7am kick off a good read

[stg]

http://www.7amkickoff.com/


Grim Thoughts: Divining the Future of Football part 1 – background

It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be. – Isaac Asimov

I seem to constantly have twitter fights with people that are struggling to come to terms with the modern reality of football, it’s risks and how it’s changed over the last 20-30 years and it’s this that prompted this piece – well that and Tim the Enchanter’s late night with the Seattle Sounders. We all want glory, trophies and the such, but these wishes must be placed against the backdrop of a game that has changed drastically in recent times, and will evolve further in the next 20 years into something I believe may well be unrecognisable to us today. I’m not here to argue about whether this is good or not, nor is anything I’m saying to be used as a Wenger we trust/rust argument – I am simply stating the facts in a timeline as I see them and understand them. Now with that as a backdrop let me get a few things out of the way so that I may write clearly for the rest of this piece: Samir Na$ri is a complete cuntbucket, Cesc Fabregas needs to stop saying he’s an Arsenal fan and Darth Vieira needs to get his nose out of Mancini’s poop chute and remember who made him a fucking football star. Rant done – now let’s move on.

Background

Football is a very old game, every culture and every country has a legitimate claim on ‘inventing’ football as it’s been played in various forms throughout the ages back to the dawn of recorded history and has been banned throughout Europe numerous times in the middle ages for inciting riots (some things don’t change eh?). Apologies for looking back that far and don’t worry this isn’t about looking back it’s about looking forward and the implications on Arsenal. However it’s important to understand the history of an argument if the argument itself is to be understood as it’s my belief that some of the mystery that surrounds the clubs current policies can be explained by the way they’re preparing for the future. This is in several parts

The rise of player power

It’s a seismic shift from the original days of professional football – back in the day contracts were all in favour of the clubs and players were viewed as business assets and to be used as such. Clubs held all the cards, and contract or no could stop players from joining another side – kind of like draconian ‘non-compete’ clauses. Then in 1995 the European Court ruled on the Belgian Football Association v Jean-Marc Bosman in favour of the latter and the footballing world changed forever. If you want to understand the impact of the ruling and don’t yet know take a look at this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosman_ruling.

After this ruling clubs lost the majority of their power to influence and control the movements of players and most contracts became as useful as a pair of water soluble underpants. Players became a commodity and all the training and effort put into developing them was instantly a cost clubs had to write off. You could train a player, the player could wind down their contract and then leave for free leaving the club with the cost of development, and don’t kid yourself into thinking there’s no cost; physio’s, coaches, equipment – all are expensive. As a result player contracts became more lucrative and lengthy in order to entice players to stay which exacerbated the gap between the haves and have-nots. No longer could a club compete by developing great players in a youth system in order to compete; everything turned into a contract war. This coincided with sports stars becoming celebrities in their own right and marketing that celebrity for cash.

This is not confined to the world of football of course – everyone admires what people that are good at sports are capable of, but for some reason this new found celebrity means that because Mr. Messi is a half decent footballer, people will surely want to buy stuff he says is good regardless of; a) if he really thinks it’s good or, b) it is in fact any good. Of course sports companies like Adidas are obvious, because wearing the same boots as him will enable mere mortal players to dance around Sunday league defences (not) in the same manner as him and as fast. But a quick web search brings up others that are not so obvious, such as a deal with Herbalife, because it’s these supplements that allow him to maintain his vigour, Konami because he helps sell non-FIFA football games, Pepsi for the sugar rush, and Chery because the Chinese LOVE a Barca player and if he stands in front of a crappy Chinese car it distracts from the fact that it is in fact a crappy Chinese car.

Make no mistake: because contracts favor them and celebrity favor them, players control the world of football now, not clubs and certainly not managers. For evidence we only need look at Mancini’s step down from his previous “Tevez will never play for Citeh again” to their inevitable make up sex after Tevez pretty much did what the fuck he wanted for a few months.

The influx of cash

Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and money is power in its most fungible format. The rise of player power has coincided with several other factors such as the rise of the super-agent – itself a consequence of player power, TV wealth, the Premier League, the Champions League and the influx of monies brought by participation in all of these TV fuelled cash registers.

Now, more than at any other time in the game cash is king and boy is it lording it over its kingdom. TV and the globalisation of European football via worldwide audiences has brought the game to the attention of the entire planet. You have to travel to some pretty isolated places in the world for the name Cristiano Ronaldo not to have some name recognition, more so then most modern Hollywood superstars I think you’ll find. This global notoriety has I think been responsible for the single most warping effect – the reinvention of the club benefactor. The idea of a Football club being a plaything for a rich person is not new – Elton John has owned and been involved with Watford since 1976 – however for said rich person to personally BANKROLL the club? Don’t be ridiculous.

In 2003 a previously unknown Russian Billionaire called Roman Abramovich bought the perennial ‘almost winning’ club Chelsea and turned the football world on its head. Up until this point the big successful clubs had at least become big successful clubs by working at it – building their brand, building their support base and in turn building ever bigger stadia to put bums on seats. Before Abaramovich there was a simple logic to developing a club: 1) Increase revenues, which in turn allows you to 2) pay more for players which generally should lead to 3) winning things which allows you to go back to 1) and build the cycle again. This was the reason for the Emirates Stadium after all and is the ‘secret’ behind the success of most of the truly big clubs who all have massive stadiums and as a consequence the most supporters.

Then along comes the seemingly limitless cash of a Billionaire that doesn’t give a crap about 1) so skips it entirely and injects a bunch of his OWN money into said hapless club and goes straight to 2) which leads to 3) faster than anyone could bank on. Happy with this success he continues to merrily ignore point 1) which others notice and which directly leads to others doing the same thing all around the world and we see the rise of Man Citeh, Paris Saint Germain, FC Anzhi etc. as global clones of the Roman-method, with differing levels of success.

This is all seen as good clean fun by fans of these clubs and the media at large, who benefited, but to everyone else it’s looked at with disgust because they’ve not had to put in decades of work in building their own clubs – they have no history. However what these rich benefactors had failed to recognise or care about is that it accelerated the haves/have-nots cycle that had always existed to the point where smaller clubs that are in the ‘have not’ category were forced to spend far beyond their financial reach in order to compete whilst gambling on their future success, threatening the future of local and national institutions alike. This in turn forced Governments and the useless agencies that control European and World football to bring in “fair play rules” that are at first a worry to benefactor clubs until they realise they can instantly circumvent them by simply cheating and donating money from alleged ‘legitimate’ sources despite the fact that we all know it’s a load of cobblers.

So what you may say – where am I leading with this? Ahhh dear friends – for that you must wait until tomorrow because I have things to do. This is the backdrop of the current madness for we all know how Arsenal are behaving to this influx of cash – the question is what does it mean for Arsenal and football at large – until tomorrow m

[arseofacrow]

and tomorrow he reveals that bears shit in the woods?

I would have to say not a good read.

[SWLGooner]

I like that blog. Mainly because it has a picture of me on it and the guy who writes it has a slightly different perspective to most Arsenal blogs.

[stg]

http://www.7amkickoff.com/

Part 2

Grim Thoughts: Divining the Future of Football part 2 – what’s happening now.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. – Steve Jobs

Happy Geek Pride day Gooners: This is part two of a piece I’ve been inspired to write by many a twitterfight with fellow fans that are in my opinion not looking at the whole Arsenal vs. the world in the wrong light – we need to look at Arsenal’s place in the future as well as in the here & now. If you haven’t read the first piece then please click here as this will make much more sense with the backdrop. Again I’d like to reiterate that I’m not here to argue about whether this is good or bad, nor is anything I’m saying to be used as a Wenger we trust/rust argument – I am simply stating the facts in a timeline as I see them and understand them. Now with that as a backdrop let me get a few things out of the way so that I may write clearly for the rest of this piece: To all those Totteringham fans out there that were gloating earlier in the year with the “Mind the Gap” bollocks – Karma’s a bitch eh?

In the last piece I gave you some background to what I’m going to say in this part of the divination but please read this follow on with an open mind. Futurism is something I do for fun in my work life. I have many thoughts based on the observations of not just Football but Sport & the Entertainment business in general, so some of the platitudes are going to come from outside the game, and some of it will concern how you & I watch the game. So I’m aware some of this will read weird, but just bear with me, it’ll make sense in the end. At the heart of all of these ideas is one universal constant – no not the speed of light in a vacuum (three Geeks are laughing at that), something man made and very dangerous: Money.

The global-world-wide-interweb-super-information-highway

Actually that’s a bit misleading; money is the root cause of a lot of these predictions but only in tandem with the biggest thing to hit human society since the printing press, the interwebs.

The web is impacting everything we do, watch and interact with. It might sound like a rather obvious statement but people (especially you young whipper-snappers) take the web, smart phones, social networking, twitter etc. completely for granted and don’t seem to realise how it changes our behaviour, our viewing habits, and how it even impacts the game.

The internet is powerful but can it change a clubs ownership? Get a manager fired? How about we ask Hicks/Gillett how they feel about that or England’s new manager? Of course it’s oversimplification to say that the interwebs did that by itself; the fans booed & blogged, the press went bonkers, and it all forced public opinion against the consortium and in turn the confidence of the banks that held all the clubs debt against Hicks/Gillett. The internet didn’t push them out, but it DID allow the organisation and distribution of the antagonism that did. Has the penny dropped yet? If you think the web’s powerful now you wait until the next stage – the internet of everything (now we’re getting into my work world) – Google it, if you’re like me you’ll freak out a bit.

It will connect everything with everything, everyone and every place, with the web. The web has given us all a voice and I think it’s positive, mostly. It has opened the football world to scrutiny from all sides, with the nasty side effect being short term-ism; win now, pay later. This is unprecedented in the game – that fans could oust a manager or a whole ownership structure by will of words.

Money, money, money

OK – back to money. Money is the big polluter in sport. When a game goes from Amateur to Professional it stops being about the sport and starts being about the money. In the first piece I alluded to the 1, 2, 3 program of club growth that Mr. Abramobitch totally fucked up, but there are other effects of this influx of cash: The Contract cycle.

Now that there are clubs out there that can essentially afford anything a player might ask financially speaking it has upped the expectation of ALL players. Let’s take Robin van Persie as a case in point. RvP is a player I love to watch, so this is no reflection on his character but I keep reading that he has ‘earned’ his possible 130k a week contract and I have a hard time justifying it in context to the club. When Henry earned his bumper contract, he had in fact EARNED it – he’d played his socks off for 7 years and had been instrumental in the most successful run we’d had in recent times.

RvP has been on the treatment table for a large chunk of his time with us and has had an 18 month purple patch – and yet people think he’s earned it? I’m not saying his injuries are his fault, but neither are they Arsenals. The only reason he’s being offered this money is so that he doesn’t do a Flamoney and fuck off for free next year. In context of what he’s done on the pitch, he has NOT ‘earned’ it, but in context to the fact that he can earn double elsewhere with the mindless cash clubs like Citeh or Chel$ki paying whatever, then he has earned it.

This is how the limitless funds available to the nouveau riche are completely fucking up the system. They force fiscally responsible clubs to break wage structures just to keep their good players – essentially rewarding potential over actual performance. It also forces the clubs to offer ever more lengthy contracts and at a younger age. This is why we keep getting lumbered with Bendtners – fear of them doing a Na$ri. Again – the players have the clubs over a barrel and know it.

The side effect of this is that ALL clubs barring those with bottomless pockets are now ‘feeder’ clubs, yes there I said it. ALL clubs – that includes Madrid and Barca too, because now that they can’t be bailed out by the Spanish Government any more their days of limitless spending are at an end… this is why Barca have reverted to tapping up players (looking at you Cesc) because they can’t afford to pay true market value (i.e. potential value vs. actual) against the fiscally irresponsible numpties who will pay someone like Na$ri 170k a week. Don’t get me wrong, I think Nasri has the potential to be a great player (I just threw up a bit in my mouth), but how does a six month hot streak justify that outlay?

The problem is perspective; you and I would probably not dream of dropping 60k on a Breitling watch, but if you had 100 million quid in the bank, 60 grand is about 2 days compound interest – this is why Citeh pay stupid money for players. The rule of thumb in this and any business is: you can only ever be as profitable as your most stupid competitor and unless FIFA/UEFA grow a pair of balls and introduce salary caps or some other method of player market stabilisation it’ll carry on getting worse.

Business models

So what does all this mean for us? There are two choices in modern football – copy the Citeh Model and try and find a benefactor that will pump silly money into the club, or constantly reinvent the team. The latter is the approach that’s been taken by pretty much every club in France who are seemingly picked apart every transfer window, because they cannot hope to compete, even with the responsible members of the rich list such as Arsenal. With Arsenal being such a well known club it’d be a very expensive proposition for a billionaire to outright buy the club – that’s why Usmanov hasn’t just dropped a couple billion on us already, and while on that subject don’t expect him too. Also I don’t expect us to get the Citeh/Chel$ki treatment, from anyone.

The buy the league model is based on two key factors: 1) buy a mid league club with half decent facilities 2) throw money at it. It’s not just that the costs involved with buying an already successful club are prohibitive, but that the PR value from buying an underdog and making them top dog will trump buying a success and continuing that success ANY DAY OF THE WEEK. The established clubs are instead being bought by Sports Businessmen such has been the case with ManUre, Scouserpool and ourselves.

On that point Usmanov is nothing like Abramovich in my opinion. Abramovich is a control freak egomanic and Chel$ki is his personal plaything, something he may well actually take pride in the way Dr. No liked his piranhas. Usmanov is all about making money. Abramovich’s motivation surrounds the fact that owning Chel$ki gets him the sort of attention and notoriety that’s usually reserved for complete media-whores like Donald Trump, but without him having to resort to the humiliating Cuntery that Trump is well known for (those in the US know what I mean – anyone outside won’t have his perma-tanned visage shoved down your throats as much).

The alternative is to be a selling club for now and continue to grow the club organically until we can compete with the Citeh’s using our own resources, think of the tortoise and the hare. Arsenal can still attain the cash heights of Clubs like Madrid through steady growth, shrewd business plays and out thinking the opposition. Selling club is used as an insult by other fans, to which I say Bollocks – you don’t know what you’re talking about. If you cannot win against big spending by fighting fire with fire, you have to take a different strategy and walk to the river to find a bucket.

So if we can’t compete on level terms then we have to accept that we have to let go of a few concepts like player loyalty and the expectation that we’ll be in the market for a Ronaldo, Aguero or Hazard in the short term at least.

However, it has to be said; have we ever been? The Arsenal way has never involved buying the talent at its peak and having an array of stars, that’s ManUre’s business model and I think the Citeh/Chel$ki situation will hurt them far more then it will us. They are way out of their depth in debt and losing the league the way they did this season will have a knock on effect to their bottom line as will going out of the CL at the group stage. ManUre’s business model was based on always winning, and it worked for a short while, but they didn’t win squat this season and stand to lose a BIG chunk of change. This is why they’re being floated again but in a world where Facebook stock can take a shit, and Europe looks like it’s tanking again who’d want to be public? Yeh they’re being floated in Singapore, but anyone in the markets will tell you that they’re all co-dependent.

Gooners should NOT despair at not being able to compete with the stupid money clubs because there is a inherent risk in playing that game – escalation. Citeh were bought as a direct result of Chel$ki’s success. It’s my belief that the Abu Dhabi consortium saw what Abramovich got for his money – global fame, PR worth Billions – and they wanted the same for themselves. Ask yourself, who the fuck had heard of Abu Dhabi before they bought Citeh? How about Etihad airlines? Did you know they were the richest of the United Arab Emirates? I did because they bought the manufacturing operation of Chip maker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) a few months before they bought Citeh and the cynic in me cannot help but think it’s a very big marketing exercise. We’ve already seen others come in any try to do the same thing; QPR is owned by the same guy as the Caterham (Lotus until last year) F1 team, Blackburn by the Venky’s, though neither of those is working out because they’re not prepared to go all out and remove the limits on spending. Someone will though; Paris Saint Germain are 70% owned by a Qatari investment company (notice the Oil link here?) and will probably succeed in winning Ligue 1 sooner rather than later. How long before the REAL oil men in Saudi Arabia come in? They’ve got enough cash to buy Abu Dhabi AND Qatar.

If the club-buying continues I think we could see a situation similar to what happened to F1 in the last decade or so. Manufacturers watched in envy as Ferrari got so much publicity mileage out of the Schumacher era winning 5 titles and wanted a piece of the action themselves. Honda, Toyota, Ford, BMW all bought teams and started pumping hundreds of millions into them until two things happened: 1) they didn’t win 2) they realised that the returns were not worth the outlay. Then they started getting out in the same scrambled manner as particularly violent fart victims escape a lift.

Chel$ki and Citeh are the early adopters and have proven that buying the league can not only be done, that it can be done repeatedly – same now goes for the Champions League. However, success breeds imitation and if others start to buy up other mid-table clubs and inject untold millions into them the already tough Premier League will become a VERY difficult place indeed.

The other issue with the Abu Dhabi money is my suspicion that if this is indeed a marketing exercise, then it’s going to be short to mid-term at best. You see marketing is a tool that does a job, when that job succeeds and the job is done, the tool is usually abandoned – you see this in marketing cycles all the time. Let’s say Citeh keep winning everything for the next 5 years – will Abramovich stick around and continue to sink his money into Chel$ki? How about if Chel$ki win everything – or we finally get a break from goalposts, referees and linesmen? Food for thought no?

Players, players, players

And so to the players again: as with any power struggle there are knock on effects. Cause and effect. Cold War = Industrial military complex. Rise of Terrorism = Boom in security technologies. Clubs who don’t value money = mega agents. The above has been recognised by players and their advisors and is in turn leading to the end of the one-club player, players that are not interested in us fans at all, not interested in their countries and are just interested in PERSONAL silverware.

Players like Tony Adams are already a thing of the past, hell players only playing for 2 clubs are going to become a thing of the past – and in their place? It pains me to say it but Ibrahimovich is the model that young players may well aspire too. He’s won almost everything on the club scale and is the ultimate expression of mercenary player. He’s made several high profile, big money moves and has made his agent/agents a FUCKLOAD of cash. This is not to judge it because as much as I don’t personally like him, you can’t deny he’s a hell of a footballer and HAS won almost everything. He is only 30 years old and has played for 6 clubs already – 5 of those being CL teams; FIVE! No don’t hate the player – hate the game, even if the player is a lanky, big nosed twonk.

The fact is that players used to compete for the attention of clubs. Now with almost every league in the Universe being televised, the player has become a commodity to be bought & sold around the globe. Like any commodity you milk the hell out of it while the stock’s high and while you can. Modern players realise this, they have 20 years on the outside edge to make their impact on the game. In that time they hope to etch their names in the history books alongside the greats but what they don’t seem to realise is what made players great is not what they seemingly think. They want to be universally admired, not by one fanbase but by the world. What happens if you ask fans of Malmö FF, Ajax, Juventus, Internazionale, Barcelona and Milan if they think Ibra is a Legend? I think you’ll get “he was a great player but not a legend” – see my previous post on defining legend for my thoughts on that.

So business models are evolving, players are in charge and the worlds going to hell in a handbag – what does this mean for the game at large? Well for that my dear friends you must wait on part 3 where I’m going to go all weirdo on you and postulate on the trends of money, technology, and globalisation.

Adios Amigos

Grimbo

[OneBardGooner]

Is he related to US martin?...coz they're a tad long....

[franksav63]

I like that blog. Mainly because it has a picture of me on it and the guy who writes it has a slightly different perspective to most Arsenal blogs.

Of Art Garfunkel??? may have to pay it a visit if that's the case...

[OneBardGooner]

I like that blog. Mainly because it has a picture of me on it and the guy who writes it has a slightly different perspective to most Arsenal blogs.

Of Art Garfunkel??? may have to pay it a visit if that's the case...

Does he have his suitcase and guitar in hand!??

[franksav63]

I like that blog. Mainly because it has a picture of me on it and the guy who writes it has a slightly different perspective to most Arsenal blogs.

Of Art Garfunkel??? may have to pay it a visit if that's the case...

Does he have his suitcase and guitar in hand!??

Yes, sitting in the railway station with a ticket for his destination in his hand..

[SWLGooner]

I like that blog. Mainly because it has a picture of me on it and the guy who writes it has a slightly different perspective to most Arsenal blogs.

Of Art Garfunkel??? may have to pay it a visit if that's the case...

Does he have his suitcase and guitar in hand!??

No, I'm getting knocked off a chair in the Arkles by a fat midget

[franksav63]

I like that blog. Mainly because it has a picture of me on it and the guy who writes it has a slightly different perspective to most Arsenal blogs.

Of Art Garfunkel??? may have to pay it a visit if that's the case...

Does he have his suitcase and guitar in hand!??

No, I'm getting knocked off a chair in the Arkles by a fat midget

Who?? Danny Bailey..

[SWLGooner]

I like that blog. Mainly because it has a picture of me on it and the guy who writes it has a slightly different perspective to most Arsenal blogs.

Of Art Garfunkel??? may have to pay it a visit if that's the case...

Does he have his suitcase and guitar in hand!??

No, I'm getting knocked off a chair in the Arkles by a fat midget

Who?? Danny Bailey..

Harsh!

No mate, Charlie, don't know if you know him. About my age, goes home and away. Likes giving Tamil Tiger abuse on FB and Twitter.

[olgitgooner]

I like that blog. Mainly because it has a picture of me on it and the guy who writes it has a slightly different perspective to most Arsenal blogs.

I haven't spotted you on there mate. Got a link?

The blog is a very good read. I get the daily email. Only trouble is it's always quite long. So often don't have time to read through it.

[SWLGooner]

I like that blog. Mainly because it has a picture of me on it and the guy who writes it has a slightly different perspective to most Arsenal blogs.

I haven't spotted you on there mate. Got a link?

The blog is a very good read. I get the daily email. Only trouble is it's always quite long. So often don't have time to read through it.

http://www.7amkickoff.com/2012/7amkicko ... o-anfield/

I'm only in one picture...