Arnesen : In an interview with the
Danish newspaper, Arnesen explained the dismissal of 15 scouts were
due to the credit crisis and Roman had asked to cut
deep - angering the Russian billionaire.
Frank Arnesen will be dismissed by Chelsea before
the end of the year as Roman Abramovich punishes the club's chief
scout and director of youth development for his multi-million-pound
failure to establish a single youth signing in the first team,
sources close to the club have told Observer Sport. Chelsea's
owner was also angered by Arnesen's ill-advised decision to discuss
the owner's straitened finances in public.
Arnesen's closest associates were openly discussing the Dane's
demise last week as a recent pruning of his scouting network
degenerated into impending departure.
'Frank will be out before Christmas,' said an agent involved in
one of Arnesen's more controversial deals. 'Roman does not want him
near the club any more.' Chelsea last night declined to comment on
Arnesen's future employment, while Arnesen said he did not expect
to depart: 'I am not leaving Chelsea Football Club at the end of the
year.'
Arnesen had positioned himself as a key advisor to Abramovich,
playing an important role in the conclusion of Jose Mourinho's
highly successful reign as manager as the pair battled for control
of first-team transfers. However, it is understood that Arnesen's
failure to establish even one youth signing in the senior squad
despite unprecedented investment in his recruitment programme
eventually placed his own performance under scrutiny. Arnesen then
compounded his problems by connecting sackings of his own scouting
staff to Abramovich's recent financial losses - angering the
Russian billionaire.
In an interview with the Danish newspaper Weekend Avisen,
Arnesen explained the dismissal of 15 scouts from his network. He
said: 'The credit crisis has meant that Roman has hit the financial
brakes, and asked us to cut deep. We have cut down significantly on
scouts and other activities.'
The comments were ill received by Abramovich, who carefully
guards his privacy. Though the Russian has lost billions of pounds
on stock-market investments during the credit crunch, his advisors
have publicly dismissed them as 'paper losses', emphasising that
the bulk of his fortune is intact.
Acquired from Tottenham at a cost of over £5million in the
summer of 2005 (the same compensation fee Spurs paid Portsmouth for
Harry Redknapp last month), Arnesen has been paid £2m a year and
generously supported in his stated aim of producing 'the best youth
development programme in the world'. Abramovich funded the
construction of an £11m academy building and has spent further tens
of millions on transfers, salaries and agent fees for the young
players Arnesen identified.
The former Denmark international had built up a network of more
than 50 scouts to find those prospects. With more than half of his
scouts employed full-time and many on six-figure salaries, it was
the largest and most expensive scouting system in world football,
yet had grown infamous for its ineffectiveness.
Among the ill-starred recruits, Serb centre-back Slobodan
Rajkovic was acquired from OFK Beograd for €5.3million in November
2005, a then record fee for a 16-year-old. He has yet to play a
game at any level for Chelsea, been farmed out to PSV Eindhoven
then FC Twente, and in September received a one-year ban from Fifa
for spitting at a referee. Michael Mancienne's recent success in
being called up by England had little to do with Arnesen. The young
defender joined the club as an eight-year-old, long before the
Dane's appointment.
Infringements of recruitment rules have led to unnecessarily
high compensation payments for the likes of former Leeds United
schoolboys Michael Woods and Tom Taiwo and warnings from the
Football Association as to the club's future conduct. Critically,
not one of Arnesen's signings has established himself as a regular
first-team player, leading to public criticism of their quality by
Mourinho. Luiz Felipe Scolari has also been frustrated with the
lack of options available to him when senior players have been
injured. 'I've tried to find new faces, but I haven't been able to
bring enough from the youths,' said Chelsea's current coach.