, I suspect, will be the club’s next set of accounts, which are expected to show significant profit. The reaction to that is easy enough to predict. We can and should debate the manager’s position, but the scale of rebuilding job – bear in mind that something still has to be done with Vela, Bendtner, Denilson et al(munia) – means we also need to start asking serious questions about the owner’s intentions and commitment. Arguably we ought to have been asking them forcefully much earlier.

For me, Kroenke looks like the wrong man at the wrong time. We might have been able to muddle through with his sort of ownership, which is seemingly based on not investing a penny and assuming Arsene would work miracles ad infinitum, if Utd were our only competitor. But this is a post Mansour/Abramovich world. We’re trying to fight men armed with laser guns using a matchlock pistol. That plan was never going to be sustainable in the long-term.

(For a start, I’d prefer we at least armed Pat Rice with a Kalashnikov.)

We live in a free market economy and Arsenal is a non-quoted PLC, so my views on the ownership count for nothing more than my ability to withdraw my ticket money. In fact one fan suggested that’s what I should do if I’m unhappy and I suppose he’s right, but again it’s depressing to be reduced to mere consumers whose only right of redress is to reject the thing they love.

According to this year’s Deloitte Football Money League, we’re the 5^th most cash generative club in the world. We are almost entirely ~~self-sustainable~~ fan-funded. But what happens if the team keeps declining? What happens if we don’t qualify for Europe at all? And if the season ticket waiting list really starts to shrink?

Does Stan Kroenke have the answer to these questions? Is he even aware of the level of discontent? What kind of manager does he think should eventually replace Arsene? Will it have to be another nickel and dimer? Does Kroenke even watch the games? Could he name our starting back four next week? (Trick question: no one could these days.)

I’ve don’t know, because I know almost nothing about the man. No club ‘deserves’ silverware, but Arsenal does deserve an owner for whom Arsenal is their #1 priority. It should be the first thing they think about in the morning and the last thing when they go to bed. Given the breadth and location of his other interests it’s impossible to think that’s the case with Kroenke. So I’m worried. That’s what this is: me worrying about the long-term future of the club. It’s not about trophies. I’ll still support if we never win anything again. And it certainly isn’t a cry for Usmanov to come in either. But what I’m trying to do with this brainspill is to say all this is the kind of stuff we should be debating now. Politely. Logically.

I’m not interested in being told we have to wait until the end of the season to have the discussion. Because after that it’ll be, ‘Well, we have to wait until the end of the transfer window to evaluate’. And then the cycle starts all over again. I’m terrified by the amount of work which needs to be done at Arsenal and how long it might take, especially if as seems likely we lose the skipper. The side requires transformative change, not tweaking, but there is a kernel of exciting young players in place. Wilshere, Ramsey, Miyaichi, Coquelin and Chamberlain – the poor bastard who none of the seniors saw fit to console either after the OG or at full-time. On Wednesday night I felt embarrassed and numb. Now I feel worried. Because when this man is starting to make sense, you know you’ve really lost the plot.

– TDC