A rediculous display by Real over two legs.Serves 'em right.You can't just "turn up!"You've got to give your all in both legs.Reminded me of that awful CL Final we had against Liverpool.
Woolwich have ambitious owners with a winning culture these days, they have backed Captain Scarlet, it`s painful to see their £100m ready made signing dragging them into the CL semi final by beating the holders. It shows what can be achieved with the right owners, with the right mindset and right priorities.
An achievement our owners have already accomplished! Arsenal currently have more flexibility on finances than we do because they moved stadia earlier and so have no major debt covenants. Another mistake by previous owners that Levy had to fix.
They've also pumped in £200m in recent years by way of shareholder loans, specifically to improve results and make CL qualification a mininum expectation. ENIC put in £100m under Conte, but it proved to be too little, too late and much of it was poorly invested. Bissouma and Richarlison have never looked like good investments and Perisic struggled to play WB in the Premier League. Spence has come good now, but only after offering nothing to the cause for 2 seasons. Add in the lack of decent previous transfer business (mostly piss poor after Mitchell's departure), **** all of note from the academy and our constant coaching changes and since the only cash injection of cash under ENIC, we've gone backwards. It just sums up where we are. Reckless decision, after dreadful decision after awful decision, after poor decision. All done on cheap arsed wages, proliferating the mediocre players in the squad.
The shareholder loans are the extra flexibility I mentioned. Money added by ENIC has exactly no influence on how much we can spend on transfers or wages because that is limited by the stadium covenants, not cash, and earnings don't change at all with new shareholder injections. For the same reason we can only pay higher wages if we reduce spending on transfers. I would rather we signed fewer better players but very few have agreed with me on this. There is certainly no point in paying the current squad more. Finally you have made the normal assumption that somehow we ought to have an edge in recruitment. I simply don't believe that such an edge generally exists. Clubs simply have bad patches and good patches as far as I can see. If I am wrong about this then it will simply be another advantage the richer clubs can buy. I do agree that our managerial appointments have been strange.
ENIC had the chance to put in more. In 2022 it was estimated that our FFP 'wiggle room' was as much as £400m. As usual, they underestimated the cost of sporting improvement, yto meet their own limited criteria and failed to put in the required amount to address the neglect from 2017-19 and the utter waste of £millions from 2019 until then. Arsenal saw the coming cost of failure and acted decisively to prevent it. ENIC chose not to see it. It was staring them in the face...and now we're tasting the bitter fruit of that neglect. We'll be out of European football again next season, with ever decreasing options on how to replace the income that should be bringing in.
