What Arsene Wenger wanted to say at the AGM: "Look... you'd be on your hands and knees thanking me right now if you people knew what I've delivered versus the resources these guys have given me since 2004!
Thursday’s annual general meeting hosted by Arsenal was sensational for all of the wrong reasons. What was reported was Arsene Wenger’s “fourth place is like a trophy” comment that sent some Gunners into the stratosphere over perceived lower expectations from their manager while simultaneously eliciting “he’s off his rocker” guffaws from those with no particular affection for the club nor its contrarian manager. The problem was that this statement wasn’t the real bombshell, as everyone has known for years that Wenger and Arsenal have seen Champions League play as one of the primary ways to entice players to stay at or join a club that hasn’t had a realistic shot of winning a title since its perfect season in 2004. The bigger commentary in Wenger’s statement was found elsewhere, as reported at the end of this ESPN article summarizing the conference.
My job is to deliver a team with the resources we have, and I have never complained about that. I want a club to pay players from its own resources, there is no shame in that.
Notice the tone at the front end of the quote. He uses the phrase, “with the resources we have.” Someone in Wenger’s position has to be very careful in the words that he uses. He won’t openly criticize his bosses, and won’t say what others might have expected him to say, which was, “my job is to deliver a team with the resources that have been made available to me.” While the atmosphere in the same article described Wenger’s post-speech reception as one where he “received a warm ovation” that contrasted with lack of such “warm platitudes” for chairman Peter Hill-Wood and chief executive Ivan Gazidis, the reality is that Wenger works for those two men and the club they run. Arsene Wenger has always been a good field general who happens to get the most from the troops under his command that his higher ups allow him to recruit. No matter the era, Wenger has always done what is asked of him and done it with faithfulness few other managers in the business have demonstrated.
When the club turned to him in the mid-90’s and asked him to remake one of the most British clubs at the time into one made up of continental Europeans, he embraced the project wholeheartedly. The reward for this effort was the plaudits that came with three championships, three FA Cups, perennial Champions League qualification, and English football’s second perfect season ever in the top flight in Wenger’s first eight years at the club.
When the club’s leadership settled on the need to build a new stadium that would require the shedding of players to balance the books with the forthcoming debt load, Wenger obliged and retooled a perennial championship contender into one that set its sights instead on only being a perennial Champions League contender. When the exodus of players accelerated with the arrival of sugar daddy owners at both Chelsea and Manchester City, Wenger dutifully stayed at Arsenal and somehow managed to coax them into Champions League qualification year-after-year.
Every step along the way, Wenger’s implemented a system that allows the club to meet the goals set out by their expenditures on players. The club’s reduction in both transfer spending and wages has resulted in them falling to sixth in the league in terms of player spending. Heading into the 2012/13 season, Arsenal had only a 6% chance of winning the title based upon their player expenditures. Through last week’s matches, those title chances had dropped to less than 2%. Arsenal hasn’t been a title threat in years, and Wenger and the leadership team know it because they also know that spending on players translates into success and the club’s leadership can’t spend as much as Manchester United, Chelsea, and Manchester City if it wants to run a break-even-to-profitable business.
read more : http://www.forbes.com/sites/zachslaton/2012/10/27/what-is-champions-league-worth-to-arsenal/
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