Tag Archives: She Wore

Tottenham sell North London Derby tickets for 10 times face value

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Legal touting has been in football for a while now.

Arsenal have had a relationship with Thomas Cook for many a year. what happens is the club sell the travel agent tickets for games. Thomas Cook then package them up as a holiday deal, including flights (if required) and hotels.

The idea being that you can be a fan in America, visit London, and be guaranteed a ticket.

I am off to Antigua at the end of January for the cricket. I have bought flights, hotel and tickets for all 5 days of the test through a similar company as a package deal. Sport tourism is a huge market.

But Spurs have taken it to the next level by offering these sort of packages direct.

Recently many Tottenham fans received the below Email:

Tickets for the North London Derby, like all away tickets, are capped at £30 (Arsenal then deduct a further £4 for fans)

So Spurs are selling a £30 ticket for £298 (£249+VAT). That is 10 times face value.

Taking into account they have already done their fans over with the new stadium, selling season tickets when they knew it would not be complete, this is another show of greed by the club.

To justify the cost, you get:

  • Breakfast with some Spurs legends (probably Micky Hazard and Graham Roberts)
  • 10% discount in the club shop (encouraging you to spend even more money
  • Travel to the game (probably in Micky Hazard’s cab)
  • Match tickets
  • Optional return travel

The breakfast will be your bog standard full English. The ones you pay £8 for in a hotel. Taxi fair for the 4m journey is around £16. Plus the ticket, the total cost to Spurs is £54 (or £70 if you want to return to Tottenham High Street).

So fans are paying an additional £244 on top of the basic cost to have legends sit with them at breakfast, and to jump the waiting list for tickets.

Tickets for most away games are at a premium.

Spurs would receive around 3,000 tickets for the trip to Arsenal.

Tickets for the game sold out to Season Ticket Holders with a current total of 362 or more ticketing points (away credits). What buying the package through spurs means is that you could have no ticketing points. Never been to an away game. Not even have a season ticket, and yet jump the queue and get the rarest of rare briefs.

There will be fans who have been to 20-odd away games over the last 3 years who would have missed out on tickets. They find their place taken by someone who has not been to games and paid £298 for the privileged.

Greed is killing football.

Keenos

ITK season is open

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Middle of November, the final international break of the year, seems to have meant the start of silly season with transfer rumours.

We already have the usual ITK’s on Twitter making stuff up to gain followers. You all know the ones by now, the Ali G actor, the bloke who works in a KFC in Leicester, the A level student who call himself Plug, and the bloke pretending to be a horse. It is a surprise that people still fall for their BS.

In the last week we have seen Arsenal linked with plenty of centre backs and left wingers in the press. It is the usual tactic; write as many stories as possibly about as many players and eventually one will be right.

Arsenal will be scouting 100s of players at one time, so often when the media do say that we are “interested” in a player, it is not totally untrue. However there is a big difference between us scouting a player and actually having solid interest.

One gem in this weeks news was in The Sun. The headline was:

Arsenal target ace Denis Suarez ‘gives green light’ to join Gunners with Chelsea also tracking Barcelona star

A world exclusive that the Spanish midfielder was set to leave Barcelona in January, with Arsenal his likely destination.

But then within the article was this snippet:

But, it is unclear if the Gunners have any interest in signing the Barcelona midfielder

What a waste of 500 words saying he had the green light to join Arsenal, then only to a say that it was unclear if Arsenal wanted him.

There has also been plenty of speculation about Aaron Ramsey.

On 3 consecutive days, the same paper said that Bayern Munich, Juventus and then PSG were leading the race for him.

Of course, when a deal is announced, the ITKs and papers will all point to their tweet or article saying that they “called it” ignoring the 99 names they got wrong.

Its all a load of rubbish.

Keenos

Sven Mislintat promotion gives peak into Arsenal future

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Last night it was announced that Arsenal had promoted Sven Mislintat from Head of Recruitment to Technical Director.

By promoting a scout whose vision of the game is about unearthing stars of the the future gives you a peak into Arsenal’s future.

The club will look to recruit young, exciting talent, and develop that talent into global superstars.

A return to Arsene Wenger’s early philosophy of making, not buying superstars

Earlier this week I had a little discussion with someone over the N’Golo Kante deal.

It was reported by Football Leaks that his agents had pocketed £10.6m from the deal, which would go some way to explaining why Arsenal did not follow up their interest.

Under Arsene Wenger, rightly or wrongly, we often pulled out of deals that saw a huge chunk of money going to agents.

Wenger was a ”purist” and detested agents taking money out of the game. He hated the likes of the Anelka’s who would unsettle their own client and move them from club to club, making millions of pounds in the process.

Sadly to compete for the best players, you have to be willing to deal with the likes of Jorge Mendes and Mino Raiola. Dealing with these individuals is a huge reason why Raul Sanllehi was bought in.

The conversation went beyond agents fees and also discussed that Arsenal are still a way behind the likes of Manchester United in terms of wages paid.

Recently it was revealed that Barcelona’s wage bill was approximately €487m, with Real Madrid paying out €395. In 3rd place was Manchester United at €337m. The traditional Big 3 of world football were joined by the Billionaire Boys Clubs of PSG (€272m), Manchester City (€296) and Chelsea(€256m). Juventus (€259m) and Bayern Munich (€265m) were also amongst the top 10.

Arsenal were 10th – paying out around €232m.

Whilst that is a huge amount, it is €100m less than United, whilst Barcelona pay out more than twice in wages than Arsenal.

Wages are often the key to success. The rule of thumb is the more you spend in wages, the more higher you finish up the table. This is obviously on average, so there will always be exceptions to the rule such as Leicester.

What is clear is that Arsenal are still not eating from the top table. We are still unable to pay the top wages to attract the best players. We are still a 2nd tier club behind the likes of Barcelona, Real Madrid and Manchester United.

But we were told we moved from Highbury to enable us to compete.

And that was the plan.

The gate receipts from the emirates were meant to bring us back level with the likes of Manchester United and Barcelona – who at the time were doubling our gate receipt income.

Back in the early 00s, gate receipts were king. They were the main source of income.

But the game moved on. TV money and commercial deals are now more important than what comes through the gate.

Moving to the Emirates means that Arsenal have the 4th highest gate receipts in world football – behind the big 3 of Man U, Barcelona and Real Madrid. There is not that much in it. TV deals are also fairly neutral – although the figures above are prior to Arsenal failing to qualify for the Champions League.

What is clear is how far Arsenal fall behind when it comes to commercial revenue.

4th in gate receipts but just 10th in commercial revenue – and £162m less than Manchester United.

When we moved, we could not have predicted that the world would change to the extent it has, and that commercial profits would be king.

The thing with commercial income is it is slightly beyond our control. Manchester United, Barcelona and Real Madrid are bigger brands than Arsenal, so will naturally command more from Nike, Adidas, Emirates, AON, etc, for deals.

We are over €100m behind Manchester United in salaries paid and €162m a year behind in commercial revenue. We are still at the 2nd tier. Not at the top table.

Well we should not have moved then you cry.

Incorrect.

Had we not moved our gate receipts would have dropped by £40m to £60m. Without the big commercial deals that Bayern Munich get, or having a super rich owner like Manchester City (Stan Kronenke is rich, but doesn’t have £2.7bn he can pump into us) less gate receipts would have left us even further behind.

We would have a similar total revenue as Liverpool – who have won just a single trophy in 10 years. We would be even more reliant on selling players to generate income (Liverpool have sold over £400m worth of players in 5 years, Arsenal just £200m).

The move to the Emirates was supposed to close the gap between Arsenal and those on the top table. The explosion of commercial deals (and Billionaire Boys Clubs) have meant that the move has basically allowed us to maintain our place as a second tier club in European club football.

Hopefully with the new Adidas deal, the Rwanada deal, and other new commercial deals, we will see that gap close up, allowing us to be more competitive.

By promoting Mislintat, Arsenal have shown great self awareness.

We do not have an owner who will pump in £2.7bn of his own, and neither should we expect him to do so.

In European football at the moment, it is only PSG and Man City who have owners bankrolling them. Roman has turned the tap off. Every other club is (attempting at least) to run a self sufficient model. You spend what you bring in.

With a great coach like Unai Emery, and the promotion of Mislintat, Arsenal will continue buying the next global superstars. Lucas Torreira and Matteo Guendouzi rather than N’Golo Kante and Paul Pogba.

Some might see this as the wrong route. That we should be spending hundreds of millions a year on transfers, but this not realistic.

We as fans have to understand that as a club we can not afford to pay the wages of Man U, Barcelona or Real Madrid. Kante is about to sign a £290,000 deal. Alexis Sanchez close to £500,000.

Arsenal are not going to suddenly magic up another £100-150m a year to fund the big transfers.

As Dortmund, Monaco, Atlético Madrid, Liverpool & Napoli have shown, you can build a competitive team through sensible recruitment rather than big money signings.

It is about how you buy, not what you spend.

Good recruitment + good coaching = success.

And Mislintat is key to the future of the club.

Keenos