Category Archives: Arsenal

Martinelli injury, Humbled Haaland and Guardiola departing

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Martinelli injury

With 2 goals and 2 assists in the last 3 games, it felt like Martinelli was finally regaining his confidence and returning to form, so it is frustrating to read that he hobbled off in training yesterday for Brazil.

It is not yet clear if it was a pre-caution, or a sign of a bigger issue. What we do know is Gabi was feeling discomfort in his right calf, and he had the area strapped during training. He has since had an MRI scan.

I would be surprised if he plays against Peru, and a longer absence will be frustrating for Mikel Arteta having also seen Bukayo Saka pick up a hamstring injury for England.

What I would say is in Gabriel Jesus, Raheem Sterling and Leandro Trossard, with have 3 options who can all play outwide against Bournemouth this weekend.

If either Martinelli or Saka is not fully fit, we need to look long term and give them a week off. Following Bournemouth is Shakhtar at home followed by Liverpool away.

Without being arrogant, we should overcome Bournemouth with a front 3 of Sterling, Havertz and Jesus. Saka and Martinelli can then focus on getting fit for Liverpool.

Humbled Haaland

In Martin Odegaards absence, Erling Haaland has been wearing the captains armband.

Following last nights 5-1 defeat to Austria, the stand in captain refused to answer media questions, highlighting that great goal scorers do not necessarily make great leaders.

Players should always be angry and upset when they lose, but a captain should also be aware of his obligation to face up to defeat. Not to run away, hide and cry. Haaland is clearly not leadership material.

I have always thought that Haaland comes across is arrogant. As aloof. That everyone else is below him. And this might be what has helped him become the greatest goal scorer of his generation.

Maybe he needs to take his own advice and stay a bit more humble. Realise that defeats are part of the game. That you can not expect to win every game. And that when you do not get a positive result, you can not just throw your toys out of your pram, abuse others and hide away from your obligatins.

Guardiola departing

At the risk of becoming a Manchester City blog for the day, I want to talk about Roy Keane saying England should “go for” Pep Guardiola.

I get where Roy is coming from. England should go out for the best. But it also shows the Irishman is grasping for headlines in the same way as his pal Greame Souness. it is very clickbait of Roy to say England should go for Pep.

What I did not realise, however, is that Pep’s Manchester City contract is expiring at the end of the season, and Pep has been very coy about his future saing recently “I’ve not decided anything, everything can happen. So I don’t know. Let’s see on my future. I still need to reflect and decide what I want to do.”

Considering Jurgen Klopp’s departure from Liverpool, and Mo Salah, Virgil van Dijk and Trent Alexander Arnold are in the last season of their contract, the English football could look very different in 12 months. And a host of departures could leave the door open for Mikel Arteta and Arsenal.

Arteta has build a young squad that should stay together for the next 5 or 6 years. But we now just need to win the trophies to keep the players happy. Pep departing could put City into disarray. We are perfectly positioned to take advantage of any drop off in City’s performances over the next half a decade.

Keenos

Souness: Wenger a lucky man, not a football man

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What a bitter, bitter man Graeme Souness is.

In a podcast with Simon jordan and Troy Deeney, he has sated that Arsene Wenger was not a football man, just a lucky man.

He goes on to claim that he inherited the “best back 4 in the world”, a “22 year old Dennis Berkgamp and Ian Wright” and got lucky that he managed in a time when “French football produced its greatest ever group of players”.

What a load of rubbish!

Now I get these days that the media these days is all about “creating viral moments”.

Driven by the rise of AFTV and the like, the likes of TalkSPORT now rely on their presenters making outlandish statements or going on rants that can then be clipped for social media in the hope it goes viral. In turn that leads to an increase in revenue.

And podcasts are like this on steroids.

The podcasting world is crammed with idiots fighting for airtime. With podcasters trying to say anything and everything in an attempt to go viral on social media. And this is why a gambling company would put Souness, Simon Jordan and Troy Deeney in a room together.

The Up Front podcast is not about providing an informative look on football by those who have spent decades in the game. It is all about creating viral moments that lead viewers to setting up a betting account.

Souness clearly has a grudge against Wenger. And this comes out later in his rant when he explains that Wenger was the “only manager that ever” came into his office after game and how after a game, he would go to Wenger’s office and Arsene would “never be there”. Jordan is probably spot on when he says “maybe he didn’t like you”.

As for the statement, I always laugh at the back 5 statement.

Yes, Seaman, Dixon, Adams, Keown and Winterburn were a fantastic defence, but Wenger made them better. But each one of those has spoken about Wenger and what he did for his careers. They all credit Wenger and his new fitness regime with letting them pay on so long.

As for his comments about Bergkamp and Wright….

The Dutchmen was 26 when he joined us. He had struggled for consistent form since leaving Ajax for Inter Milan at 24. In 1997, under Arsene Wenger and aged 28, he was named the 3rd greatest football on earth by FIFA.

Meanwhile, Ian Wright was on the decline. He lasted one season under Wenger as a starter before losing his spot to a teenage Nicolas Anelka. Was that lucky?

Wenger built an invincible team. His back four contained a Cameroonian midfielder signed from a mid-table Spanish team and an Ivorian midfielder/winger who had never played centre back, signed for £150k.

In midfield it was a Frenchman who was sitting on Milan’s bench, an unknown Brazilian playing in Brazil, a Swedish fella with red hair and a soft Frenchman who every pundit said di not have the heart to make an impact in the Premier League.

Up top was a former wonderkid winger who was found sitting on the bench at Juventus, An ageing Bergkamp. A Kanu. A player no one else would touch due to heart and knee issues.

Souness is attempting to re-write history with his slander.

I would rather listen to what Ray Parlour, Lee Dixon, Thierry Henry et al say on Wenger (Adams has become bitter in his later years due to being snubbed for a job. What he says these days is very different to what he wrote in his 1998 autobiography Addicted).

Souness is clearly a very unhappy man. Or is just peddling extreme views at the request of a betting company to get clips going viral. And if it is the later I guess I have fed the beast with this blog!

A final thought.

Arsene Wenger signed George Weah. He was discovered playing for Tonnerre Yaoundé in Cameroon. He would go on to win the Ballon D’or.

Greame Souness signed Ali Dia. He had never played a professional game of football before. He was signed following someone calling Souness and telling him Dia was Weah’s cousin. It is considered the worst transfer in Premier League history.

Keenos

Arsenal have “zero PSR concerns” despite Man City judgement

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The biggest side-story to come out of the Manchester City judgment is how “Premier League clubs with high levels of borrowing are now in danger of breaching Profitability and Sustainability Rules.”

Arsenal have been made the poster boy of the statement, with many journalists going onto point out that we “have borrowed more than £200m made up entirely of shareholder loans.”

The insinuation is then that we have found a loophole within the rules to find our rise back to title challengers, and that we are hypocrites for our stance against Manchester City. But this is not true, and to tell the story, we need to go back to where it begun.

The stadium build

As with every club that builds a new stadium we required bank loans to do so.

In 2007, we refinanced these into a new series of loans and bonds, spreading the debt over the next 25ish years. At the time the Bank of England base rate was 5%, and our average bond interest rate was 5.14%.

2020 refinancing

In the late 00s and early 20s, borrowing was dirt cheap. The Bank of Interest base rate went to as low as 0.1%. And then Covid hit which had many experts predicting interest would sharply rise (and it did). KSE then took the chance to refinance our debt.

KSE took a loan out themselves, and in turn loaned Arsenal the money to pay off the existing loan from the stadium including early repayment charges. The net gain was that whilst Arsenal would owe more money due to having to pay the charges, our total to be repaid, including interest, would drop.

Refinancing is a common practise in both business and life. Why pay more for interest than you have to? It is like changing mortgage provider to get on a lower rate.

Lower rates were available on the market that we were paying, so KSE decided to reduce what the club would pay, even though it meant increasing out total debt.

But is it Fair Market Value

A tagline to come out of the Manchester City case is “Fair Market Value (FMV)”. And I agree with City that shareholder loans should also be at FMV.

No more zero percent loans like what both Manchester City and Chelsea have benefited from in the past. Shareholder loans should be provided at a FMV rate. And there is zero evidence that Arsenal’s loans are not at FMV:

To establish what FMV is, we only need to look up the Seven Sisters Road.

Tottenham’s stadium loan is at 2.6% interest. Taking into account our Loan to Value (to use a mortgage term), will be a lot less than Tottenham, we would expect the interest rate offered to also be slightly less. And it is. So if the above is true and that we are paying around 2.4% interest, than KSE are clearly providing us with a shareholder loan at FMV.

Injecting cash to compete

A false narrative being written by opposing fans is how we have borrowed £200M of our owners so we can compete with the big boys. the irony of this is us Arsenal fans have complained for nearly two decades about the lack of investment from KSE into the club.

And this loan is not an investment into Arsenal to allows us to compete. It is a refinancing of existing date which goes back to the stadium build.

The Kroenke’s did not go out in 2020 and give us over £200m to buy players and spend on wages. The loan was to pay off the existing debt, held at 2007 interest rates, and then add new debt to the club at lower interest rates.

Debt from infrastructure costs excluded from PSR

From Day One of PSR, debt accrued from infrastructure improvements were always excluded from PSR.

Building or maintaining a football stadium comes under the ‘in the general interests of football‘ clause, which also includes the costs of running the women’s team and the academy.

It is this clause which has allowed Manchester City to massively improve the Eastlands without impacting on PSR. That has allowed Tottenham to build a new stadium. That allowed Liverpool to expand their stadium. And that will eventually allow both Newcastle United and Chelsea to build new stadiums.

If debt incurred by building or maintaining a stadium was accountable under PSR, then no club would rebuild a new stadium. Or develop their current one. Nor would they invest as much money into either women’s football (a loss-maker for every English club) or the academy. All of these would be at the detriment of English football.

So regardless of whether or not the shareholder loan from KSE is at FMV, as long as we can prove that the loan was for infrastructure then it does not nee be submitted as part of our PSR monitoring. And we can prove it was for the stadium as we can show the receipts of us receiving a loan to almost the same value as the bonds we paid off that were raised in 2007.

Zero PSR concerns

Those that are creating a narrative that Arsenal have somehow used a loophole to circumnavigate PSR, or have future PSR concerns are doing so with a lack of knowledge.

They have neither taken into account that the loan from KSE is at FMV, and that the loan relates to infrastructure improvements.

Reading social media, you would think Arsenal had been given a £200m interest free loan from KSE to buy players in 2020. But we did not. The two clubs to have been given sizable interest free shareholders loan this century are Manchester City and Chelsea.

And my final thought is that if new rules come in banning shareholder loans altogether, then they will not be bought in retrospectively. Any club currently with a shareholder loan will be able to continue operating with it without paying it off.

And the worse case scenario is we merely take out a bank loan (still at lower than the 2007 rates), pay back the KSE shareholder loan, and return to monthly payments to our new creditor. Basically using Peter to pay Paul.

For opposing fans reading this, I hope you now feel educated. Although I imagine all of you will ignore the facts and continue to with the narrative that Arsenal are in the wrong. IF you maintain that standpoint, then good luck in life. You will need it.

Keenos