In a summer when clubs and players have acted fairly appallingly to engineer transfers I find it rather heart-warming that we have a manager who not only doesn’t engage in the same kind of tactics but who is brave enough to speak out against it.
I know that after three years without a trophy and almost over a week without making a signing himself Arsene has his critics amongst Arsenal fans but to man Arsenal fans should be right behind him when he says that big clubs need to act better. He says:
If you don’t show respect to other clubs I think that football is moving in the wrong way. You cannot come out like Ramon Calderon has done at Real Madrid with Manchester United and tell them you cannot stop a player leaving.
You can destabilise any player in the world — that is irresponsible. Big clubs should set an example.
And it’s not just Real Madrid, it’s Barcelona that have done similar to Adebayor and Hleb while AC Milan used Vincenzo Morabito to mess with Adebayor’s head. Now, I’m not foolish enough to think that Arsenal are whiter than white, but we do not engage in the same kind of media-led pursuits of players the way these clubs do.
The way Madrid have acted this summer over Ronaldo has been dreadful. It’s been so bad that as an Arsenal fan I have sympathy for Man United. Of course the clubs like Arsenal and United aren’t helped by the players and their agents who lose sight of the fact that they’re already earning a fortune and everything they do is motivated entirely by greed. It’s a sad situation really but unfortunately I don’t see it changing any time soon.
Wherever there is big money there are shysters and scum-sucking bottom-feeding cuntblisters like agents and an agent’s job is to make his client money. It’s not to say ‘Well, you’re actually earning good money here and for the sake of your football career I’d advise you to stay’. As long as agents are tolerated then things will never change. Ban all agents, that’s what I say. If a player is too stupid to enter in wage negotiations, like every other person on the planet has to do themselves, then fuck them.
One man who has certainly had his head turned by agents is Emmanuel Adebayor. The Guardian reports that in discussions yesterday he refused to commit to Arsenal, holding out for three times his current £35,000 a week salary. If that’s really the case then fuck him. Absolutely fuck him. I’m tired of shit like this, just because you’ve scored a few goals one season does not mean you’re a fucking superstar.
And to me it’s obvious that Adebayor and his people have never been interested primarily in a wage rise at Arsenal. If he’d really wanted some more money they’d have gone and said ‘Do you think that we could negotiate an improved contract for Adebayor based on his last season?’ and there’s every chance the club would have done that. When you walk in, just as the season is over, and blunderbuss a demand for £80,000+, knowing that the club has a wage structure, then it’s just another way of making a transfer request. The worst thing is that no player will ever say they want to leave directly in case they lose their ‘loyalty bonus’ written into their contracts. Imagine. Loyalty bonus. It’d make you fucking cry.
So Adebayor’s objective was never to get more money from Arsenal. It was to get a move to Barcelona or AC Milan. If Arsenal had capitulated and given him the cash then he’d have stayed, I think, because he probably likes it at Arsenal. He’s a big personality, well liked by the other players and the staff, so either way is win-win for him. Now though, with interest from other clubs having cooled, perhaps the cast-iron guarantees his agent got from them not so cast-iron after all, he’s stuck in a kind of limbo.
In one way I hope no move happens at all. It’d be sweet justice and hopefully it’d teach other players a valuable lesson. Watching Adebayor squirm as fans tell him what they think would be most enjoyable. On the other hand I’m loathe to keep someone who has acted in such a way and if the money came in and we had a decent replacement I’d flog him in a second. How he’s fucked it up though. Well on his way to being a real fans favourite, still with work to do though, now he’s just another cunt in a game full of them.
Bacary Sagna talks about his return and says his ankle is improving all the time. It’s good to see him back as we really missed him at the tail-end of the last season.
The squad play a friendly against Hungarian side Szombathelyi this evening and the pre-season begins in earnest at the Austrian training camp. No doubt we’ll get picture specials of them being put through their paces.
Other than that it’s all quiet so I’ll leave it there. More tomorrow.
