Dribble said:
gordondaviesmoustache said:
One cannot help but wonder if there'd been such haste to bring in FFP if Sulaiman Al Fahim hadn't mouthed off so much in September 2008.
This.
The good thing is that we quickly kicked him and his loads a money bullshit to the kerb. We are still trying to recover from that damage in the eyes of many and I fear irrespective of what we do in the future, that assumption about us will follow us around for years to come like 'same old Arsenal, always cheating'.
Every opportunity opposing managers get to mention money in relation to us, they take. Will we ever shake this assumption off? I don't know but it seriously pisses me off when it constantly gets mentioned.
Yes, I agree. The £100m Kaka bid was another catalyst imho. It was too big, too audacious for us at our stage of our development. Now perhaps as double league champions with an established squad and CL progress. But back then it was like a red rag to a bull. Platini mentioned it repeatedly as being totally wrong and although that was hypocritical given the similar sized deals that are done by other clubs, in a way I can see his point.
For all they knew at the time, we were going to just blow the whole of the establishment out of the water with a £1bn superteam that would render all competition null and void for the foreseeable. The fact that we were on a track to produce a solid, self-sustaining business, investing in the community etc perhaps sounded like hollow promises.
Perhaps we could have handled it better in hindsight, with a more softly softly approach. Dunno.
