In the morning.
A lot of goals were scored in the Champions League last night. Aston Villa and Liverpool both scored 6 goals, which is obviously impressive but probably tells you something about the league stage of this competition. Maybe the quality of some teams is in question, maybe it’s the strength of the Premier League, maybe it’s just one of those nights. I don’t know.
“Manchester City” faced France’s PSG and lost 4:2. How interesting it was to read Luis Enrique supporting City before this game:
I hope things go well for Manchester City because I think what they’ve done on the pitch in the last few years has been incredible and they certainly deserved to win all the trophies they’ve won on the pitch. The trophies you win on the field stay on the field. They deserved to win it and I hope they can avoid the sanction.
For some reason I have a picture of Enrique sitting in a glass house with a large collection of stones in front of me, but it says ‘DO NOT THROW’ in big letters.
Lance Armstrong still had to ride a bike. Ben Johnson still had to run the races. However, isn’t it interesting that the man who actually manages a club/team set up in the same way as Man City doesn’t see what’s going on there worthy of sanction? Obviously, what he thinks won’t and shouldn’t have any bearing on what happens in the end. But perhaps there’s some cognitive dissonance here, because dwelling on your success at such a club can make it feel like less of a success, no matter how well you’ve molded a particular group of players into a highly effective and sometimes entertaining team.
This year we held the first Enhanced Games where athletes could compete and take Performance Enhancing Drugs. It’s probably the idea of some cunt who thinks generative Ai is great, but will inevitably end up in multiple lawsuits when juiced “roid heads” get involved and their enlarged hearts explode mid-event, because it’s of zero interest to people who actually love the sport. Maybe we can create an Enhanced League and just let Man City and PSG play each other every week until it becomes some kind of dystopian last man. Erling Haaland is “The Man on the Run”. Watch out, Erling, Khvicha is coming after you!
Elsewhere, Arsenal are reportedly set to cut up to 60 jobs in the name of “efficiency” after hiring a team of consultants. On the one hand, I assume that every business will look at how they can streamline operations to be more cost-effective and where changes can be made to effectively save money. On the other hand, football clubs are not really normal businesses.
You’ve got some people earning average wages, and others earning multiples of that, and to be fair, that’s because they have (mostly) an extraordinary level of talent in an industry where they’re handsomely rewarded. Players and managers at this level will earn that money at Arsenal or, if they can’t, go elsewhere. It’s the labor market, supply and demand.
However, there is a supporting cast that is crucial to creating the perfect environment for those people to perform at their best. These days football clubs like Arsenal require a large staff not only on the football side of things (coaches, physios, medical) but also behind the scenes. People we have never met. People who keep things going. New technologies can affect some people. Do you need someone at the end of a ticketing phone line when an automated chatbot can do the job? Maybe not that great, but enough to save a few paychecks, and the net result is increased customer frustration because we’re tired of talking to robots as if they’re sentient or know-it-alls.
Grime, but that’s the world we live in. We belong to American billionaires with a special corporate culture, so we should not be surprised when things like this show up. However, it is difficult to justify that the salaries of people who will lose their jobs and be laid off contribute the least to our payroll. A quick Google says the average salary in the UK is around £40,000 a year and I’m sure some of these cuts will affect people on higher salaries than that, 60 jobs cut is 40k = £2,400,000.
I understand that this is very simple, but it is about the salary of a decent player. Probably significantly less than what we pay an agent to complete the transfer of a fairly average player. Mikel Arteta’s new salary is reportedly £20 million a year. I don’t begrudge him that, as I said before, we could pay twice as much and end up with a half-decent manager, but when you see those salaries, when you see a club spend tens of millions on players (and I understand that the two are linked, if not obviously), and then you read about ordinary people losing their jobs, it just doesn’t feel right. Especially considering the record revenues, massive growth in commercial revenue, prize money and more of recent seasons.
I understood. It’s a business, but a faceless consulting group comes in and the end result is 60 job cuts dressed up as efficiency when we know cost cutting is the worst kind of faceless capitalism in existence. I find it very difficult to imagine that a club that exists in a community and does incredible things there, should be admired and appreciated by Arsenal fans, can take a mill to a significant part of its workforce and expect the fans to be happy with it. I know the football side of things is probably sacrosanct, but I’d bet it would be easier to find the “efficiency” they want to be better at there in terms of something as simple as recruiting than firing 60 people. But what do I know?
Anyway, I’ll leave it at that for now. Get ready for our Arsecast before dinner. Until then.