Arsenal executives announce the sacking of 55 employees within 3 days of winning the FA Cup. In the opinion of yours truly and George this is another ominous sign of the future of the football club.
In our opinion most fans have been swept up in the optimism of new signings that coincided with the redundancies, ignoring the the betrayal of the traditional values of the club. This is exactly as the owners and the executives planned, just as they did in the 2019 summer transfer window. But the consequences are far more ominous as explained in the podcast.
Give it a listen and show your support by subscribing to this podcast wherever you download.
As always comments are welcome!
Positively Arsenal 
Arsenal head of physiotherapy Chris Morgan has rejoined Liverpool’s backroom staff ahead of next season.
LikeLike
Have to say, I have always been too romantic and perhaps naive to think too much bout what goes on upstairs, but maybe that is the luxury of supporting a pretty stable run club, until recently.
But, Shotta, PG, Finsbury and others on here have called out Raul from day 1, if these guys knew all about him, why didn’t KSE, and why did they take so long? In fairness to Raul, he was doing what he said on the tin , why did Ivan recommend him?
Lots of questions. Will Wenger come back now, even if just to see a game? Can we keep AMN? Can Ozil play again?
Still, this morning , the club feels a little more like Arsenal once more
LikeLiked by 4 people
Interview: Vinai Venkatesham
16 Aug 2020
I’d like to start by just saying a huge thank you to Raul.
He’s been such a huge part of this football club over the last few years. I’ve been lucky to be a colleague of his and also a friend of his and I have a huge amount of respect for him. We’ve been working side by side for the last two years and one of the reasons I’m so optimistic about the future is the fantastic work that Raul has done, really being a driving force in putting together the team of people that we have across our football operations that are going to help drive this club forward.
It’s been an honour and a privilege to work for Arsenal Football Club for more than 10 years and I love this club. Like many people that work at this football club, I spend pretty much every waking minute thinking about how we can improve and how we can achieve our goals and how we can achieve our objectives going forward. I know this role comes with a huge responsibility and I’m fully aware of the weight of responsibility and I’m also hugely grateful. I’m grateful to Stan Kroenke, Josh Kroenke and the rest of the Arsenal board for their trust in me. But I’m also very clear about what our fans expect and what our fans demand. And I know at the moment we’re falling short of our expectations and there’s a huge amount of work ahead to get this football club back to where it needs to be.
We are fortunate to be followed all around the world by hundreds of millions of passionate fans and we have an extraordinary history of success. Our fans expect and our fans demand that this football club wins trophies and is at the top of the game both here in England, but also in Europe. So what fuels me is delivering on the expectations and delivering in regard to what our fans demand of us.
We started last season full of expectations, we looked forward and we looked upwards and unfortunately it’s not worked out in the way that we wanted it to. We obviously changed coach in the middle of the season, which obviously was not part of the plan, and then we’ve had the coronavirus hit us and hit everybody this spring. But despite all of the challenges this season has thrown at us, our squad and our players and our football staff kept fighting and they kept fighting all the way to the end. We saw on August 1 at Wembley, us winning our 14th – a record 14th – FA Cup, which was a sign of progress. I think we can look forward with some real optimism. I think, in Mikel Arteta, we have an absolutely fantastic, dynamic head coach. He forms a formidable team with Edu Gaspar, who is our technical director. And if we look at our academy, I think we’re in really, really strong hands with Per Mertesacker and we have some of the most exciting young talent in the league.
Now we did of course not achieve our expectations last season and we need to do better and we need to improve. But I think we’re absolutely on a positive trajectory and we’re on the right path. The message really is: we need to improve. We’re really focused on where we need to improve and there’s lots of things that we need to do.
You would have seen a couple of weeks ago that this also involves making some difficult decisions. We had to make a difficult decision about proposing redundancies. That decision is about making sure that we have the right structure and the right size of organisation going forward, into a very, very different world that we’re going to face post-coronavirus and making sure we can be as strong as possible on the other side. So there’s going to be some tough decisions.
We have, in Edu and Mikel, two individuals who are responsible for our technical plan. Of course, [that is] overseen by me and the board, but those two are the experts and they have a very, very clear plan about how they want to rebalance our squad in the short term, in the medium term and in the long term. We’re starting to work on that immediately in this transfer window.
There’s other things that we need to do better as well. I think we can do better a job of communicating with our fans. We’re not going to be able to give them a running commentary of everything that we’re doing, nor are we always going to correct or be able to correct some of the misinformation there is about the club. But we need to be clear about what we’re doing and what our plan is and we can get better at that.
There’s of course lots of other areas that we’re going to be addressing, but it’s all about the same thing: trying to make this organisation as efficient as we possibly can and as high-performing as we possibly can. Because if we can do that, we give ourselves the best ability to deliver on our objectives.
We are impatient. So we know we’re not where we want to be and we are impatient, because we want to get to where we want to be, as quickly as we possibly can.
I think the key message for our fans is that we all want exactly the same thing. We all want Arsenal Football Club to be back where it belongs, competing for and winning the biggest trophies in the game. That’s what fuels us, that’s what our focus is and we ultimately want to do that so our fans all across the world are proud of their football club for what we do and what we can achieve and what we win, but also for how we do it. Doing it in accordance with the values, the history and the tradition of this great football club.
In terms of the board, we work very, very closely. So we’re in regular contact with the owners pretty much every single day and we’re all here to achieve the same thing and that’s to push this football club forward and to get this club back where to where it needs to be.
We’ve been active in the market and we saw recently that we brought in Willian from Chelsea, a signing that Edu and Mikel are really, really excited about and I’m sure our fans are excited about as well. And we’ll continue to work hard this transfer window. I think it’s going to be a challenging transfer window post-coronavirus, it’s going to be unusual and it’s going to be challenging, but we’ll continue to work hard to deliver on our objectives to strengthen the squad and Edu and Mikel have a really clear plan around how they’d like to do that.
Our objectives are to be back competing for and winning the biggest trophies in the game and if you’re Arsenal Football Club and if you’re in the Premier League, there’s two trophies that really matter and that’s the Premier League trophy and the Champions League trophy. That has to be the objectives of a football club like Arsenal. It’s not going to be easy, it’s not going to be straightforward, there’s a whole load of competition but that has to be the objective for this football club.
I’ve been at this football club for 10 years, but I feel just as hungry as I did on the first day. I remember the first day that I walked into Highbury House – which is our office – and I thought ‘wow, I’m part of this amazing football club’ and I still feel that 10 years on. I feel just as hungry and just as driven to push this football club forward. And we have a huge responsibility here.
This football club has been here for [nearly] 135 years, we have got hundreds of millions of fans all across the world that are driven for this club to succeed, they want this football club to succeed and it’s in their hearts and it’s part of their passion. And that’s the responsibility, to deliver on those expectations. That’s what this is all about.
Copyright 2020 The Arsenal Football Club plc. Permission to use quotations from this article is granted subject to appropriate credit being given to http://www.arsenal.com as the source.
LikeLike
I do apologise for my rants against the the previous head of football and the soft ride he got from the media during his horrific tenure.
Many here wanted Arteta, a few long before he even hung up his boots as a player-coach-captain. I couldn’t have hoped for better given the mess when he came in. He’s exceeded my hopes.
LikeLiked by 1 person
And Raul’s gone sooner then I’d hoped. Given the fact he got the job in the first place! How?
Someone invited the vampire into the club & I see some are putting the entire debacle upon Gazidas, who cares: all that matters regarding the Football is that the Arsenal boot room which in it’s current tradition or lineage goes all the way back to the early seventies as far as I know has been restored, and the owner has either been forced or chosen to clean up shop.
“I really like Raul”/“Ramsey & Ozil can’t okay together”
Is the epitaph for the Unai-Raul horror story. It looked ugly from the beginning and the ending was not pretty.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Play>okay
LikeLiked by 1 person
Think one of the learning points from all this, the owners need to be a bit more careful who they let lose on their club. Wenger was and is unique, they should not give lesser men the running of the club lightly, the last couple of years should serve as a salutary experience to them , even though they have now acted.
Lots of Arsenal men in the club now, which should be a good thing, but Stan cannot take things for granted. The last regime they put in place could easily have relegated their club had Raul been allowed to keep Emery on, could have bankrupted the self sufficient club as well.
Don’t get fooled again, Stan, put some checks and balances in place, or someone implicitly trusted.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Daily Mail suggesting leaked fixtures – with our first game being away to Utd.
If this is true, give myself a good shot of naming the ref as well, will be one of three, including a Greater Manchester ref
LikeLiked by 1 person
mandy seems the fixture leak is from a fantasy football site
LikeLiked by 1 person
Arsenal now being linked to another Kia player, West Ham’s Felipe Anderson
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hope so, could do without Utd away and Taylor/ Atkinson/ Dean first game
Would prefer a nice gentle start, like Leeds away
LikeLiked by 2 people
Immature I know, but Sevilla 2, Man U 1. Tee hee!
LikeLiked by 3 people
first time in over 20 years since utd went 3 years without a trophy
LikeLiked by 2 people
seen this stat tweeted earlier
man utd had 22 penalties this season, Arsenal have had 21 penalties in last 3 seasons
LikeLiked by 2 people
Former Arsenal defender Philippe Senderos has been confirmed as the new sporting director of Swiss team Servette FC
LikeLiked by 2 people