Adebayor, Adebayor, Give Him the Cash, He’s a Gunner No More…

By: Martin | July 18th, 2009

Well, it’s official. The Togonator is gone. It’s worth taking a moment to look back on his time at the club.

Ade arrived at the club from Monaco for a mere £3 million in January 2006. He hadn’t really set the world on fire there, scoring just 18 goals in 79 games. Then he showed up, a tall, skinny, clumsy, giraffe of a man, and everybody, myself included, thought Wenger had just accomplished the equivalent of flushing £3 million down the toilet. As is so often the case, though, Wenger had seen something most of us hadn’t. He scored 4 goals in 13 matches down the stretch that spring.

The next season he continued to develop and show some growing pains. In 44 appearances for the club in all competitions, he notched 12 goals. He still looked pretty mediocre, but started to show flashes of strength and skill. But I don’t think anyone was prepared for what he would be able to do the following season.

When Thierry Henry left the club after the 2006-2007 season, pundits questioned where the club’s goals would come from, and the consensus was that the club would finish outside the top 4. But Adebayor stepped up and proved himself to be nothing short of world-class. Right under our noses, the giraffe had become a gazelle–where Adebayor had once been skinny and gawky, now he was muscular, strong, and graceful. When he was on his game, he was a nearly flawless striker–he chased and harried defenders into bad decisions and bad passes, and when Arsenal had the balls, he made incisive runs and was fully capable of scoring with both his head and feet. He was strong enough to outmuscle smaller defenders, but had enough pace and skill to get around larger defenders. He scored 29 goals in 47 appearances for the club as the Gunners pulled off a famous victory over AC Milan at the San Siro and mounted a serious title challenge. He was a star, a fan favorite, and seemed to be on his way to be an Arsenal legend.

But like Nicolas Anelka and so many others before him, it wasn’t to last. After such a brilliant season, Ade quickly dispensed of all the goodwill he had accumulated by having his agent pimp him out to AC Milan and Barcelona over the offseason. When neither was interested, he came back to Arsenal with his tail between his legs, and thought Gunner fans were stupid enough to believe that he never wanted to leave the club, that it was all his agent. Right.

After being rewarded with a new contract anyway, Ade came back to earth in 2008-2009. He tallied 15 goals in 35 appearances. And while that’s not bad on the face of it, he didn’t score a single league goal last season against a team that qualified for the Champions League or the Europa League–that’s ZERO goals against the top 7 in England. He was clearly usurped as the team’s top striker by Robin van Persie, and the emergence of Nicklas Bendtner as a viable striker option and Andrei Arshavin’s explosion on the scene put him in even more jeopardy.

More than his dropoff in stats, though, was what we saw with our own two eyes. He was no longer the guy who would chase after the ball like a man possessed–even in crucially important matches (like the Champions League semi against Manchester United) he seemed perfectly content to simply jog around hoping that the ball would somehow magically find its way into the net, because he couldn’t be bothered to create a play. For us Arsenal fans, to watch someone with so much God-given ability squander it when his club needed it most was truly maddening. Towards the end of the season, he criticized Arsenal fans for not supporting him enough, and he was benched with an “injury” for the last game of the season.

Another offseason came, and once again, even after being given a new long-term contract, he was looking for a way out of North London. And he finally found one, and will make twice as much money next season after having a season half as good as the one that preceded it. If you’re confused, you are not alone.

I think this is a good move by the club, and a fabulous piece of business to turn a player we bought for £3 million into £25 million 3.5 years later. Like Prop Joe says, “buy for a dollar, sell it for two.” If we reinvest the money into the club, I have no doubt that Wenger will be able to make this club much stronger at the start of the season than it was yesterday.

Adebayor gave us some good times. Scored some truly spectacular and meaningful goals, like the wonderstriker against Villareal last season. Gave us some silly celebration dances and some memorable hairdos.

Despite all that, though, I think his legacy at the club will be similar to that of Anelka–he was a striker who could have been an Arsenal legend, but instead turned his back on the club, demonstrated a very bad attitude, and chased the money. I, for one, don’t particularly bear him any ill will, and wish him luck as long as it doesn’t include beating Arsenal or knocking us out of the top 4, but I definitely suspect that he will not be well-received when he returns to the Emirates wearing baby blue next season. I guess he’ll just have to get used to crying into his money-stuffed pillow….