Jock Gooner wrote: ↑Sat Dec 07, 2019 11:48 am
SteveO 35 wrote: ↑Sat Dec 07, 2019 11:17 am
Jock Gooner wrote: ↑Sat Dec 07, 2019 10:48 am
The club is riddled with useless cu.nts from top to bottom. The owners are scum, the board the usual clueless 'yes' men, I'm not convinced at all by Sanllehi, what the fu.ck happened with Mislintat, Edu is just an attempt to wedge in a name to placate the fans, freddie is too inexperienced for where we find ourselves and he has the biggest shite, I mean no 2 in the business. The team are spineless.
We are broken.....top to bottom....fuc.ked
The numbers are falling away quite quickly at the bowl. On Thursday night the lower was pretty full but the upper was only about 60 - 70% full and plenty of empties in CL.
Perhaps this will test wiggy to a degree as a half empty bowl, lagging corporate interest and pissed off sponsors would be a good thing now as far as I'm concerned. Throw in that old favourite of toxic fans and the money men might just start looking elsewhere for their football fix. I think it's time for a slide down the table to see whether wiggy can be arsed with soccer when it ain't all quite so rosie.
Agree with all that. What's more is that for a good decade or more we've had a free hit at the tourist fans with our wonderful new stadium and the regular promise of good football and a place in the Be All and End All. The vermin now have a better stadium, play better football and have that CL place this board took for granted. Eventually when the product dies the tourists will dry up too
The tourists have begun to seriously drop off this season. We were chatting about that the other night as the empty seats speak volumes. Imagine paying £80 for a couple of tickets to watch Arsenal lose at home to Brighton in what was one of the worst performances I have seen for some time. The highlight of the night was that the weather was mild rather than cold or pissing down. What was amusing to watch was a couple of beardy hipsters losing their shit over how they were having to watch such crap performances.
Another thing I took stick for on here was saying how I could see a return to the days when 15-20k fans were in the stadium, and based on what I saw for the Frankfurt game we aren't far away from that happening soon. In my lifetime I've stood there at Highbury watching us play the likes of Doncaster and Chester in the League Cup and seen the stadium with less than 20k in it
Contrary to what people think football is NOT immune from the mismanagement of "customers" in exactly the same way that a restaurant, shop or any other service business is. The only difference is that we won't take our 'custom' to a rival brand in the way that someone might do with those other businesses. Just look at the comments on here - ones which make me genuinely sad to read - from people that have been going for 30-50 years and have now stopped going. Ask yourself why that is?
The lazy answer is that they/we are all ungrateful bastards who think we've got some divine right to success. Not true. Fans born anywhere between the late 40s and the early 70s would have grown up knowing as many barren years as successful ones. I was born shortly after the 71 double and apart from the 79 FA Cup win, waited 16 years or so before GG started bringing any kind of success. Older Gooners will recall the era pre-Bertie Mee where there were long periods of shit football and under achievement.
My son actually asked me the other night why I'm so against everything at the club now when I've seen Arsenal finish mid-table before and play consistently shit football. The simple answer is the owner and the continual piss taking and mismanagement of the fanbase. Tell us we're going to compete with Europe's elite, charge the highest prices in the land, talk about a catalyst for change and your great ambition for the club (remember the one about the commercial deals and the fact we could buy any player in the world with a few exceptions?).......then consistently mug the fans off and fall way short and you will get what you've got now. Angry "customers" who will vote with their feet. Look at the so called loyal Geordies under Ashley - voted with their feet and back in the late 80s in the second division were getting gates of 10,000. If you mug people off and mismanage their expectations they will walk - doesn't matter if you own the Ritz, the best hotel in the world or Arsenal FC......over promising and under delivering always costs you.
I see no end to this cycle. It will end in relegation and almost the entire re-birth of the club under a new owner when he has eventually dropped its net worth to virtually zero