Thread by @madnavin

Yesterday, @Arsenal announced redundancies in non-playing staff due to ongoing revenue pressures linked to Covid-19 and have been receiving a lot of flak from fans and media. Sports=Business is my favourite topic, hence, a contrarian view 🙃 (1/n)

arsenal.com/news/club-upda…

Of course, this is a deviation from the #Classenal legacy that Wenger built and I am not a fan of this either, but is the backlash too much? Are there parallels we can draw to professionally run organizations in this move? I think so at least. (2/n)

It is relatively simple to compare the large salaries of players and consider a pay-cut, sell them or not pay super agents to avoid this. But, for an organization of this size, it is hard to believe that the absolute $$ involved matter. (3/n)

In any organization, would you rather risk the highly paid stars leaving or pushing back on some of the talent that can be replaced when the breathing room comes back? For eg. Amazon could ask everyone to take a paycut when Jeff B is a super-rich billionaire. Is that wrong? (4/n)

Would you rather let go of your star performer who you know can take you back to glory days or would you keep trying for the best decision for all? Of course, Ozil situation and similar outliers will exist, I would like/hope to believe the club has their reasons. (5/n)

The other thing to note is that the club has deviated from Wenger's philosophy very clear in the recent days - new "Footballing Hierarchy" in place that is making the decisions on hiring. Given they are likely to get a long run, the club has to back them. (6/n)

If they are the ones making investment decisions and not fans of scouting/analytics, unfortunate as it might be, the work will also be exactly what it is described as - redundant. Same as any organization that goes through a management change & shakes things up (7/n)

Hence, in an ideal world, every organization would have liked to be a happy family always, but these decisions are never easy to make. Fortunately or unfortunately have had to live through some of these decisions & it isn't always as trivial as it is made out to be. (8/n)

Besides, thinking of it very differently, the old methods got us somewhere, mixed results, not entirely successful, maybe it is indeed time to try something new and invest in other methods? The age-old "What got you here won't get you there" analogy. (9/n)

Don't get me wrong, I am not happy and endorsing the decision to let people go or rely on agents, but just think that only one side of the decision is being looked at. Hopefully, it yields some results soon and we can go back to investing in some of this at the right time (10/n)

But, some of the outrage is possibly because the view is purely an emotional lens and maybe waiting for the results will help us look back at it differently. Hope springs eternal I guess. Now, waiting to be called out as a traitor to Wenger (No) #AFC cc @vinayakkm @arseinho.