Good, perhaps great, news from The Indy:
In the previous two seasons, Wenger has said that the club must sell a player every year to help service the annual £24m payments on the Emirates Stadium. He has sold Thierry Henry and Alexander Hleb – both to Barcelona – over the last two seasons and the evidence suggests that a further sale will be in order this year if he is to continue financing the club.
That should be relatively simple with Emmanuel Adebayor’s departure more than likely after his growing disenchantment and poor performances. However, it seems that Wenger, who spent £15m on Andrei Arshavin in January, will once again have to come up with a cut-price alternative to the Togo striker. The slightly cryptic interview given in France over the weekend may just have been the Arsenal manager hinting at his unhappiness.
Wenger also had to endure a rough ride from Arsenal supporters at last week’s shareholders’ forum. It is understood the Arsenal board has always sought to keep to the line that there is money available to spend on players because it is concerned that disillusionment among fans would strengthen the hand of Alisher Usmanov, the Uzbek billionaire who owns 25 per cent of the club and has promised large investment in the past.
Kroenke, who owns sport franchises in America including the NBA’s Denver Nuggets, owns 28.3 per cent of the club having bought shares from Fiszman and the Carr family, the latter last month. He endorses Fiszman’s view that the club can survive without a major benefactor and Wenger himself has rallied against what he perceives as “financial doping”.
However, the Arsenal manager is now facing his most severe financial restraints. The midfielder Samir Nasri, signed last summer by Wenger, said yesterday that there was “no question” of his manager leaving. Nasri said: “I know that he still has a project for two years and he is counting on allowing Arsenal to rediscover its glorious past.”
Huzzah. Not for Arsenal, or for the good of English football, but for us in our quest to hang onto Brede Hangeland.
Our possible European qualification may move the goalposts slightly, but good sources reckon that Fulham are expecting to have to deal with some pretty persuasive bids for Hangeland over the summer. The thinking is that we’ll do what we can to keep him, but if a big club comes in with a silly offer it’s going to be hard to say no. Now, we can all gnash our teeth and complain about not having ambition and being a selling club, but in the really real world things aren’t that simple and if a player gets an offer to improve his career and if a club gets offered serious money that player’s probably on his way. You’d hope that with Hangeland and Hodgson things might be different, but we can’t really know.
The point of all this is that I’d assumed Arsenal to be a bidder. Never have I seen a club who need a centre-back so badly, and the fact(s) that Hangeland is road tested, not frightened of having the ball at his feet, of a cerebral bent and (most importantly) of sufficient quality, had made me assume that Arsene would be lurking around Roy’s office as soon as the season finishes with a blank cheque, a nice bottle of wine and a Balzac first edition.
But perhaps not. If Arsenal have no money I can rest easy. Manchester United don’t need Hangeland; Chelsea wouldn’t happen; Liverpool would be interesting and the other club I worry about, but would he play regularly there? That just brings us down to Villa, who would surely want him, Man City, who could offer money but little else, and Spurs, who will surely ask (Hangeland was dominant in our win over Spurs at the Cottage) but will surely be told “no”. The latter clubs aren’t really a big enough step up to justify leaving the good thing we have here anyway. So perhaps we’re safe after all.
Two more things:
Adam’s got some more good stuff up at This is American Soccer. One of my ideas is to form some sort of inner-city football world. I have no idea how this might be pulled off, but I like the look of this Pier 40 place.
Also, great forgotten albums of recent years: Screaming Trees, Dust. This is from about 1996, which I remember well because Hade and I had just got together and (she) drove all the way to Glasgow for T-In The Park, where we saw all kinds of great music and had lots of noodles tipped on our tent while we slept. I listened to this album a lot at the time. Music and memories, eh?
