Arsene is featured in this month’s FourFourTwo magazine’s ‘Readers Questions’ section, the supposedly juicy bits being his ruling himself out of the England job when it becomes vacant next summer. For me though, the interesting stuff is more Arsenal specific. In response to a question about players he missed out on, he again mentions Eto’o and Makelele. The next part of the answer is produced in full below,

I also let some players go who I knew would make a career, like Muamba, Steve Sidwell and Larsson, but in the end I had to make a choice whether they could play for me or not. Sometimes you’re too hard but most of the time it’s because the guy doesn’t have the necessary quality or motivation

In that context, it makes you wonder which one of the three Muamba had. At the time, I could understand Sidwell because of the quality of those ahead of him and Larsson had not convinced me about whether he could make the grade at Arsenal yet Muamba had ‘rave’ reviews at Birmingham during his loan spell, coupled with praise from Arsene. Is he going to be the one of the three that ‘got away’?

Elsewhere in the Q&A session, he goes into his ‘tease’ mode – ‘There is one record I’d like to break this season but I won’t talk to you about that now’ – perhaps wary of the ridicule that he got the season before The Invincibles for what seemed an optimistic claim about going unbeaten whilst the start to this season is of little or no surprise to him – ‘I expected us to start well…I felt in pre-season that they had solved the frustration of last year and had a kind of revenge in their heads’.

International Football is savaged in the main due to the number of countries that have sprung up which in his opinion is lowering standards – ‘You think it’s a level up but 99% of the time it’s a level down’ – and his one rule change is to prevent anyone other than the Captain speaking with the referee. This is one that the media tried to justify as a possibility earlier in the week, highlighting the fact that Barnet do this and are not doing too badly this season, sort of proving that it can work. The biggest problem such a change would face is not necessarily from the players but those officials who want to be seen as the ‘players mates’ although with the absence of Graham Poll this season, perhaps the biggest culprit is now missing so it could work.

The magazine is in the stores now I believe and worth a read. It also has an interesting article in it about fans that do not go to games, preferring to watch matches in the pub instead. It is a ‘problem’ for English football right now. One of the observations made is that outside of the ‘Big Four’, attendances at other clubs are struggling to keep pace. It is not simply a cost issue of getting into the ground with ticket prices, the ancillary costs of getting there are increasing as well, but as each generation comes, there is less of a habit of going.

Here is the bit where I sound like an ‘old fart’ but when I started going regularly, we had Match of the Day or The Big Match showing maybe four or five of the top flight games and that was your lot. To see your team in action, you generally had to go to the game. The cost of a matchday was less than a fiver. Granted that it is relative but beyond the top echelon of the game, i.e. the ‘Big Four’, the concern is that Premiership football is slowly killing itself through the broadcast deals.

It is a balance that the ‘Great and the Good’ are slowly losing every time a new broadcast deal is negotiated. The money is not filtering back to the ticket prices, which have risen disproportionately over the years. The time will come when half-empty stadia make the remaining sixteen teams unattractive to broadcast and the money received reduces. The question then becomes how the ‘Big Four’ react. Is there another breakaway looming a decade down the road. Personally, I think FIFA and UEFA are hastening the charge towards that by constantly provoking the clubs (and vice versa); a time for co-existence would not go amiss in that respect.

‘til Tomorrow.