THE BACKGROUND:
This has been one of the craziest weeks ever in modern football. Last Sunday, as Arsenal were putting in a tepid display against Fulham, the European Super League news was reported by outlets in France. Late in the night, the league was announced officially.
The drama that unfolded in the next 2 days was undoubtedly a victory for fans of football, with the current ESL proposal put to a halt.
One of the takeaways from this whole saga was the anger fans directed at their owners – especially at Liverpool, Arsenal and Manchester United. The ESL fiasco gave fans the momentum to make their feelings heard loud and clear, with Arsenal and Man United supporters holding protests to get KSE and the Glazers to sell respectively.
Meanwhile, Josh Kroenke spoke at the fans forum on Thursday. When asked about why he never bothered to meet the fans before, he highlighted his preference to be physically present for these meetings. Ironically, the entire Super League was planned out between the owners via Zoom and other online platforms. A nice excuse to say the least.
Personally, I don’t really crave for the owner to meet up with the supporters regularly. What I’d like is for the club to be run well. Good governance stems from the top and permeates its way to those who run the club, the coaching staff, players, and the fans. That will trickle down to results on the pitch and when those are good, fans will be happy. And that is the primary issue with KSE. They have failed miserably in this regard.
HOW DID KSE ACQUIRE ARSENAL?
KSE started acquiring shares in Arsenal right from 2007 when Kroenke’s stake was around 12.2%. In the years that followed, he would go on to gradually increase his ownership. In April 2011, Kroenke became the majority owner by purchasing the stakes of Danny Fiszman and Lady Nina Bracewell-Smith.
The only hope for Arsenal fans was Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov who was the second major holder of Arsenal’s stake. KSE rejected Usmanov’s offers to buy the remaining stake and essentially, the Russian had little to no say in the club’s affairs. Frustrated, Usmanov finally sold his stake to KSE in 2018.
KSE then went on to take 100% ownership by exercising the compulsory purchase of remaining shares option, many of which belonged to Arsenal fans who were forced under a legal obligation to give up their stake at the club.
And that’s the little story of how KSE become the majority owner. It was a process that took over a decade, but they got what they wanted in the end.
THE DISASTROUS MANAGEMENT OF ARSENAL UNDER KSE:
1. The self-sustaining model:
KSE supported the idea of running Arsenal as a business that can sustain itself – essentially, you are allowed to spend what you make. And to do that, you have to maximize your resources by being a smartly run club. Long story short, they didn’t want to put in their own money to give us that external push we sometimes needed.
As of 2018, Arsenal were the only team in the league whose operations are 0% owner financed. The Kroenkes justify this by highlighting ‘Arsenal’s values’. Josh Kroenke stated in 2019 that they’re not Arsenal’s owners, rather ‘custodians’ that acted in line with the values of the club. I didn’t see much of this when they worked to join the Super league.
2. Losing our best players to rivals:
Ever since KSE became Arsenal’s majority owner, Arsenal have lost:
-Van Persie to Manchester United
-Samir Nasri to Manchester City
-Alexis Sanchez to Manchester United
If you sell your best players to teams that you are competing with because you need to balance the books, you are never going to move forward.
All 3 transfers were avoidable if the owners stepped in.
3. Too comfortable making the top four:
In KSE’s eyes, Arsenal were a successful business model considering we were making the Champions League every single season. In the eyes of the fan, it was frustrating to see us unable to kick on and move to the next level.
They simply lacked the ambition and when that is missing, the result is stagnation. And then decline… That’s exactly what happened to Arsenal.
In the 2015/16 season, the team was a few top additions away from a serious title challenge. We were the only Premier League club not to sign an outfield player that window and we lost out on the league title to Leicester City of all teams..
4. Not bringing in the best people to run the club:
Just like many other owners, the Kroenkes don’t know much about Englsh football, but what they can do is bring the best in the business. They placed too much trust on Ivan Gazidis along with the manager to make decisions and there was a real lack of accountability.
Gazidis promised fans back in 2013, stating that ‘We should be able to compete at a level like a club such as Bayern Munich’, but 4 years after that statement we lost 10-2 on aggregate to them which also happened to be our last Champions League campaign.
In 2017, Gazidis brought in Sven Mislintat and Raul Sanllehi to establish the ‘continental model’ where each person is tasked with a specific function. The aim was to have the scouting capability of Sven and bolster it with Raul’s contacts book to get deals over the line.
That very summer, Gazidis left the club and in the vacuum that was created, Mislintat stepped down after Sanllehi denied him the technical director role. Edu Gaspar was hired in the summer to be Arsenal’s first technical director. In 2020, Sanllehi was sacked by Arsenal which the club say was due to COVID, but there’s obviously more to that.
As a result, we have become an unstable club. We have gone from a ‘Manager does it all model’ to a ‘continental mode’, to one relying on agents and then a hybrid approach with a technical director with Arteta’s title being changed from ‘head coach’ to ‘manager’. No one is ever going to be successful with that level of instability. And KSE turned a blind eye to all of this.
They brought in Tim Lewis to join the board and oversee things in July, 2020 but it was all too late – the damage was already done.
5. A lack of direction:
The owner sets the direction. People who work for him execute it within that framework. Has Kroenke ever told the fans what his actual plans for Arsenal are? The annual statement KSE will come up with saying they want to ‘compete for the biggest honors’ is so unbelievably vague. And remember, Kroenke famously said this, speaking to MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston back in 2016:
“For me, being an individual owner, I have to have some sort of reality involved. If you want to win championships then you would never get involved.”
And that tells you the true colors of the man himself. What you see in a statement will never be what he truly feels. And in that interview, his true colors came out. If that is the mentality of the owner, it would rub off on those who work under him.
Have there been any positives?
I believe its important to look at both sides of an argument and if there’s one thing I like about KSE, it’s that they haven’t taken money out of the club. In recent windows, we have been more aggressive, but due to how unstable we have been behind the scenes, money has not always been efficiently spent. I believe they’ve been more helpful than before during the pandemic situation by helping refinance the debt – this isn’t something that deserves praise, it’s the bare minimum, but by KSE’s standards, it is noteworthy.
TO CONCLUDE:
It has been more than a decade since KSE became the majority shareholder – a period in which Arsenal have progressively declined. The negatives are high in number, whilst the positive aspects are negligible. Whether KSE will sell or not is a topic for another day, but they have failed Arsenal, there is no question about it.
Enough is enough, it is time for change and to take our club back! #KroenkeOUT