RvP’s ankle knack is going to keep him out for six weeks the club has confirmed today. In keeping with Arsene’s luck over recent years, this means he will miss around 10 games since the injury occurred in the last international break of the year. A month earlier and he would have missed about half a dozen games at most although no doubt his national coach would have called him up for a squad even though he it would have been patently obvious that he was not fully fit, leaving him to suffer another injury on top of that. Anyhow enough cynicism for one day.

As international week drags inexorably to its mindnumbing conclusion around the globe, it just would not have been the same without a Cesc to Barcelona story or two. Despite the player confirming over the weekend that he is not Mystic Meg and does not know what the future holds five years from now – or twelve months for that fact – the media has decided that the Catalans are going to offer the chance for Arsene to get his Yayas out with a Krkic. Presumably they will be offering a few vowels alongside this deal so that Arsenal can maximise their commercial revenues although no doubt any shirt with his surname on it would be a limited edition when the K’s ran out in the club shop. Alternatively, there is a view that Arsene is going to offer Fabregas for that pair although I think that someone, somewhere got the wrong end of that particular transfer stick and I hasten to add that having read that particular story three times, it wasn’t me.

Angus Kinnear, the Arsenal marketing guru, knows a thing or two about career progression. Step one is a bit of brown-nosing:

I think the board were very judicious in making sure that they appointed somebody who had an absolute understanding of the values of the brand and I think all the fans’ groups would testify that Ivan has demonstrated that straight away

Kinnear speaks of ‘the Arsenal way‘ and one hopes that the marketing department will not lose sight of that. At present, the whims of a single owner are not encountered and Wenger is able to set the agenda for pre-season tours. Kinnear acknowledges that it is a marketing opportunity lost purely in revenue terms. At the moment, the fact that Arsenal is a football club has not been lost sight of. That may come if commercial pressures change drastically, as they surely would were the plurality of ownership to end.

The article is interesting but throws out a curiousity, one that has slid by but in many respects is alarming. Kinnear states:

The 51,000 seats we have on top of those 9,000 are just a bonus

The 9,000 referred to are the middle tier. Does this mean that so long as the premium seats sellout, the rest of us do not matter? Mind you, the speed with which the ground empties before the final whistle, the players probably already know what the atmosphere would be like if the normal seats were unsold.

The club finances are not so strong that they can dismiss 51,000 people so readily. Surely he meant to say the 9,000 were the bonus not the other way around? Such slips can be forgiven but in my mind, it does undermine somewhat, the earlier protestaions that the Arsenal way was all that matters to the club.

Away from that, the deals with Emirates about shirt and stadium sponsorship are almost glossed over, despite highlighting the fact that the deals have been dwarved by the revenues earned elsewhere. The Emirates sponsorship helped build the stadium, something that was necessary and it is difficult to compare any deal signed in isolation and subsequently, by a rival when Arsenal were looking for a package at the time. Yes, the moneys may not be as extensive but likewise there is no evidence that they could have obtained more at the time the deals were signed.

’til Tomorrow.