The international break is upon as such there’s very little Arsenal stuff to talk about. Thank goodness for the Arsenal FC Weekly Podcast!
On this week’s pod Jamie Sanderson from Young Guns is back for Part 1 to discuss Olympiacos and get all philosophical while Pete from The Beautiful Groan makes his debut in Part 2 to marvel at Cesc Fabregas, laugh at Sam Allardyce and ponder just how much Arsenal fans will miss Arsene Wenger once he’s gone.
For the first time you can subscribe to the Arsenal FC Weekly Podcast via iTunes (click here) or alternatively you can just subscribe directly to the RSS feed (click here).
Arsenal FC Weekly Podcast 8: Cescy results, celebrating Wenger and philosophical meanderings [42:58m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1304)Enjoy – I’m off to have a beer!
Have your say on this week’s Arsenal FC Weekly Podcast by leaving a comment.
Its good time now to give comfort to the team instead of giving complains.To me its des-respctfull to critic someone while they are giving their best for improvement.And we are talking abt a very good improvemnt here not average.Its just not fair as a reward for such a good effort!!!
Ambrosia,
I don’t want to be rude. Honestly.
But can you fucking address my question: Chelsea spent £400M to compete. That’s how much it cost them to build a squad. So let’s assume that’s how much a title-winning squad costs.
Of the squad we have now, only Clichy, RVP & Fabregas were around when we last won a trophy.
So I want you to give us a winning strategy for buying a squad without £200 Million to spend (that’s only half of what Chelsea spent).
Don’t dodge the question. Please take it on directly. Tell me how it was to be done.
Some fans are like children. It’s like my niece who thinks you just have to get to the ATM to get endless money.
There are no choices to be made. No recognition of the fact that we had absolutely no choice to take on a youth strategy, and no recognition of the fact that it could have meant not winning trophies for a while.
And what absolutelyy exposes the shallowness of this approach is that Arsenal have reached the Champions League final and semis twice in these barren years where we had never gone that far in history. We’ve played finals. We’ve been a victory at Old Trafford away from winning the league.
But some people are easily deceived by shiny objects.
But I won’t forget that Liverpool are the most successful club in England, and they’ve never won the Premier League. If you ever feel the need for perspective. Start there.
cant believe the dutch are coming out on saturday for a friendly, hope RVP stays fit and doesnt get injured!
Ole Gunner, if you want to bring Chelsea into the equation, in 2004, we had a team full of established champions of the highest quality, of those, how many have actually retired from the starting line up? Bergkamp is the only one, Lauren-Campbell-Ljungberg have definately seen better deals, we should still have had Cole if the management never messed him around, Pires was released prematurely, Gilberto Silva was also allowed to leave so easily, Vieira still had presence in the league and his name alone would make opponents fear Arsenal even if his quality had waned, Henry was let loose a full 12 months after a new contract and hefty signing on bonus, he should still be with us. Lehmann and Toure are the only ones who time has gone for Arsenal.
We dismantled a winning team, and winning culture very badly, once you lose the winning mentality, it is hard to get it back, and we have seen that we haven’t had the winning mentality, it will take something special to get it back.
Why did that team get disbanded so quickly? Instead of getting youngsters in droves to replace them, we should have got stars to replace stars, we have money for giving Henry a £3m one off payment for a new contract that he only saw off for a year, but no money to buy quality players? Give me a break.
I have told you, many teams have won titles in the face of bigger giants, Stuttgart did it, Bordeaux did it, why can’t Arsenal?
I like my nice football as much as the next man, but i won’t be brainwashed by the media gurus at our club, we used to be winners, and i hate the fact we are hoping rather than expecting us to win stuff and be a big force on all fronts. Since when did it become cool to accept underachievement?
I won’t criticise individual players like Diaby etc like some do, but the management, from the board to the coaches take us for a ride sometimes, imagine what will happen to other coaches who have barren spells as long as ours, and get battered at home twice in the space of a week, instead people shrugged it off.
I was also against giving Walcott £60k/week, Ozil is twice the player and is only on £7k/week, Hazard is a better player and is on £5k/week, if we are so prudent with money, why do we pay players over the odds? What has Walcott done to get such a big contract, Ramsey barely plays and he is on £35k/week, what the hell for? Busquets is on less money, and he is a player in the Spanish squad, baffles me sometimes.
Has it ever occurred to you that the team that went invincible in 2004 finished well off the pace in 2005 and 2006? Given their ages it was clear they had reached the end of their cycle. In 2006 it took the Spud players getting the shits for us to just nick a Champions League qualification.
I keep asking; Where was the money to come from?
How do you know how much Busquets earns? Don’t just make things up.
I think we’re clearly overachieving. No manager would come close to keeping Arsenal competitive against teams that have spent close to £1 Billion on players.
Sack the manager and we’d be even further away from winning the league.
You can come up with all kinds of silly scenarios (like Hazard is on £5K a week when you have no clue how much he earns or even how good he really is) but struggle to deal with the hard practical stuff.
We have remained competitive. Arsene has bought spectacularly well. He has developed a squad competing in the smi-finals of the Champions League on how much Chelsea pay 5 of their players in a year.
But that shouldn’t count, right? It’s not a trophy.
Bring in a new manager every year. When they dont win, fire them. That works, that’s why Chelsea have won the league & Champions League every year since 2006 isn’t it?
The revisionism of it all.
We disbanded the team too quickly my dog’s arse. As if it wasn’t the old team that fell behind badly in 2005 and 2006.
When we finally completely disbanded the invincibles by selling Henry, Ljungberg and Lauren, we went and almost won the league.
Arsene was supposed to believe that they would somehow reverse the ageing process and start winning again.
I am not calling for his head, I don’t think I ever said Wenger should be sent packing, what I am alluding to is he should not be given an easy ride, why shouldn’t he put under pressure, fans pay very good money every year, and the team doesn’t get close to winning a trophy, to tell the truth, we have played awesome football for 5 years since we last won the league, I would instantly take a league triumph on 1-0 wins all the way, we have shown enough times we can beat anyone, but not win trophies.
If you read any French publications, or follow the French league, he only signed his first pro contract earlier this year, and £5k/week was the figure issued, in any case, it is waaaaaaaaay below Walcotts £60k, and he is already a more complete player than Walcott. I may/may not watch Hazard, you may believe me or not, no worries for me.
Same applies to Busquets, he is on around €25k/week, way below the figure of Ramsey, and he has already shown his quality on the grand stage.
I won’t say Wenger has bought ’spectacularly well’, some haven’t shown they are able to elevate us to compete for titles.
Money is not a bigger issue for me, if we had a good tactical system, and found a solution to win, then we won’t need the money.
I am sorry, I haven’t bought into the spin from the club, the fact is we haven’t won anything in ages, and between 2005-2009, we have only challenged for the league once, this cannot be acceptable. If the board allow Wenger not to spend money and instead focus on property deals, and say it is fine, just finish 4th, they need to ask themselves if they are still focussing on sporting ambitions or another motive, i really hate not winning, or looking like we can really win, it really sucks big time. It sucks because we choose not to improve, but chase a vanity project.
@ Ambrosia – Just replying to your last couple of statements.
Walcott is on a high salary because he brings a level of marketability to Arsenal that players like Hazard or even Busquets just can’t. Walcott has the potential to be England’s best player and everybody wants a piece of him, he is paid more because he has the potential to bring in a lot of interest from all around the world into Arsenal. While I can’t really comment on Ramsey I would say that the reasoning behind his salary situation is that by paying him more as well as having him on my books we were able to stop him from joining United. It seems like a contradiction to criticise our unwillingness to spend but then overlook the fact that, in a different way, we have spent and brought in players like Ramsey and Walcott who have massive, massive potential and British marketability. Additionally, those players will help rid the club of the media’s “Arsene is anti-England” bias which can provide a positive effect for the club in a different way.
Finally, our comments in the podcast had nothing to do with giving Wenger an easy ride. We just wanted to take some time to look at the big picture of what Wenger has done during his time at this club and I think it would be very hard to argue that he’s not done a spectacularly successful job.
SpanishFry, we are told we look for the best players, regardless of passport, but to be honest, I don’t think Walcott should be on such a lofty contract, he has done nothing in the game yet, Kaka didn’t start seeing big money until he was 23, and by then he was already destroying teams on a regular for Milan.
On the pitch, Walcott hasn’t yet arrived for Arsenal, but he is on big money. Imagine we saved some of those lofty wages for a bigger player? It just puzzles me incredibly that we say there is no money, yet we pay over the odds on wages.
Eden Hazard may not be well known, but he has the complete package on the pitch, at 18 he is a leader, already L’equipe bemoaning him playing so well as he will have to leave the league because of them, he is on peanuts, and a player older than him doesn’t have the same skills is on way more, really baffles.
Just shows, the spin machine at arsenal can make folk think differently.
@ Ambrosia – Sorry about the “SpanishFry” tag, those comments came from me.
Re: Walcott, I think I already explained that he is extremely marketable. That’s all I said.
When you say it baffles you why Hazard doesn’t make as much money but is more skillful a lot of it comes down to marketability. That’s the way of the football world a lot of the time.
I don’t know where this “spin machine” comment is coming from. I don’t feel affected by it – I form my own opinions. We’ve had a good discussion and I think saying that at the end is a little bit unfair.
Now that our team has confidence and a bit of nastiness- I think it is safe and would be a great move to bring in Vieira in January. You saw what the simple appearance of Henry did to them. Vieira will bring us back to the promised land and cover for Song when he is in Africa
@Ambrosia – you sound like you maybe started supporting Arsenal when they were winning loads of trophies and are now bit disenchanted to discover it’s not as easy as it looked. NO – Arsene Wenger is not here just to win trophies. Arsenal as a club is NOT just about winning trophies. Some clubs go for decades without winning a thing. Some for centuries. Some never. Generally you won’t hear their fans bitching about it like spoilt brats.
Last weekend I sat and watched Arsenal beat Blackburn 6-2. It was a brilliant match. Easily the best game in the Prem that weekend. I’d rather sit and watch that than stare at a tin cup for 2 hours going – “Oohh, goody, look what we won.”
Arsene is not above criticism – but you cant have been reading this or any other Arsenal blog if you think he’s getting an easy ride.
Might I politely suggest you go and support one of these Spanish, French, Italian, Portugese etc. clubs you admire so much? You can have trophies coming out of your ass – and be happy.
Saying Arsene is above criticism is a red herring.
As far as I can tell, there is nobody here saying; “How dare you criticise Arsene”.
What Ambrosia (and so many others) get taken to task for is that their evaluation of the state of things is misguided and not useful.
An example is the failure to accept the notion that clubs exist to win trophies,a nd if you’re not winning trophies you’re doomed. And that’s just wrong.
Then there’s the I-Know-Brigade who know everything the manager should be doing. Eden Hazard should be playing for Arsenal and not Theo Walcott. This person shouldn’t be on this sum of money. All having no real knowledge of the situation. It’s silly and it’s destructive.
Then there are those who just want money spent as if spending money guarantees anything.
Then there are those just distorting what has happened in the last 4 years. That’s the one that gets to me. They blame Wenger for not keeping the invincibles, whereas it was clear after 2 years of poor performance in 2006 that Arsenal had to rebuild or fall out of contention altogether.
They gloss over relative success and want us to believe that if we’d for example won the Carling Cup in 07 and 09 it was, in terms of success, of more weight than reaching the CL semi-final and final, and being one victory away from winning the league. All that is glossed over as if even relative success is no success at all.
Sure, it’s not enough to reach finals, but it is still an achievement. Now we’re a seeded team in Europe, one of the top 6 rated. Someone wants me to think that’s a disaster.
Then there is the lie that football is winner-take-all scenario in which you either win trebles or die. And it’s so untrue. Manchester United won a double 2 seasons ago, and made a huge loss. And even in that year, their revenue from that footballing success amounted to something like £20M more than Arsenal got from winning no trophy.
Then there is the crude idea that the manager shouldn’t think of the health of the club. The idea that the manager should be like the child who thinks you just have to get to the ATM to get endless cash, and should hold no concept of where the money he spends comes from.
This one idea is madness. Arsene’s job is not to balance the books they say. Well, his job is to succeed as best he can with the resources the club has.
And the club being £300M in debt should not like Liverpool or Man City be getting into ever increasing debt to buy players, especally if success only nets you £20M more.
We need a reasonable, comprehensive discussion of the situation at Arsenal with everybody accepting the underlying realities.
What’s with this Ambrosia dude? Reminds me of several of my pals last season, btn Oct-Dec who were so angry that Arsenal kept drawing matches they started calling for wenger’s head. Don’t we have alot to be optimistic about this season so far? We seem to be doing fairly good.If we keep our current form and keep scoring alot of goals we are going to be unstoppable…..a brace in trophies wont be too far fetched.
in many ways your points are valid ambrosia but alot of these players you hav mentioned in the italian/french leagues may not be able to adapt to the english game which is way harsher than continental football,also when you speak of their wages do you not think that once these guys you say earn 5k and 8k start negotiating at arsenal that they would want 50/60k a week????thats part of being a big club and add this to how much power the agents and players hav and the wages will rarely reflect value…look at ballack.
also would you rather the manager goe for the star players like ibrahimovic who cost 35m WITH samuel etoo???that deal just reflects how inflated and proposterous things hav become.players like gary cahill now for 20mil…are you kidding.also it seems whenever it is leaked about us havin an interest in a player we are being followed by smaller english clubs most recently west ham,sunderland and bolton with players such as cana,chamakh and veloso…this may bolster ambrosias statement that we operate poorly in the transfer market now and that even these teams now feel they can do business better than us.
while i do feel you raised some fair points i also feel you are fast becoming like the utd/chelski fans of this world which is a world away from being an arsenal fan…its sounds like you just want the trophies so you can wind up ur mates of different clubs down in your local…your are not taking reality into perspective,our club has a philosophy,integrity and steadfast belief in doing things a certain way,a way they feel is apt to our club and when trophies do arrive it will make it all the sweeter knowing how hard and honestly wed worked for it and not hav that hypocritcal,deluded and condescending viewpoint of a chelsea/utd fan who hav on many occasions brought the game into disrepute with vulgar spending