Kolo Gone to City; Henry Still Awesome

By: Martin | July 29th, 2009

Well, it looks like Toure to Manchester City is a done deal, for a rumored £15 million. Brace yourself for the surprise of what I’m about to say, but Citeh will also reportedly close to double Toure’s wages.

I have very mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, Toure was really pretty poor for most of the second half of last season–he’s never been an overly physical defender, instead relying on pace and positioning to keep attackers away from goal. But last season, his pace slipped dramatically, and while he still had a lot of heart and smarts, he seemed utterly incapable of dealing with elite level attackers. And he’s 28, which is the age at which many players, especially players so reliant on pace and athleticism, start to slip in their performance. So objectively, I don’t think he’s worth anywhere near £15 million, so it’s not a bad piece of business.

However. This is assuming that the £15 million will be reinvested in the club–say, for example, by basically offering that money to Fulham for Hangeland. Based on what we’ve seen so far this summer, I have absolutely ZERO confidence that that is the case. Think about it. Going into this summer, we were all told that Wenger would have money to spend to improve the team, which meant that he wouldn’t have to sell players to fund incoming players. He went out and got Vermaelen early in the summer for £10 million, and we’ve been linked with loads of other players–Bassong, Melo, Inler, Cana, Matuidi, Huntelaar, Chamakh, and on and on. We bought none of them.

Meanwhile, our competitors for the 4th and final Champions League spot, mainly Manchester City, have been spending in an effort to improve their clubs. Surely Wenger and management have to see that our spot in the Big 4, and therefore our position as one of Europe’s elite clubs, is in serious jeopardy. And yet they do nothing. Adebayor was sold for £25 million, this deal is reported to be worth £15 million, and the Eboue to Fiorentina deal (which, yes, I know is still speculative at this point) deal is supposedly worth close to £10 million. If the Eboue deal goes through, that means we will have gotten nearly (best if read in a Dr. Evil voice) £50 million from sales. Which means we’ll have turned a profit of £40 million thus far. In a summer in which our position in the top 4 is in jeopardy and Wenger was supposed to spend to improve the club.

I don’t want to get too repetitive, because I feel like I’ve been saying this all summer. But this is absolutely, completely, maddening. We’re a big club, and we should act like a big club. And big clubs exist to win trophies, not just develop players for other clubs. The bottom line for me is that if Arsenal wants to avoid becoming a mid-table team like Aston Villa, Tottenham, West Ham, or Sunderland–decent clubs with decent numbers of supporters and decent players, but who don’t win trophies and aren’t able to hang onto truly elite players–we have to get better this summer.

My theory, and I think Travis agrees, is that I think Arsenal’s financial situation is much, much worse than they are letting on. The club borrowed a lot of money to pay for the Emirates Stadium, and while the new stadium brings in a lot of revenue, paying off the stadium debt may well eat up all that extra revenue and then some. The club planned to pay off most of the debt with the Highbury Project. Essentially, the idea was to turn the old Highbury property into a high-dollar luxury apartment complex. At the time, the real estate market was booming and it seemed like a brilliant idea. However, now that the apartments are on the market, the economy, particularly the housing market, is down the tubes, and the project is not bringing in nearly as much income as must have been originally projected.

So my theory is that the board of directors isn’t giving Wenger the money he needs to build the club. Now, I know, no one will admit this–they’re saying they have plenty of money, and the club is doing well. But if that’s the case, why on earth isn’t Arsenal spending some of the money? I refuse to believe Arsene Wenger is perfectly happy to just sit on a pile of money–anyone who’s followed this club for any length of time knows he’s a champion and how bad he wants to win. On the other hand, it makes perfect sense that they’d want to lie about this–if, for example, they came out and said, “This club is flat broke and totally screwed. We can’t spend any money,” that would cause an exodus of players from the Emirates because they’d figure they’d never win anything at Arsenal.

Look, I’d love to be wrong about this, but when I look at the economic situation and how we’re acting, it’s the only way I can make sense of it all.

Of course, the Toure move is sad for another reason as well. He’s been at the club for seven seasons, making him our longest-tenured player. He was a member of the Invincibles title winning 2003-2004 squad, 2 FA Cup winning squads, and the squad which made it to the finals of the Champions League. He’s a soldier, and a winner, and the kind of player, and man, you want on your team. Losing him is the last real link to the great Arsenal teams of the first part of this decade, and there seems to be a kind of finality about severing that last link that is inherently sad. I wish him well, and feel like he deserved a better exit than to have been essentially demoted from the first team and having to feud with the likes of William Gallas. Sigh.

I guess this is one of those cases where Boyz II Men said it so much better than I ever could:

In better news, Thierry Henry once again reminds us why we loved him, and still love him, so much. I’ve avoided talking about the Patrick Vieira to Spurs rumors because I can’t bring myself to believe them, and because it’s painful to even think about. But when there was a rumor that Henry had advised Vieira to sign for our archrivals, Henry put that rumor to bed with a quickness:

I am Arsenal through and through. I’d never advise ANYONE to sign for Tottenham. Patrick Vieira is a grown man who will do whatever he has to do for his own career. But I have never advised anyone about their future because it’s not my business. I can’t have Arsenal fans thinking I am helping Tottenham in any way.

And that, boys and girls, is how an Arsenal legend rolls.