Van Persie on the Wage Structure

I'm not going to bother covering another lot of transfer rubbish today, as nothing has come up that strikes me as even remotely likely. Instead, I would like to focus on a story based on comments by Robin van Persie.

Basically, van Persie has come out and said that he thinks Arsenal lose their top players, and will continue to lose their top players because they won't match the wages offered by other top European clubs.

To a degree, I agree with him; if we had matched AC Milan's wage offer, Flamini would still be at the club. However, Flamini aside, there are notably few players who have left Arsenal due to higher wages on offer elsewhere. The recent high-profile departures, Henry and Vieira, were already on huge wages at the club, and left for other reasons. Henry for a new challenge, and Vieira who was encouraged to leave (it seems) by Wenger. The club has shown before, notably in these two cases, that for exceptional players it is willing to offer wages way outside the normal structure. The rest of the squad are probably on lower wages than they would be on at a different team, but (again, excepting Flamini) those who do leave tend to leave for other reasons. This season, Diarra left because he didn't have the balls to fight his way into the first team, and Hleb is very likely to leave, though we are not yet sure exactly why.

In my opinion, van Persie's comments here are a veiled threat. He wants more money, not necessarily now, but when he negotiates his next contract, it seems fairly probable he will ask for a big pay rise. As the club has shown before, if it feels a player is worth these higher wages, it will offer them. Van Persie has a lot to prove before he can expect to be paid more than he is now; we all know he is a quality player, but his ability to stay fit for more than a couple of months at a time is really under question. Arsenal don't pay players more than they're worth to the club, which, to me, seem eminently sensible. Van Persie needs to realise that he has to prove he deserves higher wages before he gets paid them.

Other than this we have Johan Djourou telling people that he's best as a holding player. Could he be the player to replace Flamini? I doubt it, but I'm often wrong.

Flamini didn't make the final France squad for Euro 2008. I know a lot of people are getting kicks from this, but it does seem really unfair on the player. Diarra, who is a far inferior player, is in the squad and Flamini isn't.

UPDATE: The EU has come out against Fifa's proposed 5+6 quota system. Fantastic. Let's hope that this puts all this talk to bed for the next few years.