I love my club and I hate players pretending in midseason that they will stay and then leave. I’m sure Wenger was not told straight by Flamini that he was going to leave and therefore we lost opportunities to get into the market early or keep Diarra

PLEASE NOTE THAT YOUR VISION ARTICLES ARE SENT IN BY READERS AND ARE NOT WRITTEN BY ARSENAL VISION WRITERS.

By an Arsenal Mania Authour

There is a war going on in football. The main international bodies FIFA, UEFA and CAF are at war with each other. They are fighting over control of the game. The clubs are at war with the national and international organisations over control, regulations on players and expansion. The clubs are at war with each other on the pitch for trophies, off the pitch for players and international market share. The players are at war with clubs over movement rights and money. The agents are at war with clubs and everyone else over players’ movement rights and money.

The battlefield is on the pitch, in the courts, in special interest ground like G16, in bitter election battles in associations and stock exchanges. The punches and blows are exchanged over the media. We haven’t even mentioned the fans, big financiers, tycoons and oligarchs.

Football is not just a game. It is business, it is politics, it is power, it is a toy for some and one of the most powerful products in history. The problem is that with so many stakeholders, a clear vision for football has to be shared among all for all of these groups to function well together. Quite clearly, there is no shared vision so the war continues.

The power is divided between all those locked in battle but it is popular misconception that the players have the most power. Footballers in this war have almost the least power. They are certainly less powerful than the associations, the press, the clubs and even the agents.

It is tempting to think of the big players only but those are only a minority of footballers – as a group, even the biggest players – they are just tools in the game and commodities that get traded around with little or no control over their destiny. At 10 years of age or less, they get owned removed from school and play to the master. By 30 they get dumped out on the streets to figure out what to do with possibly 50 years of life with little or no skill to transfer jobs outside football. In those 20 years, they would have been traded about 5 times.

Let’s take Freddie Ljungberg for example. He ran into every challenge, threw himself at a piece of leather going at 60kmh, exposed his balls to metal studs and broke his bones. He worked his body to the ground and has now retired from international football. He has nothing left – maybe 1 more year in league football. He leaves with all he earned during that time to last him 50 years, some great memories and a few medals.

Freddie loves football and has lived his dream but it came at a price – a price well worth paying for your dream. But if you look at it another way, how much did Arsenal, Halmstad, Sweden and West Ham earn from his toil? Should he have demanded a greater share of that? Is it greed if did?

Modern footballers are beginning to realise that loyalty is a one-way street in football. You are required to be loyal to your club but only if you are able. They will certainly not be loyal to you when you are not able. You will be auctioned off to the highest bidder and more often than not, you will not be able to decide where you go. I listened to the girlfriend of former Cameroon international, Lucien Mettemo. She said the same thing that Henning Berg’s girlfriend said. She had been shipped out to a dozen cities over a few years with no control over where she lives or how long she will live there.

Modern footballers are also beginning to realise that the odds of winning it all (League, Cup, Euro / African Cup, World Cup) are pretty slim – even if you are a very good footballer. Cantona, Dennis Bergkamp, Ballack and I could go on have won only won League and Cup trophies. In fact, if you’re not an Italian, French or Brazilian who has been playing for Real Madrid, Liverpool, Man Utd, Bayern, AC Milan, Porto or Barcelona over the past few years then you could not have got the range of trophies, no matter how good you are.

Players can see that even if you play for one of the top 8 clubs in Europe the chances of winning the Champions League in your career are not certain much less the World Cup. Essien and Ballack, etc. played for 2 great clubs that won domestic leagues and cups and played in the Champions League every year but it’s quite possible that as great footballers as they are, they could will finish his careers with championship medals but no European or international medals.

Modern players can also see that David Beckham will have a good retirement fund not because he won everything, not because he was better than Dennis Bergkamp, Ballack or Cantona but because he exploited his stock to the maximum. Michael Owen, John Terry, Ashley Cole, etc. have all tried to do the same. Sometimes the club and the player can satisfy each other for very long like with Paul Scholes, Giggs, Bergkamp, Gilberto and even Henry. Many times they can’t.

Cesc stays at Arsenal because he will get the chance to play, he still commands loyalty and good money and his chances of a trophy do not mathematically improve by moving to another top 8 club because Arsenal is already there and he is young.

Hleb may want to move because trophies and starting every game are becoming less important at 27 than gathering life experiences and building up the retirement fund. Wenger is in doubt about a good player like Arshavin who is 27 because he cannot play 2 games in 3 days. Why should Hleb think his chances of building his retirement fund will be improving rather than diminishing at Arsenal?

I still believe footballers want to win trophies but don’t dismiss the urge to prepare yourself for the rest of your life. Think about yourself for a moment.

I have worked for 5 companies in the past 10 years. I made the biggest jumps in salary by moving jobs not by asking for a raise. I cannot bear the thought of the fact that someone else would have decided where I would go when I left one company to another and that I would have had no control over when I leave.

Football is screaming to the world that it is special case but yet where it suits them, they rejoice the fact that the EU ruled against Blatter’s plan because it was against normal EU employment law – i.e. football is not a special case. Just for the record, I didn’t have much time for that plan or for Blatter.

Ronaldo has won everything he can with a club. He’s 23-years-old with plenty of football and life experiences ahead of him – why should he be forced to stay in one place? Would you? Why should he work in Spain and then decide to work in Italy for a while. I have worked in 3 countries for the experience of it.

A team sport as Wenger always says and quite rightly too, needs stability. You can’t put a few guys together on Monday and expect to do well on Tuesday. The Bosman and Webster rulings go against stability and as Wenger, rightly again, has predicted, it looks like this might lead to the end of transfer fees.

The current situation is not good for the best expression of football. Teams need stability to function at their best. But we may never have this with football as long as there is the amount of money circulating in it. It is therefore urgent for us to get to the end game (maybe end of transfer fees and simply go for one season notice period) so that new solutions can then be found under those conditions. Maybe that is the best stability we will have. Many competitive businesses function with talent with the threat of 1 months’ notice but they have found other ways to ensure loyalty.

I love my club and I hate players pretending in midseason that they will stay and then leave. I’m sure Wenger was not told straight by Flamini that he was going to leave and therefore we lost opportunities to get into the market early or keep Diarra. Vieira’s flip-flopping also cost us Carrick and Essien. The current system is full of deceit, tapping up, sneaky deals, etc. We need to cut the crap.

I have thought about this and decided that clubs and money are far more to blame than players. Players are simply looking after themselves because nobody else does – not even their agents. By and large, players tend to do their best on the pitch. Flamini did not relax once even though he knew he was leaving by the end and I really respect that. It also shows that there are possibilities in a more flexible employment environment.

I will continue to be annoyed when players leave and I will continue to detest the sneaky ways they do it. I will continue to detest agents and other clubs tapping up and disrupting players but I will always try to understand the player for leaving even when they say daft things like Ljungberg did when he moved to West Ham: “I wanted to move to club with more ambition and I want to win trophies” (not verbatim).

Or when they say they wanted to win trophies by leaving a team that missed the trophy by 2 points or lost in the final – so you couldn’t win it yourself and you decided to go to the guys who’ve won it so they can win it again for you?