Is it fair of Arsenal to penalise players via contracts for poor Champions League performances?
Arsenal have revealed new proposals which will punish their players for performing badly in the Champions League. The competition is the one tournament which Arsene Wenger has not been able to win in his time as manager and it is hoped that this new measure will help the club achieve that goal.
However, a number of young players are currently staring at contract negotiations in the near future including Jack Wilshere and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain. It is highly unlikely that their representatives are going to agree on such variations of a player bonus unless it is used across the whole club.
Arsenal will shoot themselves in the foot if they don’t ensure parity because should one of their players miss out on a decent chunk of cash as a result of someone else’s mistake, then it’s going to cause a big rift in the dressing room which is something they would naturally like to avoid.
This is not a radical idea. Many clubs have clauses in their player’s contracts stating they will get a certain fixed bonus for every goal they score, every game they score or any tournament that the club wins. The point is that these new ideas coming from Arsenal could be potentially devastating for team unity.
Arsenal have done superbly in the last few seasons in terms of bring younger players into the team, including the Champions League side. Some youngsters coming up and signing their first professional contract could be facing punishment related to the Champions League, even if they don’t play a single game for the club in that competition.
A better solution would be to operate a bog standard bonus associated to the Champions League which rewards players for reaching certain stages of the competition or achieving certain goals. This is along the lines of bonuses as they stand.
Attaching a punishment to a player’s basic salary means taking away when clubs should be, in order to encourage their players, creating the prospect of giving more. It is a brutal way to ensure efficiency if the club penalise players finances directly if Arsenal were to go out of the Champions League at the group stage or not even make the quarter finals.
Arsenal have come very close to winning the Champions League before but it’s a little unclear over whether this is the way the club should be going about rectifying that.
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