Aiming for the moon? It''s all about the journey, insists Arsenal boss

Making fans proud is more important than Champions League success, argues Arsenal chief executive.

Arsenal fans may have mixed feelings about an address made by the club’s chief executive yesterday at anti-discrimination group Kick it Out''s Raise Your Game Conference.

After the scoreless draw with Chelsea on Sunday, which moved Arsenal’s London rivals closer to another Premier League title, Jose Mourinho countered Chelsea’s ‘boring’ tag by mocking Arsenal’s approach to football and success.

“You know, boring I think is ten years without a title. That''s very boring.

"You support the club and you''re waiting, waiting, waiting for so many years without a Premier League title, so that''s very boring.

“People talk about style and flair but what is that?” Mourinho continued later. “Sometimes I ask myself about the future, and maybe the future of football is a beautiful, green grass carpet without goals, where the team with more ball possession wins the game.

“The way people analyse style and flair is to take the goals off the pitch. It’s the football they play on the moon – where the surface is not good, with some holes but no goals.

“Everyone speaks about teams playing fantastically well because they ‘had great ball possession’. It looks like the goals aren’t important. They conclude a team that scores as many as we do is boring but a team with 70 per cent of the ball who don’t score isn’t.”

But Gazidis, who joined Arsenal in 2009, appeared to counter Mourinho’s view that results are the only important measure of a club’s progress.

"When we talk about the destination, it''s not winning a Champions League, it''s making fans proud," said Gazidis at the event, which was held at the Emirates Stadium.

"It''s about making the people at the football club proud of what we do and how we do it."

"We get a lot of criticism, but we have people at the club who are very firmly fixed on where we want to get to and won''t get knocked off course by the whims that happen day to day.”

Sensible, phlegmatic stuff, though there was one line which may raise the hackles of those Arsenal fans already questioning the club’s ambition to make the push back into the winner’s enclosure.

"We are very much on that journey, and we may never reach the destination."

Expect Mourinho to have noted that one down for next season.