Arsenal’s soft culture indulges in failure and the Kroenkes are to blame

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Lampard could talk about plans, just as Arsenals owners Stan and Josh Kroenke wrote about a bright future in the program notes ahead of the Chelsea game – but such a jam approach tomorrow is not acceptable to Abramovich. It requires both. A bright present and a bright future. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

As Pep Guardiola says, it’s easier to convince everyone of your project when you win. Once the transfer ban was lifted, once again the money spent, Lampard had to deliver. At once.

The problem for Arsenal is that they have created a culture in which underperformance is tolerated and apologies are made. There is a softness in them and it has been for years that they have flip-flopped between deciding, for example, that Granit Xhaka can leave and go to Rome before panicking after playing well for Switzerland at the Euro. and award him a new contract, a salary rises and he’s captain of the team in their first two league losses.

Where is the reflection in there? (Oddly, this contract has not yet been officially announced but was mentioned by the Kroenkes in their program notes).

Arsenal fielded the Premier League’s youngest half-back this weekend. But that’s not something for a club of their stature to trumpet, especially when they are then easily torn apart by Chelsea with Arteta taking the wrong tactics. It is not a good combination. The coach left these players exposed.

Of course, Arsenal are not Chelsea. They don’t have the same financial strength. Neither City nor even Manchester United. But neither are they minnows or courageous underdogs, and they shouldn’t continually appear like they need to look for excuses.

There is a common theme. The Kroenke property; owned by Silent Stan. Americans still appear to be indifferent, distant, money-focused and only panicked to reach out and invest more, following the backlash from fans after the European Super League debacle.

We were wrong, Josh Kroenke said after that. He could have spoken of much more than the happily aborted ESL which becomes another example of chaotic decision-making.

Arsenal are out of European competition this season. Already, just two qualifying matches for the Champions League, which they haven’t played since 2017, having participated in every season since 1998, seems unlikely.

Of course, a case can be made for the future. There are very talented and promising young players. The problem for Arsenal lies with the best-run clubs, clubs like Chelsea, who are allies in a case at the moment. And they have summarily failed to fix this problem all over the club.

There are too many attempts to mitigate and justify failure, and as one great old editor (Alf Green at the Liverpool Echo) once told me when I started my career as a journalist there at 30: bring me exclusives, not excuses. As always with Alf, he was right.

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