Arsenal beware: the headhunters are in town.
Newcastle, rooted to the foot of the table, need a win at the Emirates on Saturday but they also need the nucleus of a new squad, and their hosts have been in this position enough times to know how that usually plays out.
Memories are still fresh in north London of the last time new money came face to face with the grand old traditions of English football, when Manchester City dismembered their first team with a wave of a chequebook then rubbed it in their face by replacing them in the title shake-up.
Newcastle might not be plotting the same kind of merciless raid, but make no mistake; life will get harder for Arsenal once the Magpies’ pockets are emptied into the marketplace.
It’s not always straightforward to tell correlation from causation. Arsenal last won the Premier League in 2004, a year after Roman Abramovich began his revolution at Chelsea. Their last sustained title challenge – though this is less easy to pinpoint – arguably came in 2008, the same year the Abu Dhabi group bought City.
The graph shows the club’s fortunes took their most drastic downward turns at the same moment that new money destabilised the traditional landscape and changed the way of doing business in English football. Arsenal wouldn’t adapt, couldn’t keep up, and the juggernaut has rolled on without them.
When Chelsea and Man City raided Arsenal
A mixture of promising and established talent swapped Arsenal for Manchester City after their takeover by Sheikh Mansour in 2008:
- Emmanuel Adebayor – £22m, July 2009
- Kolo Toure – £16m, August 2009
- Gael Clichy – £6m, July 2011
- Samir Nasri – £24m, August 2011
- Bacary Sagna – Free, June 2013
A similar path has been well-trodden between the Emirates and Stamford Bridge since Roman Abramovich’s takeover.
- Ashley Cole – £6.6m, August 2006
- Olivier Giroud – £18m, January 2018
Isaac Hayden and Joe Willock may well prove to be pioneers of a new north London to Newcastle route over the coming seasons.
Research by Layton Ryan-Parson
In some ways, it was a simple volume equation, displacement theory in action. The league’s top four didn’t get any more spacious just because more clubs, well-armed with the proverbial transfer war chests, were trying to squeeze in.
But the nouveau riche did more than just crowd the Gunners out. Chelsea and City needed recruits, preferably players who knew the league and were settled in the culture. Arsenal’s stars fit the bill, not just because they were ready-made and on the spot but because they were palpably frustrated with the direction their own club was taking. Like any start-up in any industry, City and Chelsea went talent spotting where the talent was disgruntled, the low-hanging fruit of the football transfer market.
Ashley Cole was the first of Arsene Wenger’s Invincibles to be lured. That was the summer of 2006, after Arsenal had laboured to a fourth-place finish at the end of a disjointed season. Cole famously claimed to have been left “trembling with anger”, nearly driving his car off the road, by Arsenal’s contract offer, reported to have been £55,000 a week, but the saga cast a dye. Wenger lost the world’s best left-back to an emergent rival, his principles intact, yet he had failed to face up to the changing shape of the business of football.
Losing Cole might have been the most damaging moment in the club’s recent history. It started a trend. It also showed other clubs that Arsenal could be “bought out” of their place at the top, that it would cost far less for clubs to pick off their stars than it might anywhere else.
Manchester City ruthlessly followed Chelsea’s example. The piecemeal dismantling of Arsenal as City built their first title-winning side made sense in the context of a radical, almost overnight power shift, but it also showed up an institution still trying to play by old rules. The oligarchs and petro-giants had looked at Arsenal and seen them for what they were, the purse strings pulled taut and held there by an almost religious commitment to frugality and doing things, by some archaic metric, “the right way”.
Now another cat is prowling around the litter box, looking for a way in. If anything has changed in the intervening years, it could be that Arsenal are no longer such a shop window, or at least not the high-end outlet they were a decade ago. But whatever shape the Newcastle overhaul eventually takes, it is likely to happen in stages; the January transfer window will be about recruiting to secure Premier League safety. To that end, rumours that Nicolas Pepe – still not looking the £70million star Arsenal paid for but plainly brimming with potential – could be in Newcastle’s sights represent a worrying echo of the past.
The headhunters are in town again.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/32rk1JE
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