If you've read part 1 and part 2 of my behind-the-scenes look at the "behind-the-scenes look" at what went wrong during the latter stages of the transfer window, then you've already got a good idea about the extent to which we as fans have been kept in the dark. However, I can assure you, things are about to get much more interesting.
Those of you who are active on the various online Arsenal communities and gossip pages are probably already familiar with the now well-documented Persil non-bio saga, and if that's the case then you're probably dying for me to spill some more behind-the-scenes beans on the subject - which I'm going to do. But first, I'd like to step back from that for a moment and try and try to explain the bigger picture regarding our coaching staff and the board. To put it bluntly: things are a mess. For months now Gazidis and Wenger have barely been speaking, Kroenke is nowhere to be seen and the coaching staff are in absolutely disarray. We find ourselves in quite the pickle.
Anyway: Wenger, Gazidis, and the Persil non-bio debacle. For years Wenger had been growing his own weed (he now buys it from the darknet) which he didn't really sell per sé, but he did share it around quite a bit with the lads which is technically the same thing. You might be surprised at the idea of a man of his stature dealing drugs but actually it doesn't surprise me at all. When you think about it, it makes perfect sense.
In hindsight it's clear to see that this tweet by Liverpool chairman was essentially a taunt directed at Wenger: come for our player, and I'll tell the police where your boys are getting their Lemon Haze from. I'm told that this is the real reason we ended up not following through on Suarez, despite the activation of his clause being legally binding. This is one of many things that made Gazidis and other members of the board feel things were going too far with Wenger's smoking.
The weed culture in general at the club is rumoured to be pretty bad, with numerous sources confirming that more than half the lads smoke, and most of the first team smoke every day at training. Wenger takes a kind of "if I didn't see it then it didn't happen" attitude to it but his official stance is that players should only smoke on weekends or at night to help them sleep. However on one occasion Wenger actually pulled a whitey in front of the lads during one of Steve Bould's defensive awareness talks, which went some way towards undermining his stance on smoking at training.
Some might argue that there's no reason why a man his age can't kick back and enjoy a puff once in a while, but it does appear to have been quite a bad influence on the squad and on some of the other staff. Gazidis had always been afraid to smoke weed, and he had actually managed to avoid it for quite a while until more or less everyone he knew was doing it. After a few weeks of trying it out he began to enjoy it a bit more (although sometimes smoking it made him worry about the North Korea situation) and would go to Wenger's house once or twice a week to smoke a zoot, and usually watch some clips from Wenger's funny/sad/inspiring/sexy vids playlist, which he tends to insist on doing when friends come over.
Anyway, a few months ago Wenger declared that he and Gazidis should each have their own joints instead of sharing. Gazidis rightly wondered why Wenger couldn't just make his spliffs a bit bigger or "put less baccy in", but the boss was adamant. At first Ivan found the new arrangement a bit weird but mostly okay, and had assumed it to be part of Wenger's new cool-guy attitude that he had adopted ever since he'd started having weekend sessions with some of the younger lads (note: it's alleged that at one point Wenger had rather worringly turned up to one of these weekend sessions with a concealed knife, to which the boys all reacted with horror and hastily explained to Wenger that they weren't into that sort of stuff. This is yet to be confirmed but it wouldn't be the first time he's taken things too far to impress some of the younger, more "urban" lads in the group.)
After a while however, Gazidis began noticing he was coughing a lot more than usual, and sometimes he felt quite strange after spliffs (a feeling he described as 'fuzzy'). Wenger was adamant that it was because Gazidis wasn't used to the new stronger stuff, and that he needed to stop acting like a pussy or he couldn't come round anymore.
Gazidis eventually found out that Arsene and the younger lads had actually been preparing joke spliffs for him at the weekend, filling them with things like black pepper and crushed up paracetamols. He was livid when he found out, with Wenger having confessed to him during one particularly heavy session that he was smoking Persil non-bio. This was the last straw for Ivan, who had already become fed up with being the butt of jokes (the boss would often film himself performing pranks on Ivan, who tended to fall asleep a lot when he smoked - pranks that ranged from silly ones like drawing a fake moustache on him to strangely aggressive ones, for example slapping him extremely hard across the face on one occasion.) Ivan told Wenger to grow up, and said that he wasn't going to hang out with him outside of work anymore.
Since then things have been quite frosty between the two of them at the club, although Wenger tries to act like nothing happened, and became very threatening when Gazidis mentioned it in front of some of the more senior board members on one occasion. Inevitably this has had an enormous effect on transfer dealings, contract negotiations, and has played a large part in the general madness going on behind the scenes. Whether or not Wenger loves his green lifestyle too much to sort this out is yet to be seen, but I'm currently doing all I can to get more info on the situation.
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