Arsenal Fans Given Same Old Explanations, Excuses at Thursday's AGM

If Arsene Wenger was troubled at the thought of meeting Arsenal’s shareholders, nervous at the questions he’d no doubt face at the club’s annual general meeting, he hid it well at Emirates Stadium on Thursday morning.

“It’s always an important part of my season to come here and meet you,” the Gunners manager told his audience, according to the club’s official website. “I know you’re very ambitious. You can be sceptical, critical, but as well this is a very important meeting because we have something in common: we are very loyal to this club.”

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No one at the AGM would have dreamed of questioning Wenger’s loyalty to Arsenal after 18 years of service. But devotion, however inspiring, doesn’t deliver results, and to that end it was performance, squad depth and transfer policy that shaped the membership’s line of questioning at the event.

What came back at them were the same old answers, the same assurances, they’d been hearing for at least the past decade.

In a moment of troubling naivety—and one that only reinforced the notion that Wenger is stuck in the past—the 64-year-old emphasised his belief that the current Arsenal squad is good enough to win the Premier League title this season.

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“Last year we finished the season with 79 points,” he told a questioner, as per The Telegraph. “We have won championships with 78 points.”

At no point did his answer take into consideration the heightened standard of contention in the English top flight since the club last lifted the trophy in 2004. And if the slings-and-arrows section of the Arsenal support needed any more ammunition for a manager they increasingly see as out of touch, they were provided it on Thursday.

Wenger’s admission that he should have bolstered his defensive depth will have also been worrying for the shareholders, especially since he was provided a sizeable transfer kitty for the summer transfer period.

“I agree we could have bought one more player,” he conceded, according to The Guardian. “We will try in December to rectify that because we are a bit short with the injuries we have.”

“A bit short” is something of an understatement given that Wenger submitted the names of just five senior defenders for his Premier League squad last month—a lack of depth that was emphasised when Mathieu Debuchy suffered a serious knee injury and underlined by Laurent Koscielny’s ankle problem, which was revealed by the Daily Mail in the buildup to the AGM.

But the Frenchman will be given upwards of £20 million for winter reinforcements, as per The Telegraph.

Ticket prices, too, were on Thursday’s agenda, and in the hours before the AGM the Arsenal Supporters Trust revealed a growing uneasiness with cost escalation.

“The ticket price increase this season has created ongoing bad feeling amongst the fan-base, made worse when we see the club sitting on such a large, unused cash pile,” the body stated, according to the BBC.

Club chief executive Ivan Gazidis responded to the concern by downplaying Arsenal’s cash reserves.

“There is quite a lot of inaccurate and superficial analysis about the cash that we have available,” he remarked, as reported by The Telegraph. “That leads to stories we are hoarding a vast cash balance, and that is simply not the case.”

Finally, chairman Sir Chips Keswick addressed the elephant in the room when he revealed that Arsenal were already making succession plans for the post-Wenger era.

“Rest assured we will follow the situation carefully,” he said, according to The Telegraph. “I believe this great club will always be attractive for the great manager. I hope when the time comes we will be spoiled for choice.”

It was a revelation—that the club are, indeed, thinking about what comes after Wenger leaves or retires—that will have been the only fresh information the shareholders have been given in years.

Arsenal’s AGMs have for so long been a case of same-old, same-old, and on the balance of it Thursday’s gathering was just another exercise in repetition.

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