Arsenal fans disillusioned at the continuing prevalence of the Arsene Wenger transfer philosophy may want to get their eyebrows ready to hit the ceiling; owner Stan Kroenke also owns the team that has just engineered one of the biggest player acquisition gambles in recent sporting history at the NFL Draft.
The Los Angeles Rams, fresh from a Kroenke-driven relocation from St. Louis, acquired the first overall pick of the draft two weeks ago, giving them the freedom to choose any player entering the league from American football’s college teams. Earlier this week, they confirmed their choice of Jared Goff, one of two consensus favourites as the best available player at quarterback – the most important position in the sport, and one where the Rams were severely deficient last season.
To obtain this opportunity, the Rams forfeited their rights to no fewer than five valuable future selections – including two next year – in a blockbuster deal with the Tennessee Titans, who previously held the first pick after having the worst record the previous season. In the NFL, there is no such thing as buying players from other teams with money – there is free agency, where out-of-contract players are signed for nothing but their wage bill in a process much like a Bosman signing in football, but a hard salary cap restricts the influence of even that, as every team has the same amount to spend.
The real currency of the league, at least in terms of transactions between teams, is the draft pick. Each team receive seven every year to acquire new players from the hundreds of would-be stars turning professional, with teams selecting in reverse order of the previous season’s record in each of the seven rounds (This and the salary cap lead to a real competitive balance within the league – there’s no such thing as a Leicester City story in the NFL).
In practice, these draft picks are assets that can and do get dealt – teams can swap, or “trade,” any combination of draft picks (including those from future years) and players – so most teams don’t keep the same seven picks each year. Teams can and do move up within the draft to acquire a particular player they covet – as long as there’s another happy to receive compensation for their own choice being deferred in the form of additional later picks – or perhaps use draft picks on veteran players for a championship charge now, as the Arizona Cardinals did this spring in exchanging a second-round draft pick and an underachieving player for the highly-rated Chandler Jones, who filled the team’s biggest need.
A Wenger-esque philosophy in the NFL would involve very little spending in free agency and an aversion to trading assets for higher-value picks in the draft. This philosophy happens to be espoused by the Cincinnati Bengals, whose last major transaction involved trading veteran quarterback Carson Palmer – deemed surplus by the performance of first-year professional Andy Dalton – to the Oakland Raiders in 2011 in return for two early future draft picks. Since then, they have made the 12-team playoffs every year, one of very few teams to do so, but fallen at the first hurdle in every single one of them – an Arsenal-like philosophy producing the most Arsenal-like of results.
Gunners fans should be fascinated to see how another Kroenke team has pulled off a transaction that would be anathema to their own team’s approach, which has started to look more like a theology than a philosophy in recent years. The club’s consistency – not to mention the lack thereof at post-Fergie Manchester United in particular – has deservedly earned him respect, and the benefit of the ever-growing doubt. And, of course, the UEFA Champions League provides major reward for continued moderate success in the Premier League; nothing of the sort in the NFL, just a string of slightly less valuable draft picks than would be the case in the event of a bad year.
However, fans impatient for glory amidst their own major expenditure for the club’s notoriously expensive tickets now have a new precedent within the Kroenke sporting empire to watch for. The consensus of most pundits and analysts is that the Rams are on the wrong end of this deal, and that Goff is not a sufficiently special prospect to warrant an enormous gamble on; Read American Football ranks ten players in this year’s draft more highly than Goff (though two of them have career-threatening knee injuries). If those prognosticators are wrong and the Rams are right, could the illustrative example to Kroenke have repercussions eight time zones away in Islington? It’s one thing for the fans to demand a riskier player acquisition policy, but in terms of actually bringing one about, one suspects that it is Kroenke who calls the shots.
That’s why Arsenal fans should definitely have at least half an eye on how, beginning in September, Jared Goff performs as a Los Angeles Ram. An ocean away (a single appearance at Twickenham in October notwithstanding) from London and in another sport he may be, but his performances might just have an influence on the Gunners’ future.
