Arsene Wenger and Modern Soccernomics – An Allegory – By SAM KARGBO

By SAM KARGBO
History can be unkind. Take the case of the English Premier League where Arsenal was the first football club to buy a footballer from another club,in 1928, for £10,890 – the record before that was £1000
. The Wikipedia of World football transfer record names Scottish striker, Willie Groves, as the first player to be transferred for a fee of over £100, when he switched from West Bromwich Albion to Aston Villa in 1893,eight years after the legalisation of professionalism in football. It took just twelve years for the figure to become £1000, when Sunderland striker, Alf Common, moved to Middlesbrough. It wasn’t until 1928 that the first five-figure transfer took place. Bolton Wanderers’ David Jack was the subject of interest from Arsenal, and, to negotiate the fee down, Arsenal manager, Herbert Chapman, got the Bolton representatives drunk. Subsequently, David Jack was transferred for a world-record fee when Arsenal paid £10,890 to Bolton for his services, after Bolton had asked for £13,000 –200% of the previous record made when Sunderland signed Burnley’s Bob Kelly for £6,500, a huge sum when one imagines the economics of that era.
Today, Arsenal is being managed by a ‘Professor’ of Economics, Arsene Wenger, who considers the transfer of Paul Progba from Juventus to Manchester United for £89m as simply crazy, believing that record transfers could rise to £300m in the near future. Can one blame the old man? He was trained to believe that, ceteris paribus, people invest for profit. However, in football – or soccer, as Americans call it – clubs spend money for trophies and glory. Wenger missed that point. Many Gooners, as the supporters of the London-based Arsenal Football Club are called, blame Wenger’s failure to keep pace with modern soccernomics for the club’s failure to win the Premier League since 2004. ‘The Professor’, who revolutionized Arsenal’s game –making it the most entertaining club in the English Premier League, is now considered the stumbling block to Arsenal’s glory because of his repeated poor showing in the seasonal billion-pound transfer circus.
Who will blame those who do not list him among the greatest football club managers in Europe? Trophies triumph over talent honing and commitment to the game’s development, because they win bragging rights for the supporters and glory for the club owners. The fate of clubs who disappear from the radar of the English Premier League do not matter to football supporters. Theirs is about what happen on match days.
In Nigeria, booze sits well in the stomach when gulped in celebration of match victories. Rumours are elevated to factual stories when they are bandied by supporters in celebratory moods. Not many would go beyond speculative blogs and thrash peddling media to read books like Stefan Szymanski’s Money and Football; A Soccernomics Guide. Even for those whose business it is to peep through the veil of the game to sniff for slush money and rackets or prevent money laundering, the game is too big to be disturbed. After all, if football was solely about sport sans dirty money the Glazer family would have had to answer for continually throwing money at the problem of Manchester United since the departure of Sir Alex Ferguson, whose godlike standing in the game of football had a hand in the 13 Premier League trophies it has won in the first place, not to mention the supermarket mentality of Paris Saint Germain that has, for years, been buying players as if the game is about the galaxy of players a team assembles, and yet could only dominate that second-rate French League.  Real Madrid, whose £86,000,000 record in buying Gareth Bale has just been dumped in the trash bin,is in debt as much as Barcelona, its nemesis. Definitely if football were to be clean sport, the ethical question of Jose Mourinho’s personal being the manager of the players Manchester United has bought with humongous sums would have been raised and answered.
Arsene Wenger cannot be forgiven for failing to know that modern football is big business. After all, it is through the game that he has made Arsenal and himself rich, building the Emirate Stadium far away from Highbury. Wenger’s case is a fixation to profit and disdain for the fans. His colleagues are stocking up their barns while he basks in the delusion that the kids from the academy will be good arsenal for the prosecution of what he christened a world championship of managers. With José Mário dos Santos Mourinho Félix (Jose Mourinho) at Manchester United, Antonio Conte at Chelsea, Josep “Pep” Guardiola Sala at Man City, Jürgen Norbert Klopp at Liverpool, it will be a miracle for the delusional Wenger to believe that he can successfully prosecute such a war with such limited weak arsenal.
Like Wenger who hangs on to old ways in the prosecution of new realties, the opposition in Nigeria is bereft of new tools to serve as the people’s alternative to President Muhammadu Buhari’s Government.
A diehard Peoples Democratic Party supporter sent me a link to an article entitled “Aisha Buhari’s Embarrassing Grammatical Infelicities at USIP”, in which the writer, Farooq A. Kperogi, did what the opposition should have done instead of cutting into her handbag. Allowing people like Ayo Fayose to drive the opposition truly exposes the underbelly of the opposition. Instead of exposing the weaknesses of the policies of the Government and proffering alternatives to them, the opposition is fixated on the ridiculous – either defending their leaders or blaming the Government for the weather.
In 2014, I stated, in this column, that “Nigeria is one good case of how political institutions reflect the cultural values of the societies in which they are established… Nigeria has never been in short supply of government supporters who are very inventive and adept at turning logic on its head regarding the purpose of government and opposition in the polity.”
Kperogi’s critique of the First lady’s speech calls for better handling of the affairs of the First lady. It is understood that times are hard and there is need to conserve public funds, but that should not deny the First lady quality, professional hands. Like the President, the First lady is part of the face of the Government and the country.

source: Day Light