Should Wenger sell van Persie?
Lunch-time insights from Alex Ferguson are rare enough, not least when the cosy conversation is restricted to two. And you’re the other one.
Points of fact are squirrelled away for future reference. Three stick out, even if it’s three years since the day.
Robbie Brady will be a big hit at Man United. Robin van Persie was the only Arsenal player he’d break the bank for. And Arsene Wenger had done wondrous business shifting Patrick Vieira to Juventus for over twenty million quid.
The latter two are not mutually exclusive.
Whether Ferguson has the wherewithal still to make good on his admiration for the Dutchman will become evident quite quickly. But there’s no immediate rush. No-one is forming a queue outside Wenger’s Shenley office for van Persie, much and all as his agent, Kees Vos, would have us believe.
Fergie has time. Real Madrid would have to throw Gonzalo Higuain into the bargain, and Jose Mourinho ain’t for budging on that. Juventus? Van Persie would sooner join Orient. Therefore the only pockets deep enough are next door to Ferguson at Manchester City. Brian Marwood, the ex-Arsenal winger, now fetched up with a fancy title at Cashlands, had Vos as his guest at the Etihad last season. That, but more pertinently, several ostentatious displays of financial muscle, have irked Arsenal — and many others presumably — to such an extent that Wenger will drive the hardest bargain he can if van Persie flutters his eyebrows back at Roberto Mancini.
Right down to the last tuppence. The Frenchman is good at that, and in sensing the optimum time to move on his star turns. Fergie told me that.
Though Arsenal’s relationship with City is difficult — it can’t be nice being described as a feeder club to the Premier League champions — Wenger and Ivan Gazidis must cool their courage, and resist that sharp, jabbing prod telling them to dig in in the hope he changes his mind. As Marsellus Wallace told you in Pulp Fiction, that’s just pride f@*&ing with your head.
Selling off a prize asset to the highest bidder is a calculated gamble, one hardly fragranced by the prospect of an Abu Dhabi stamp on the cheque. But there’s a good reason van Persie’s goal extravaganza last season was frequently described as a once in a lifetime experience.
It was.
The previous seven were spent hobbling in and out of the physio station. Maybe Arsenal have seen the best of Robin van Persie.
Keeping the Dutchman for the final year of his contract is also an exercise in self persecution, like sprinkling your underwear with ants. The club will spend its day looking for nods or signs from the player, and fearing more agent interference. Every lull in form will be put down to this lark. Every injury will be suspiciously viewed.
Eventually, it’ll drive someone over the edge — and the dressing room to despair. The dye is cast, van Persie’s presence is now a festering sore (barring a climbdown of historically cringe levels). He is close to Theo Walcott. Would he spend a disaffected year telling Theo to sit tight and sign nothing? Ditto Tommy Vermaelen.
Arsenal could be looking at a £50m hole in the floor of their dressing room if RVP hangs around.
And most of all, he doesn’t want to be in that dressing room. And if Arsenal aren’t ambitious enough for him, then he should head off to find the true shade of green on those faraway hills. For every Fabregas and Nasri, there’s been Henry, Vieira, Hleb, Anelka, Overmars and Flamini.
Wenger’s nous is matched by his partiality to balanced expenditure. The Gunners are 19th in the Premier League in terms of net spend over the last five seasons. They’re still 21m quid and change in profit. They’re poster boys for prudency, even spending less than Swansea. Wenger will not allow twenty million euro wash down the plughole. But will they get that if, for some reason, City can’t shift the striking deadwood in their locker? That’s the real concern for Arsenal supporters. What happens then? Gooners have suffered summer sayonaras before, but where Cesc was always a case of when, not if, there is no such empathy for van Persie.
If the captain is that worried about Arsenal’s ambition and future, drive it, don’t desert it. Around the time scratchy performances at West Brom and home to Norwich were making up his mind last April-May, he said: “Whatever happens with me I will always be a Gunner.”
Really, Robin? I’m not getting that sense.
What you think Alex?
Why sell him now? If Arsenal were going to cash in on the rapidly-depreciating asset that is Robin van Persie, the time to do so was last summer, when the Dutchman made it clear he had no intention of renewing his contract at the club.
There are two possible interpretations of Wednesday’s Transfer-Request-In-All-But-Bonus-Forfeiture from the van Persie camp, depending on how much integrity you believe to be knocking about on Team VP.
Take van Persie at face value and you have a tortured soul no longer prepared to risk life and ligaments ploughing a lonesome furrow in front of the Emirates goals, forever to be denied the allies he needs to bring glory back to the club he holds dear in his heart.
Or you have a guy who rather fancies folding another 100 large every week and is beginning to fret, after an abysmal Euro 2012, that the kind of offers he has in mind might not still be on the table next summer. In reality, it matters little to Arsenal which is the case — the outcome to their summer can still take two paths.
Let’s say van Persie is being straight up. He broke bread and talked dough with Arsene Wenger and Ivan Gazidis and has been told the summer’s work is done. The creaking Rosicky will again carry the side’s creative load until Wilshere returns, if he does return.
A fit Diaby — and perhaps a unicorn — will be like a new signing. Giroud will give van Persie a rest every four weeks and Podolski will tuck away the nine or 10 sitters Gervinho scuffed wide last term.
If this is what Arsenal have planned, tread water for another year or two in the hope UEFA can come up with a scheme to make things competitive again, van Persie has some grounds for concern. At the same time, the plain mathematics apply just as they did last summer. His goals and the prospect that they will again keep Arsenal in the Champions League places are worth more than whatever transfer fee he will fetch.
And what if van Persie’s statement was inspired purely by greed and a wish to get out of dodge pronto, to wherever the notes are greener?
Perhaps Arsenal are about to add Gotze and M’Vila — or two other renowned sources of silk and steel — to their midfield. Defensive reinforcement will follow. Maybe everyone at the Emirates has realised action is needed to keep an agitated fanbase on side.
If Arsenal are truly going to go for it this season, it would be senseless to lose van Persie now. Let him stew if he doesn’t like it, but unless he performs during this coming season, the ‘ambitious’ — read loaded — clubs won’t be interested next summer anyway. He will never be regarded as highly by the Arsenal supporters again but, when it comes to it, fans have long grown detached from the badge-kissers anyway.
In truth, it would appear that Arsenal, as a business and club, has rather more fundamental questions to ask of itself than whether or not it should sell van Persie.
As the club’s ownership split rapidly dissolves into a bitter feud, nobody really knows if Arsenal are, any longer, in the business of winning. Or if they are just waiting.
Majority stakeholder Stan Kroenke appears content to play the longer game, put profits towards debt reduction and sit tight until the current wave of ‘ambition’ — Chelsea, City, PSG, Malaga, Anzhi etc — is somehow neutralised and Arsenal can better leverage the advantages its fan base and stadium will afford them. Then he can reap the rewards without pumping in further investment.
Alisher Usmanov’s motives are less clear. Undoubtedly he wants control of the club, as his rebuke of Kroenke yesterday suggests, but does he want to empty his pockets and propel it into the ranks of the ambitious? His pitch certainly involves selling fans the idea that success can be bought quickly.
What Wenger makes of it all, we can never truly know. How hampered has he been in the markets all these years and how frustrating has that been? For now, though, he has little to gain from acceding to van Persie’s escape plans — unless Man City are willing to put an Aguero or a Silva on the table.
Wenger should strip van Persie of the captaincy for his impertinence but tell him he is going nowhere. You never know, a player with a chequered injury record may well see the value of a contract extension the next time someone lunges two-footed at him.
And forget the emotional reaction that van Persie’s position at the club is now untenable.
There is always a way back for a player who says sorry with goals — as we saw with Wayne Rooney at Old Trafford.
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