Gazidis: Wenger's Job Safe In The Long Term

• Independent, Wednesday, February 4, 2009 1:30 PM

Arsenal's new chief executive Ivan Gazidis "believes that Arsene Wenger will be the manager at Arsenal for as long as the Frenchman wants and does not have a minimum success to reach in order to keep his job," writes Sam Wallace. The former MLS deputy commissioner  also told Wallace that wealthy benefactors are not healthy for soccer, and that Premier League teams should work together more to clamp down on unscrupulous agents.
 
"We're not anticipating any circumstance where Arsene Wenger would not be the manager of Arsenal," Gazidis said. "He has the full faith of everybody here and is an integral part of the club. It's difficult to imagine it without him now. He's redefined the club and the way it thinks about itself. I think he's very happy here."
 
Arsenal has so far resisted the attempts of controversial Uzbeki billionaire Alisher Usmanov to take over the club, and Gazidis thinks that Arsenal is better off without its own equivalent of Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich. "There is an inherent instability where a club is dependent on any outside source of income for its continued success or in some cases survival," Gazidis said. This puts a team "in a position where you are dependent on what may happen in a market-place or in a business that has nothing to do with football."
 
Gazidis also said that soccer needs to be cleaned up. "One of the great attractions of the Premier League is that it is a bit like the wild west. Paradoxically, the American sports model is very controlled. It [soccer] is a really challenging environment in a lot of different respects. It surprises me that we have allowed the game to come to a point where there are so many unscrupulous operators and third parties taking money out of the game."

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