Arsenal as likely to make a signing as Spurs are to win a trophy

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Can we just scrap the pointless winter break?

Due to a mixture of the break and our early FA Cup exit, tonight will be just our 3rd game in January.

These are the toughest, coldest, darkest days of the year. The ones that you need something like football to look forward to, to drag you through the week. Instead most have us have spent the last 3 weeks with very little to do except for the Crystal Palace win (and some cricket!).

We finally get back into the season tonight with a trip to the City Ground – a place that we have not won at since 2016.

Now before you say “that’s because Nottingham Forest are only just back in the Premier League”, we have actually played them 3 times in the last 6 seasons.

The first of which was that defeat in the 3rd round of the FA Cup. Probably the last day of Arsene Wenger’s reign. That was followed 4 years later by another defeat at the same stage of the competition. And then last year the City Ground was where our Premier League hopes finally died.

Hooters aside, the City Ground has not been a happy hunting ground for us, a fact which must change tonight.

The naysayers have written us out of the title race, but we sit just 5 points behind Liverpool and level with Manchester City. The dream is not yet dead.

With less than 2-days left in the January transfer window, I expect us to make as many signings as Spurs have won trophies in the last 15 years.

It has been a strange old window with not top club yet to make any big signings.

Social media is awash with fans of Everton, Aston Villa, West Ham and Newcastle blaming PSR (formally FFP) for their sides lack of spending. The truth is all of these clubs have spent A LOT over the last 3 or 4 years and do not have any money left.

Their fans forget that transfer fees are not the only aspect of expenditure, so the “net spend” infographics they produce are meaningless. Expenditure also includes salaries and general running costs.

Take Aston Villa. Their fans are moaning that they are very close to infringing PSR despite having sold Jack Grealish for around £100m.

Yes, they sold Grealish for a huge sum, but in the last 3 years they have still lost £306.6m.

The summer they sold Grealish, they signed Emiliano Buendia, Leon Bailey, Danny Ings and Lucas Digne. They also signed Calum Chambers for nothing and bought in Philippe Coutinho on loan.

Whilst their “net spend” might have zero for the period, the wage difference of 6 new players against one departing would have been huge. You lose a single player on (say) £80k a week, and replace him with 6 costing £80k a week, that is an increase in expenditure of around £20m a year.

Since 2019, Everton have made a £417.3m loss. But yet, PSR is the problem….

I expect very little transfer business to be done over the next few days, which I am sure will throw Sky’s plans into chaos. But at least we have real football to watch rather than two weird men pretending to get text’s live on air, when their source is actually just Twitter.

Enjoy the game tonight!

Keenos

RIP Jurgen Klopp

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Morning all. Quick shout out to Gav for reminding me that I had not published a blog this morning! I am currently on a 469-day streak, so would have been devastated had I not made it to day 470!

No football for The Arsenal at the weekend due to us crashing out of the FA Cup, but at least we got to enjoy the cricket!

Sky, ITV and BBC have gone into overdrive with the Jurgen Klopp obituaries. Anyone would think the King had just died with the level of coverage Klopp has got.

I get that Klopp has done a lot for the city of Liverpool, and the media to pander to the Scousers for fear of being boycotted and cancelled, but it has felt at sometimes that we were watching Liverpool TV.

It is easy to forget with everything that is going on that Klopp has only won 4 trophies and a single league title during his 8-and-a-bit years in charge. That is behind modern greats Sir Alex Ferguson, Arsene Wenger, Jose Mourinho and Pep Guardiola.

Klopp’s single league title has him joint 27th on the list of English football championship-winning managers, behind the likes of Herbert Chapman, Wenger, George Allison, Tom Whittaker and George Graham.

The way the Scousers are grieving, you would think he was Shankly or Paisley. The truth is he is closer to Claudio Ranieri in terms of what he has won in England.

At least the trouble in the WBA v Wolves game meant that we avoided whatever excruciating segment the BBC had planned ahead of Liverpool’s game against Norwich.

On WBA v Wolves, it was funny listening to Sam Matterface describing the scenes as if he was reporting from the front line. I did laugh when they say “we do not like to see scenes like that” when the only reason ITV picked WBA v Wolves was because it had the potential to see “scenes like that”.

Another fraud is Ange Postecoglou.

The greatest thing to come out of Australia since Skippy the Bush Kangaroo got very close to equaling Martin Jol’s “perfect season”.

In 2005/06, with no European football, Jol’s Tottenham was knocked out of the FA Cup 3rd round and League Cup 2nd round, meaning they played just 40 games that season – the minimum a Premier League team can play.

This season, Tottenham will play just 41 games having gone out of the FA Cup on Friday. That means their biggest result this season has been a 1-0 victory at home to Burnley! Expect the DVDs to be out soon!

In 2005/06, Jol took Tottenham to 5th in the table, the same position that Postecoglou brilliant Spurs team occupy. If that is where they remain, then it would be fair to make comparisons between the two sides and managers.

Ange Postecoglou is basically the new Martin Jol.

tomorrow we face Nottingham Forest. I imagine there will be a minute silence before the game for Jurgen Klopp so we can all pay respects to him. Hopefully the fans show him as much respect as Liverpool fans showed to a dead chicken.

Enjoy your Monday.

Keenos

Would 4 trophies in 9 seasons be a success for Mikel Arteta?

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“You either leave a hero, or you stay long enough to see yourself become the villain” to misquote Batman was my first though when Jurgen Klopp took everyone by surprise when announcing he will be departing Liverpool at the end of the season.

Whilst it was a huge surprise that Klopp is departing, it has been felt for a couple of years that the intense German might be looking for a new challenge – he has been heavily linked with both the Bayern Munich and German national team in recent years.

There is no doubt that Klopp is a Liverpool legend, but has he learned from the mistake another Premier League great who outstayed his welcome after taking his club to the top.

Arsene Wenger is one of the greatest men in Arsenal’s history. It really is no debate. But it is also no debate that he should have left the club earlier than what he did.

Wenger took over as Arsenal manager in October 1996. Similarly, Jurgen Klopp also joined Liverpool in October (2015).

If he makes it through to the end of the season, Klopp would have spent nearly 9 seasons with Liverpool. Had Wenger departed after the same amount of time, he would have left after the 2004 invincible season. Unlikely to have happened (nor would anyone had been happy with him had he left in the summer of 2004 to join Real Madrid).

For me, Wenger’s departure should have happened in 2015, having won back to back FA Cups. He should have looked at the landscape of football and realised that at that point, it was time to hand the reigns of Arsenal to a new, younger manager with fresh ideas.

The restrictions of the stadium debt were just beginning to loosen, Manchester United were on the decline following Sir Alex Ferguson’s departure, and a certain Jurgen Klopp had just left Borussia Dortmund.

Instead of departing a hero, Wenger would stay another 3-years and see many thousands of Arsenal fans turn against him.

I often think back to that summer of 2015. We had an exciting team with the genuine world class talents of Alexis Sanchez and Mesut Ozil. These were backed up by superstars such as Laurent Koscielny, Aaron Ramsey, Per Mertesacker, Santi Cazorla, Theo Walcott and more. We would finish 2nd in 2015/16 which on paper would look decent.

But we would finish 2nd behind a Leicester City team that would win the league with just 81 points. That summer we signed a single player senior player – Petr Cech. In January we would add Mohamed Elneny.

Would our world have been different if Wenger stepped aside and let Klopp take the reigns? Would we have be the Premier League champions that year? And what would we have gone on to achieve under Klopp over the next 9 seasons? It certainly feels like a sliding doors moment.

Instead, Wenger stayed and after finishing 2nd, he would oversee us dropping out of the top 4 for the first time since 1996 a year later. Poor signings and financial mismanagement would see us spend 6 years out of the Champions League.

Whilst 2016/17 would be the first year in over 20 that we would finish out of the top 4, it would be just Liverpool’s 2nd top 4 finish in 9 years. And since that season Liverpool would never look back.

Another sliding doors moment may have happened in 2017.

Alexis Sanchez was being heavily linked to a big money move away to Manchester City – rumoured to be in excess of £60m. For some reason, Wenger failed to prepare for his departue and the result was we swapped him with Henrikh Mkhitaryan. A deal that worked out badly for both Arsenal and Manchester United.

The Sanchez deal was a clear sign that Wenger, who in his early days was a leader in terms of recruitment, was now past his best. A more forward thinking manager would have cashed in on Sanchez, and replaced him with a 25-year-old former Chelsea winger who was performing well in Italy.

Sanchez out, Mo Salah in would have been a deal that Wenger would have done in his early days. Instead the Egyptian signed for Klopp’s Liverpool. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Now let me flip this blog on its head with the praise of Klopp.

In the 8 completed seasons he ahs spent with Liverpool, he has led them to 4 honours. One each of the Champions League, Premier League, FA Cup and League Cup (Club World Cup, European Super Cup and Community Shield will always just be glorified friendlies).#

I was surprised about just how little Klopp had won with Liverpool. And it got me thinking – if Arteta is sitting at Arsenal in January 2027 having won 4 trophies at Arsenal, would you deem his time at the club a success?

He already has the FA Cup in the bag. So to match what Klopp has done at Liverpool he needs to win the Champions League, Premier League and League Cup. He has 3 and a bit seasons to do it. Then he needs to match whatever Liverpool win this year (they could win the quadruple at the time of writing!).

Personally, I would see Arteta period as a success if he walked away from us in the summer of 2027 having won the 4 trophies Klopp has won for Liverpool. It would mean we would have finally won the European Cup, we had broken our 20-year run without a league title, and have won the League Cup for the first time since 1993!

But I am sure there are others that would deem 4 trophies in nearly 9 years as not good enough. Afterall, Pep won 3 trophies in a single season at Manchester City. They will point out that Arteta would have won just 4 from 36(ish) trophies. He has failed 32 times.

So it will be interesting to get these fans take here and now on Liverpool. Has Klopp been a success? Or has he been a heroic failure challenging against the Manchester City juggernaut.

I finish this blog by looking back to when Wenger stayed on too long and, instead of getting Klopp or Pep, he oversaw our demise and badly damaged his legacy. I guess the final question is: If Klopp is still unemployed in 12 months, would you sack Arteta for him?

Keenos