The Forbes writer is an Arsenal fan so at the end he turned the focus to Arsenal, here are those bits:

ZS: Me being an Arsenal fan, what do you think of Arsenal’s handling of the Robin Van Persie situation so far, and where do you think this is going to ultimately end? Finally, would you change strategy at all from what you’ve seen from Arsenal?

SK: The strategy is they’re not going to let him go and keep him to his contract even if he doesn’t renew.

ZS: This morning the Dutch press announced that they’ve also put a sort of gag order on van Persie in relation to interviews during Euro 2012.

SK: I thought that was more his own decision. My sense is that he’s going to leave. He turns 29 this summer, and he’s a very ambitious guy. As a footballer he definitely wants to leave because he realizes that Arsenal are not going to challenge for the next couple of years in the Premier League and not only because of financial reasons. There’s also a couple of players in the team that he also thinks are not of the caliber to challenge. What might swing it for him staying at least for this one last year, particularly because Arsenal have said they won’t let him go, is family and happiness in London. He’s got a couple of kids, and he and his wife have been in London for nine years. He’s very ambitious. He wants to win something. He’s actually never won anything in his career.

ZS: So this is completely competitive-based and has nothing to do with money? Obviously the money is nice if you get your wages doubled if you went someplace like Manchester City.

SK: It’s much more based on competitiveness. What I say in Soccer Men is that footballers don’t think so much about where they can get the biggest pay package. Because if they did they’d all be in Russia now or in China. They think in terms of careers just like engineers, journalists, and accountants do. You want a career in the top places doing amazing things like most of us do. That now means going to play at Manchester City more than Arsenal.

ZS: So what do you think about the RVP situation? Do you think he’s gone? If you’re Arsenal do you say, “Hey, he’s 29. We should sell him and get some money.” Or do you think that there’s almost a brand identity at stake here that if they don’t hold on to him for another season that they just basically have given up [Samir] Nasri, Cesc [Fabregas], and [Robin] van Persie and now they’re a selling, mid-upper-half of the table kind of club.

SS: I think you could make too much of one individual player. It’s very dangerous to build your entire strategy around one player, and I think you could say he was the linchpin and the future of the team. I think Arsenal are at a crossroads.

The question is, “How are Arsenal going to compete in the future?” because they’ve built pretty teams over the last few years with a lot of young players. Wenger’s story has been consistently about promise and building for the future. “This is a young team, and they’re going to grow.” In reality, it’s just crumbled in his hands. Where does he go from here? The gap between the Manchesters and the rest of the country this season must have been alarming, and Arsenal expect to do better. If they get stuck in a group of four or five clubs chasing two Champions League places there is always a danger of falling: look at the way that Liverpool have struggled. That must be the worry for them.

Even this season they could have almost been out of the Champions League- they could have been in Tottenham’s position. More generally, I think that is the problem for the big clubs in England, and Europe as a whole.

I talked about there is one big distortion in the Championship playoff. The other huge distortion is entry into the Champions League, and the step there is just too big. In some ways it’s exciting if that step has become so important that teams must fight it out and failing to get it is like going into the Championship. The fear must be that with financial fair play is that now we’ve had a reordering at the top – [Manchester] United, [Manchester] City, maybe Tottenham, Chelsea, and maybe Arsenal. In a couple of years time those may be all the teams that can compete.

ZS: Right, it’s the theory of regulation that sometimes it is needed, but don’t kid yourself that if you regulate your not going to largely freeze the marketplace.

SS: Right. In a sense the problems that Arsenal face are dependent upon how the league is going to evolve and how you think financial fair play is going to play out. I think maybe one of the ways they may be thinking is that financial fair play may ultimately restrain Manchester City and Chelsea and in that world Arsenal, [Manchester] United and Tottenham will dominate. In which case they’re fine, they’ll have enough money, they’ll invest, and they’ll be fine. And this will just be seen as a few bad years, and they’ll come out the other end of it. The problem is that clearly Manchester City are calling UEFA’s bluff.