Strange things happen in the world sometimes. We might get a nice, warm summer’s day in Ireland, for instance. Robin van Persie might spend most of the season on the pitch instead of the treatment room. Or Garth Crooks might go three minutes without being an absolute cunt.
Ok, well the last one is taking things too far but the point remains. Another example might be the Daily Star getting a story absolutely right. Naturally I was somewhat skeptical of their story the other day about how Kolo Toure had asked for a transfer because of the breakdown of his relationship with William Gallas. But whaddya know? Turns out they were spot on.
Yesterday, Chairman PHW confirmed the fact that Kolo had made a transfer request, saying:
I know about it but we are not going to accept it. We are not looking to let any of our players go and he is under contract – and we expect him to honour it.
So there’s the transfer request and I am told, from an impeccable source, that he did indeed cite the breakdown of his relationship with William Gallas the reason behind it. Now, this is most odd for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, not getting along with a fellow player is no reason to leave a football club. If you have no relationship with the manager, or a senior figure on the coaching staff, then it might be in your best interests to leave a club. But a player? It doesn’t make sense to me. All through the years there have been clashes of personality at football clubs. Nobody’s asking Kolo Toure to be best friends with William Gallas. He just has to play football with him.
Secondly, why would Kolo make a transfer request when pretty much everyone is aware that Gallas’s time at the club is limited? If he doesn’t move this January then he’s pretty much nailed on to leave in the summer. So all Kolo has to do is wait and the problem resolves itself. The Chairman went on to say about Kolo’s request:
They seem to get unhappy rather quickly for odd reasons.
And there’s the thing – I don’t think it’s that odd. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to think that Kolo’s head has been turned by a certain club who have found themselves with plenty of cash to throw around. Assurances of a first team place and a hefty, hefty pay rise at Manchester City are more likely to be behind this transfer request than any beef he might have with William Gallas.
He’s been a fantastic servant to the club down the years and he’s one of the last players I’d have thought would look to leave the club – especially while Arsene is still boss. We paid £250,000 for Kolo Toure all those years ago and for a time he was a truly brilliant centre-half. He worked best alongside the big stopper, like Sol Campbell or Philippe Senderos, his recovery pace was fantastic, some of the last ditch tackling was inspired and his enthusiasm for the game and the club was refreshing.
However, there are those that would suggest we’ve seen the best of Kolo. His form has suffered, for me a major factor in that is the fact that he has been playing alongside Gallas. That’s not a criticism of Gallas, by the way, but I’ve long held the opinion that the two are far too similar and we get the best out of neither when they play together. He’s played a lot of football too and since his bout of malaria, picked up on ACN duty, he’s looked a shadow of the player he once was.
The pace is gone, the stamina is gone, his confidence and form also gone. He’s found himself down the pecking order with the emergence of Johan Djourou and how must he have felt earlier in the season to find himself dropped after witnessing Gallas make costly mistake after costly mistake? Perhaps the ignominy of being benched for Sylvester against Portsmouth might have been the final straw.
So what to do? He’s obviously unhappy at the club and Wenger has never sought to keep unhappy players. The Chairman might say we don’t want him to leave but if you really want to keep a player you don’t tell the world he’s handed in a transfer request.
If the right offer comes from City this month I think we’ll sell. There’s been talk of £10m. As long as the bulk of that money is spent on another centre-half then it’s probably good business. It’s all quite sad, I have to say. I would have expected more of Kolo.
Even if the City thing isn’t the reason (and that’s a big if in my opinion) surely he’s got more balls than to put in a transfer request over a clash of personality with another player? Where’s the fight and the determination to win his place back? The answer to that is probably sitting somewhere on his agent’s desk (remember, his agent is our old pal Jonathan Barnett) – the offer to play and get paid elswhere.
The manager’s willingness to sell Kolo for the kind of money City might be offering may be well tied in with the amount of money he has to spend this January. We have heard a lot from the board about how there’s money for Arsene to use in the transfer market but according to the Chairman:
We have got money, but I am not sure we are going to spend it. We’ve got to continue to run the business in a sensible way. It may sound boring, but we are not going to rush out and spend fortunes on people who won’t help us achieve anything better than where we are at the moment.
Arsene has a lot of young, talented players at the club and I think he will probably give a chance to one or two of them.
This is a road well travelled and I don’t think I need to say any more about why we need to buy players. However, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that it wouldn’t take a fortune to buy some players who are better and more experienced than some of the ones we have.
And running the business in a sensible way is most admirable but the business starts on the pitch. Unless we have a team that can achieve a minimum of Champions League qualification each season then other parts of the business are going to suffer too. We’ve always been fairly tight spenders, we know about Wenger’s net spend down the years, so nobody’s expecting us to lash out millions and millions, but when you consider what there is to lose if we don’t finish in the top 4 then we’ve got to speculate a bit this month.
I’ll stand to be corrected on this but the Champions League must be worth around £20m-30m a season to us in terms of TV money, gate money, sponsorship, advertising, prize money etc. Spending some of that on a couple of players to help maintain that income doesn’t seem like unsafe business practice to me. Of course we have to be mindful of the bigger picture and the current financial climate, it would be foolish to ignore that, just as it would be foolish not to improve the squad.
So while there’s money to spend, limited as it might be, selling in order to buy might well be part of the equation. £10m for Kolo would be money the manager could easily find another centre-half with. Let’s remember as well that Arsenal won’t be the only club affected by the financial situation, there are clubs in England and across Europe stretched the limit who will find themselves unable to command the kind of transfer fees they might have been able to even 6-12 months previously.
There’s a fire sale going on at West Ham, everyone is for sale and everyone knows West Ham are desperate for money. I believe there’s something similar going on at Valencia this January too – and there’s a perfect illustration of how one season out of the Champions League can affect a club. They used that money to keep themselves afloat – without it they’re facing the prospect of selling their best players for prices well below the top of the market.
It’s a balancing act, no doubt about it, but there’s the opportunity to play the game a bit here. There’s the chance to take advantage of the woes of others, it might not be nice but that’s business. You can be quite sure we’d be the carrion to the rest of the vultures if we found ourselves in that position so there’s no reason why we shouldn’t at least try.
Anyway, it promises to be an interesting month. Tomorrow we’ve got the FA Cup, in my opinion our most realistic chance of a trophy this season, so we’ll preview that then.
Have a good one.
