Well the ‘historic quadruple’ is now over for Man City and after the ‘Invincible’ tag was taken away thanks to Liverpool in the Premier League, the world is waking up to the realisation that City are in fact, quite human after all.
Let’s not get too excited for Sunday yet though, eh folks? I mean they’ve still only lost two games all season and have been blitzing teams left, right and centre and even last night having gone down to ten men, by the sounds of it they were still the better team.
So I’m not going to be counting my chickens just yet that’s for sure. If they’d have been reduced to eight men with Aguero, De Bruyne and Silva sent off so they’d miss Sunday’s game, I’d feel a little more buoyant this morning. But I suppose you can’t have everything in life!
If you’re a mega cash cow ‘Big Six’ club though, you can certainly have money, lots of money and yesterday Arsenal announced that they do indeed have lots more of ‘the money’ with a shirt deal from Emirates that will supposedly run into the £40million per season mark. That’s a fair chunk of change and with the previous deal being worth about £30million a season it means the club has a little more petty cash to scrape around for when looking at how they can pay their hard-up footballers more money.
The deal is beaten only by Man United but having seen these announcements by all of the big clubs each season we all know how this game plays out. Liverpool’s deal is up next summer and they’ll no doubt announce a bigger kit deal than Arsenal’s yesterday. Then it’s the Totts and Chelski and they’ll probably announce an even bigger deal, before United blow everyone out of the water with their next ‘mega deal’ in about five years time or something.
It’s just one of those things and whilst we can all be pleased that the club is making more cash and is clearly viewed as one of the big players in global Football, you do wonder if the tying in for the training kit and normal playing kit will hamper them. It seems to be the way the clubs are going since United announced the kit sponsorship with Aon for training and Chevrolet for the full kits and you can bet your bottom dollar that the other clubs will follow suit.
It’s only in the next two to three years that we’ll probably see just how good Ivan’s teams’ negotiation skills are.
But for now at least it’s a nice big chunk of cash for Stan to add to the balance sheet and leverage as collateral value for when he buys his next ranch in the States. He will be pleased.
I also don’t know if we should be worried because given Arsenal’s decline in the last 18 months, from afar the fact that they can still bring in big deals like this must tick the box for our absent owner. Arsenal making money is his one overriding caveat. The success is just a happy bonus from his perspective, so whilst some people may be waking up this morning feeling hopeful that we might use that cash for improving the squad, let’s not get too excited just yet. The reality is that an extra £10million a season will probably go to some of the bigger players in the team and the players agents too.
I just hope this is all part of the ongoing plan that will see us slowly transition out the existing manager and transition in somebody who will be given the cash to creat a competitive squad. That’s what we’re all hoping for right now.
That’s it from me for today. I do wonder if we’ll get a team update for Thursday from Arsène, but I suspect it might be tomorrow, in which case we can speculate over who should be wrapped up in cotton wool and surrounded by a 12-Inch thick coating of bubble wrap ahead of the cup final on Sunday.
Catch you all tomorrow.
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