From Rhys Jaggar:
Myles,
Lots of Arsenal fans have been railing about Arsenal’s lack of ‘professional sporting values’ for want of a better phrase, not caring if they won or lost and taking selfies instead of knowing that battle has only just begun etc; etc.
Thing is: what if competition isn’t what Arsenal FC is any longer about?
What if all it’s about is waiting until the cartel develops so Stan Kroenke can get his £30m a year guaranteed profits? And the players can get £250k a week, as long as no questions are asked.
It would explain everything about why Arsenal is what it is.
Kroenke doesn’t care about titles; he cares about return on investment.
He doesn’t care about England; he only cares about a brand in a global football circus. He doesn’t care about the current squad because in years to come he will have the squad picked by a ‘roster’ system.
I think there are huge numbers of true football fans in Europe who are in danger of having their lifelong allegiances torn up by a bunch of unaccountable billionaires.
Who IS this Stephen Ross (Miami Dolphins owner) to be trying to turn the Champions League into a closed-shop global circus, playing games in the USA and Asia?
Has he put a single penny into European football the past 150 years? Of course not. He wants to take a whole load out in the future having ripped up every tradition of European football first. He has no right to do so.
He says that ‘Manchester Utd made football what it is now’. Well, maybe they did, but the shares in Man Utd as a result should reside with David Gill and Sir Alex Ferguson, not with the Glazers who have shafted the fans for £1bn in interest and debt-repayment charges to pay for the club on behalf of – the Glazers.
It is something so abhorrent to my sense of values to bring up the question should a Glazer be a fit and proper person to own a football club in Europe ever again? No ifs, no buts. Not fit and proper. They want to buy a club, they pay for it themselves. End of story. No discussion. No legal cases. No lawyers spouting rubbish in front of a judge.
But life’s not like that and Americans are now making their play to take over world football in its entirety.
As for Ferran Soriano, ask who were Barcelona in 1990? A second-rate European outfit who’d never won the European Cup and who were four years off getting absolutely slaughtered by AC Milan in the second Champions League final.
As for Man City, who were they before 2009?
All this closed shop nonsense is simply saying: ‘rather than allow everyone the chance to aspire, we have betrayed every fundamental value of sport for our own narrow sense of profit’.
It makes me sick.
I saw it all coming long ago and withdrew my financial consent 5 years ago.
What is going to exist for fans of WBA, Everton, Stoke, Leeds Utd, Hull City, QPR etc? Will they even have a say?