I think we are right now where Liverpool were back when Hicks and Gillett were running them into the ground. It took them a decade to really turn it around. I really hope it won't be that long for us.
There are a few things I want to get off my chest, so I might as well put them in this timely started thread. First and foremost I think the most depressing insight is that no one cares about the actual club and whether it should stand for something, should represent certain values and ideas on the pitch that neither failure nor adversity can take away from us. I can handle Arsenal being a bit shit if it comes down to it. I just can't handle us being pointless. But pointless is exactly what we are, and it's what you become when you load up on people who see football as a business, as books to balance and accounts to manage and middle management careers to be maintained, instead of a community-driven experience that tries to engage people and entertain them. Bureaucrats without a pulse making all the decisions while managing someone else's portfolio.
The higher ups at the club certainly put no value on loyalty, evidenced by the treatment of former players like (for instance) Ramsey and Koscielny, and the refusal to pay comparable wages for current big players like Auba, so why should the players show any loyalty back? Curiously some of this tendency has rubbed off on the fans too, who have started to count every penny and worry about budgets as soon as we fail our goals. There are almost no sporting arguments being made anymore, no consideration for the fact that we're just going to be much worse without our best players and that it will be much harder to get back to even where we are now when they leave. It's what a decade of this bullshit gives you. It has changed the club culture. It has made us accept, even embrace, being less for the sake of a few more tenners in Kroenke's bank account. Better to sell Auba to Barcelona and reinvest. As if someone good enough for Barcelona wouldn't leave a big dent behind here. As if that dent is not going to be impossible to fix with whatever scraps we'll get in transfer fee for a soon-to-be 31 year old with 12 months left on his deal. We all know where the main benefit lies, and it's not on the sporting side.
I remember how badly we treated Sagna, who is the best rightback we've had in modern times, was on less money than anyone else in the defence his entire Arsenal career, and dared to ask for a good final contract. Some would say it was the right decision with the benefit of hindsight since he didn't have many great seasons for City afterwards, but I still think it was shit. Our issue wasn't that we didn't want to keep him, it was that another £30-40K per week for a few seasons was completely unacceptable to us after him being grossly underpaid for eight years. He gave us a bona fide European top defender for the better part of a decade. So what if he wasn't going to be just that good for the last two-three years? It was always an unlikely feat to repeat. Was that money any better spent on Debuchy? Has Bellerin ever given us even one season that is half as good as Sagna's past ones? Of course not. But that is how we treat people here. Fuck off when we're done with you, and fuck you forever if you leave a minute before then. Everything is about pounds and pennies and potential monetary return on investment. We aren't capable of understanding football on any deeper level as a club, and personally I'm convinced it's our biggest failure, the biggest thing that is holding us back. Bergkamp would have been out the door years before the invincibles too if the club had been run the way it is now back then.
We have a good academy cull right now, but the whole idea of breeding some genuine club feelings back into the team by turning to Hale End is so naive. It rests on the unlikely assumption that the young players that are coming through the ranks are both good enough for the long run and feel an unusual allegiance to Arsenal to stay and fight for us, all while we're doing our best to short-change them on new contracts along the way. We're approaching a point soon where the academy products weren't even born the last time we won the league. They don't remember Henry, or even Cesc soon. Most of their memories will be of various stages of failure as the club kept dropping tier after tier. In a few years we'll similarly have new fans (and a lot fewer of them than we're used to) in their late teens who started watching us in their pre-teens and will never have seen us play in Champions League.
We always talk about rebuilding, and it never actually happens because we leave no base to build on. We're so very far from gaining any form of genuine insight about our issues, and we're not going to change until we do. No fucking pride anywhere. Not among the players, who left Leno on his own yesterday as he was carried off in a rage with a likely longterm knee injury after getting assaulted by a bloody two-penny clogger. Not among the fans, who have completely forgotten how to appreciate class and how to value loyalty. We're not a football club anymore, we're a fucking corporation.
