Is Wenger a little bitter about West Ham’s lucky break?

Wenger – It’s just not fair!by DN

Arsene Wenger is not very happy that some of Arsenal’s rivals in the Premier League have had lucky breaks handed to them on a plate, while poor old Wenger has had to struggle for every penny he has earned for the Gunners in the last 20 years, and had to build the Emirates Stadium with his bare hands while being forced to sell all his best players.

West Ham United have been given the stadium that was built for the Olympics, and Wenger doesn’t sound very happy about it! “I say to West Ham: ‘Well done. You have won in the lottery and you do not need to sweat like I did for long years, and fight for every pound’,” Wenger said. “So it’s very well done.

“They have made a good deal, they have negotiated very well. It was a fight with Tottenham [for the Olympic Stadium]. For me, it is similar to the Man City situation [when they were granted the Commonwealth Games stadium in 2003]. Man City got a new stadium for £20m, basically.”

“Will West Ham be rivals in the future? Of course,” Wenger continued. “I think it will change. Tottenham will go the same way – they will create, as well, a 60,000 seat stadium and they will be followed by Chelsea. That gives more resources to everybody and will make the league more competitive.”

“I could say the first six years were very difficult financially,” Wenger said. “Going into April and thinking if you are not in the Champions League, you are in trouble – that has been absolutely super-difficult.

“Yes, West Ham don’t go through the pain. They have taken this opportunity and taken it very well. Is it fair? I leave you to that statement. Is it fair, is it not fair? It is legal.”

Wenger has already been turned over by UEFA’s failure to uphold the Financial Fair Play rules, despite being fiscally careful to only spend what the club earned, and now he sees one of our London rivals get a magnificent Stadium for peanuts. It’s just not fair!

Darren

Tags Olympic Stadium West Ham

24 Comments

  1. Who gives a darn now? Our stadium is paid so at least we can take some pride in building it with own money. Why does it matter now? Normally speaking we should be off the hook financially but unfortunately the owner is Kroenke. And you just heard the guy, he does not give a flying fly about trophies as long as we are sound financial. I am depressed (but not angry enough to join the WOB brigade) only when I think of this state of affairs.

    1. I give a damn and so should every UK tax payer, why the heck should our gov give away tax payer money to a sport that doesn’t need it?

      Have people seen the contract they have for the stadium?

      They rent it for 25 days a season which will cover all the home games and a few friendlies as well, due to how few days it is they will have a low payment to make as a result.

      Sweet FA we can do about it for 99 years as well, that is how long the lease is.

      UK tax payers screwed yet again by our government.

      I am more upset over this as a tax payer and not a football fan.

      As a tax payer I seen Arsenal pay out to the local community and us people benefited, a tip area got turned into a beautiful stadium and Highbury turned into accommodation, the people who live in that area was considered.

      What is WHU doing for the tax payer? For their local community?

      I have seen vulnerable/disabled people get told they will have to live on less and the elder generation suffer in the cold due to less funding, then I turn round and see a EPL team get given this much…

      I now hate WHU.

      At least Arsenal and Silent Stan restrict themselves to taking the poss out of Arsenal fans, WHU have done it to every UK citizen.

      1. WHU got a much better business deal (for them; not taxpayer etc) than us or tottenham.

        as business people, kroenke & wenger should be ashamed of themselves.

        imagine where we could have had we got the WHU deal: that’s probably 2 PL championships worth right there in the last 10 years.

        unbelievable that this kind of thing can happen.

  2. Some Arsenal fans expecting things to change minus actually wanting change!

    Still living in denial huh, Arsenal will never change with Wenger in charge. Blame the board and Stan all you want but he does not train the players or actually buy then. I’ve never heard the board say there is no one on the market to improve the team, Wenger has! I have never heard the board say our strikers ARE OF HIGH quality, bla bla bla. Others claim Wenger is the scapegoat, well if that’s true then his the biggest fool and does not love the club as he claims because no one deliberately hurts something they love.

    The man is a legend, but time to go. I don’t care whether the new manager drops us out of the top four for a short while as long as he at least has a project that excites us and we can believe in unlike the clueless one marry go round!

    1. Wrong.

      “actually buy then.”

      Shall I give you a link where Wenger said if he stayed at home then Welbz wouldn’t be an Arsenal player?

      You did miss sell players which is also done by the board.
      Nasri has said that he was sold by… that’s right! The board for money!

      “I have never heard the board say our strikers ARE OF HIGH quality,”
      And you never will, the board will leave it to Wenger to tell us this stuff. They know that idiots will go “Derp, Wenger said it so it must be Wenger… Even though he has a boss and everything changed when Silent Stan came into the picture”.

      “Others claim Wenger is the scapegoat, well if that’s true then his the biggest fool and does not love the club as he claims because no one deliberately hurts something they love.”

      Oh my…
      £8 mil a year is worth some hurt.
      Also we may not get a manager who can keep us in the top 4 after Wenger, if he thinks the board will replace him with Moyes then what do you want him to do?
      Step aside and let a worse manager take over and drag the team down?
      Watch the team you love turn into Villa?

      You think a new manager will be given funds to rebuild the squad?
      PMSL!

      Wenger only managed to build the invincible’s due to David Dein being the man who done the transfers, since he got forced out by the old profit driven board, we have not had such influence in the board to get the specific players that Wenger wants, instead bargain buys of what we use to get ended up arriving.

      Have you seen what happened to Villa since they was taken over?

      Have you seen decent managers join them and they should have avoided relegation but the owner blocked a LOT which has dragged them down.

    2. Syphon Stan is responsible for Wenger being there.

      We are in such a mess with what’s happened since he’s bought a majority shareholding in the club, with him filling the board with financiers rather than footballing people, that he knows, with Wenger filling so many positions other than coach, it is almost impossible to get rid of him without Arsenal suffering a massive hit, surplus to just what’s happening on the pitch.

      Everybody goes on about Wenger’s pay packet, yet every year, the syphon waltzes in and takes half his pay packet and doesn’t even have the courtesy to tell us what it’s for. And this money comes from OUR pockets when season ticket renewal time comes, and it seems a good proportion of Arsenal fans just don’t care.

      The Syphon does have an influence on who we buy and sell, as the Arsenal reserves are there to back his teams in the US, so who we buy or sell is dictated by him, and what reserves he currently needs for collateral.

      If Wenger goes, we will need an influx of new people on the board, and in all other commercial work that Wenger currently does, and I just don’t see the Syphon doing that. That is why the Syphon needs to go first, and then AFC can prepare for AWs departure.

  3. Mmmmm sweat for years on 8mil per annum and still with enough money to procure and forge a winning team..

    Wonder what ranieri and more to the point Brian Clough would be thinking of this comment from his grave. Man achieved a lot more with a lot less.

    #sourGrapes

  4. Some people are born luck to inherit wealths they didn’t work for and some are born less lucky to work for the wealths they have.

    David Sullivan and David Gold can be described to be born lucky as they have inherited the iconic property they didn’t build nor buy it. But willed to them unilaterally.

    Whereas, Arsenal have to laboured seriously and borrow heavily from the banks at high interest rate to build their iconic new Arsenal Stadium which is being sponsored by the Emirates groups.

    Tottenham Hotspur and Chelsea are not so born lucky to inherit what they have not work for, but have to buy it. They too like Arsenal have to work seriously and borrow from the banks at a high interest rates to build their proposed stadia.

    But in the case of Chelsea, it’s owner, Roman Abramovich may supplement the cost of building the Chelsea new Stadium with a soft loan to the club to be repaid to him at low interest rate.

    Since AFC have finished the repayments of the loans they took to build the Ems, winning titles…

    1. Arsenal had to invest a lot into the local community as part of the process to be allowed to build the new stadium, we had conditions to meet and that cost us a LOT of money.

      What I find interesting is that Corbyn is the Labor guy for Islington and he is an Arsenal fan…

      So basically it sounds like an Arsenal fan got Arsenal FC to pay more then just a stadium but put the community first still.
      Respect to the guy if that is the case.

      In the case of Chavski, we have an owner who was willing to do what you suggested, Silent Stan blocked Usmanov though 🙁 I believe I read that Usmanov offered us a 0% interest loan over a silly length of time (100 years I think) and that meant we would be making repayments of a fraction of what we did make allowing more funds for wages and signing of top quality players.
      The very reason why David Dein got Usmanov involved with Arsenal, the desire to see us continue winning.

      The spuds made a deal with Bumbling Boris Johnson.
      “The improvements to White Hart Lane are at the epicentre of the Mayor’s ongoing regeneration of Tottenham. City Hall has invested £28m from the Mayor’s Regeneration Fund…”
      https://www.london.gov.uk/press-releases/mayoral/mayor-approves-spurs-stadium-plans

      Just a bit of randomness added to yours ^.^

  5. Wenger being termed a legend is something i personally dispute and am sure it’s always up for debate…winning only 3 EPL tittles with no champions league trophy for 20yrs is not pretty,it shows how we appreciate mediocrity at best.if anyone thinks westham were lucky the what abt swansea and the likes???seems anything to do with arsenal has to do with luck??? Honestly arsenal is the most predictable team in this league and managers always have formulas to knock the hell out of our team…. i mean all pundits were predicting that we cld fade away come the 2nd half of the season,it was coming!!!

    1. For me, Wenger is split in two halves:

      The Legend: His first ten years
      The tyrant: His last ten years.
      Although ever since Kroenke became major shareholder, Wenger is pretty much forced to be a tyrant.

      #KroenkeOut

      1. The 1st half Wenger also had Dein on his side who was a major influence.

        After Dein left then we see the ‘tyrant’ as it is put, this is down to orders from above.

        Lets not forget how Dein was forced out because he wanted to keep signing players and investing in the team during the stadium move but the rest of the board didn’t want to.

        The board sounded very admirable when they said they wanted to do it all themselves and that they didn’t want a foreign majority share holder taking control of the club… They felt so strong about this that they made a pact not to sell.

        It sounded very admirable…

        Shame it was all BS. We are now owned by a foreign majority share holder who seen us as a profit making machine…

        The way I see it is Dein is the legend and Wenger is trying to maintain that desire the best he can while meeting his new targets of SAFE profit, it is a task he is bound to fail. To win we need to take some risks… but Stan wants SAFE profit.

        1. Continue to defend AW all you want; for me he actions speak louder than word and he doesn’t love this club as he pretends. He loves his 8 million a year. Today as a manager, he’s average at best and still runs this club as it’s own. And yet guys like you continue to worship him like he’s some kind of saint. Pathetic

        2. The irony is that David Dein introduced Syphon Stan to the board. Syphon has already made over 25 billion pounds on the shares he bought from board members, who bitterly regret their sale, those who are still with us, but it seems that is not enough for him. I still don’t really understand why those board members sold to Syphon, after bitterly opposing it? There must be other people to whom the shares could’ve been safely distributed to, so no one has a majority. I think the German system is best where no one person can own over 49% of the shares, and with the amount of money in football ATM, the FA should seriously look at implementing their system. It is interesting to note Usmanov built up his shares to the minimum amount needed to launch a takeover bid. We can’t be sure if his intentions are any different to Syphons, but he is certainly waiting in the wings…

  6. Wonder what ranieri and more to the point Brian Clough would be thinking of this comment from his grave. Man achieved a lot more with a lot less.

    sour French Grapes

  7. Oh wait… let me get the violin out .. ????

    Poor old Wenger, If he is anticipating that West ham, Chelsea and the spud will get stronger with a bigger stadium then he should get out while his 4th spot trophy is still intact!

    Like he said ” I treat the club, as if it belongs to me”

    he doesn’t like spending money, unless he is put under alot of pressure to do so!

    It has been reported that Xhaka has been watched 30 times this season, his club value him at £35 million… So what does wenger do?…. He offers £24 million ?… I’m not looking forward to the summer transfer window, that’s for sure!
    ? ? ??

    1. “he doesn’t like spending money, unless he is put under alot of pressure to do so!”

      you 10 years old?

      I ask that because anyone who is older than 10 should remember how Wenger never done the transfers when he 1st came, it was all Dein, Wenger spoke to Dein and Dein got things done.

      After Dein Wenger had to do it himself for a few months until the board replaced Dein with a ‘Yes-Man’, that transfer window Wenger signed Arshavin for a record fee and also bought Nasri who had signed a contract extension to force us to pay more, Wenger paid it.

      Gazidis has come in and said Wenger has no clue about a players value, then he took over Deins old job and started dealing with transfers.

  8. A few comments
    1. This is a poor article, there are no details about how much west ham have paid, do they own upton park and will it be sold as development land.
    2. We have not paid for our stadium, there are long term loans which are still outstanding. I do not know much these loans are and how much we are still paying.

    It would appear that west ham have paid £15m for a 99 year lease on the stadium. This compares to £390m which emirates cost over 10 years ago. Add in inflation plus interest charges and it is probably nearer £600m. Money from highbury redevelopment plus selling players has all gone towards paying off the loan/ interest charges.

    Lets imagine the scenario, west ham move to new 54 000 seater stadium for £15m plus £2m annual rental. They sell upton park for development. They then have a huge war chest for transfers and massive income from stadium for salaries all paid for by the taxpayer. Seems to me that west ham will become one of the richest clubs in PL in terms of money available for player transfers and wages.

    We will not be so happy if we miss out on PL title or CL football due to a taxpayer subsidised team. Financial fair play it is not.

    As I said at the beginning we need an article with some proper financial comparisons and a definitive statement from someone who knows, new stadium costs £x financing costs £y, total cost £z. Amont west ham have paid ? Costs to include everything, land purchase, design costs, planning, construction etc. there must be someone out there who can give these figures.

    1. Don’t forget that the loan also covered the cost of developing the old Highbury into luxury flats, which have since been fully sold at up to 1 million or more each flat. Don’t think that they didn’t make money on selling the old ground! I bet that paid for more than half the new ground or even more…..

      1. The point I was making is that if west ham own upton park they can develop the site and use the money to buy players. As you say, arsenal had to use the money to pay for the new stadium.

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