Arsenal: sacked Wenger gets £11m compensation
Arsenal are paying Arsene Wenger – get this – £11m to leave at the end of the season. Well, so says the Sun. It’s pretty much what he would have earned for the final year of his contract – which implies he was more pushed than we realise.
Arsenal shareholder Alisher Usmanov said: “It’s a day of great sadness.” But it isn’t for the club’ s fans how have been watching Wenger’s ‘end of an era’ football for years. His years of changing things and winning the league have long departed. His aura of menace vanished years go. Usmanov’s emotions maybe more to do with his lack of control over hiring and firing at the club that despite his big stake won’t give him a seat on the board.
The decision to let the always classy Wenger go was Stan Kroenke’s, Arsenal’s absentee owner who fears that another season without Champions League cash and all those fat dividends will hurt his huge bank balance – and reduce the club’s value. And then season ticket renewal time is looming. Last season Ivan Gazidis, Arsenal’s CEO, handed Wenger another two-year contract, a move possessed of a lazy pragmatism; if not Wenger, then who? Arsenal had no clue. Wenger has gone from mainstay to stop gap. Gazidis blathered about another two years of the same old being a “catalyst for change”. Change came: Arsenal got worse.
So what next? The paper talks is of familiar faces: Juventus boss Max Allegri; ex-Barcelona boss Luis Enrique; Celtic manager Brendan Rodgers; and gun-for-hire Carlo Ancelotti. None of them excite the fans. They all represent playing it safe – people who have managed at big clubs and done well.
But Arsenal need bravery and courage. They need to get the figure who inspires. Why no Monaco’s Leonardo Jardim, a man who manages a team ever other club wants to recruit from? Be brave, Arsenal. Give the fans something complicated, daring and new to be intrigued and interested by. Give us new forms of keep-fit and training; give us new ways for players to express themselves; give us an end to the culture of playing “a little bit with the handbrake on’; give us a team of skilled tough-nuts and fighters. Give us another Wenger – you know, the one who should have gone in 2008!
Posted: 21st, April 2018 | In: Arsenal, News, Sports Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
