From Amos
Dear Myles,
I was also at the AGM today and it only served to confirm my thoughts on just how broken the club is and how disconnected I and many other fans have become from it.
For some time now I have felt that the problems stem from the fact that the board have a different agenda to the fans and to the best players at the club.
The players have a way out – they can move to another club.
Fans do not have the same option, so we have to suffer at the hands and whims of our arrogant directors and manager, who are answerable to no one.
As you could see from the chairman’s performance and attitude today, the fans are treated with contempt and taken for granted.
I believe this attitude runs through the very fabric of the club and would like to give you a couple of examples that illustrate this.
When we moved to the new stadium, I decided to buy a box with a friend. This was entirely for our personal use as lifelong fans not a corporate investment.
After 4 seasons we decided that the club was lacking the ambition to win trophies and were just wasting the money we spent on paying the likes of Diaby, so decided to give the box up. The club could not have cared less. I asked if they could help with general admission tickets for my two children and their response was “you will have to join the back of the queue”.
At that point I stopped going altogether after 40 years of constant attendance.
Last season I bought my son, and his friend, tickets for the Stoke game, using their junior gunner memberships but paying the full adult Internet price for them. On the day my son’s friend could not make it to the match, so I decided to go with him.
To cut a long story short, I was ejected from the ground as soon as we got through the turnstiles for using a junior gunner membership despite paying full price for the tickets. There was no common sense applied by anyone at the club and I was treated like a criminal. I didn’t even get the courtesy of a reply to my email to Ivan Gazidis until I sent a reminder and even then it was just a foboff phone call from the box office with no real apology.
As long as we fail on the pitch and the club have such disdain for its fans, we have no real future.
The performances by the various speakers at the AGM today were highly disappointing.
Stan told us nothing about why he bought the club or his vision for it. Ivan spoke at length but just sounded like a politician full of slick American marketing speak that just amounts to empty rhetoric. PHW continues to be an embarrassment to himself and the club. If he had any dignity or integrity he would stand down.
Arsene spoke from the heart but actually he was just trying to excuse the inexcusable.
You often refer to him as a master of spin but today he outdid himself.
Acutely aware of the bad feeling in the room, he said we have to be united to have any chance of success and that we would fail without unity. In other words, failure this season will be OUR FAULT.
The board and Wenger are always selling us the future – Arsenal have become a Ponzi Scheme.