Today Chelsea are in Seattle, Manchester City are in Johannesburg, Manchester United are in Indonesia, and Arsenal are in Hertfordshire.
Wenger, as we all know, has a policy on everything.
He says, “I don’t like the pre-season tours.”
Arsenal were without an MD for eight months. When Ivan Gazidis arrived as CEO in January he needed to build his own team of executives. He needed a power base of staff who were loyal to him. He knew he had to improve Arsenal’s commercial revenue, which is low because of the front-loaded deals Keith Edelman had to make to pay the builders.
Being a sports scientist and a physiological manager, Arsene Wenger hates jet-lag. He keeps his pre-season preparations in the same time-zone as London and loves to fine-tune his team’s fitness and focus on quick-passing moves and try to make a flying start in his first few games. Austria suits him, so he takes his squad there after playing Barnet every summer. He used to stop in Amsterdam on the way back and play a couple of games there.
Since the Emirates opened, he’s played those two games in his own stadium, which makes sense. Four games in two days- August 1st and 2nd – will damage the pitch but the surface can be made perfect again for the visit of Portsmouth on August 22nd.
This week Gazidis hired Tom Fox as his No2. Fox will start work in August.
Educated at Miami University, Fox joined Quaker Oats as a trainee brand manager in 1985, moved to parent company Gatorade’s sports marketing department in 1988, joined the NBA as director of sponsor programmes in 1993, then moved to Hong Kong to become managing director of NBA Asia. Nike hired him to run their Asia Pacific Marketing in early1997, and he became Nike’s US sports marketing director later that year. In 1999 he returned to Gatorade as senior vice president, sports marketing. Since 2007 he has been at consultant at Wasserman Media Group in Los Angeles.
Tom Fox will quickly see that Arsenal has big potential as a global brand.
It’s known these days as a club that plays stylish attacking football and signs young French players, young Africans, young players generally. Some youngsters are British and they’re developed and sold to Birmingham, Norwich, Sunderland et al.
Clearly, it it will take time for Fox to make an impact and create new revenue streams. Arsenal badly needs to generate more cash and one way of doing that is to market the club in the USA and Asia.
Big clubs like Barcelona, Man United and Chelsea quite often play in Seattle, Chicago, New York Philadelphia and Miami.
Americans think you should come to them.
They want to see you and meet you in the flesh.They want to talk to you. Their culture is very fan-friendly and media-friendly. They want news, pictures, quotes and detail. After games the Yanks open the dressing room door and reporters go in and talk to the stars, even if they are female reporters.
The media expect the kind of access that Wenger has never allowed. Here the media go to the training ground on a Friday and talk to Wenger, not the players. If you want an interview with Robin van Persie you’ll probably have to make 35 phone calls and send 25 emails and wait five weeks. Many of us reckon the Arsenal players are more pampered and protected than the youth teams at other clubs.
Personally, I welcome a classy, smart American like Stan Kroenke. These kind of guys have a lot to offer, even if they do not understand football as we do. Arsenal’s marketing will improve a lot, I’m sure. Fox will look at Arsenal TV and be appalled at how amateurish and cheap it is. And he won’t sell shirts with Emirates lettering that peels off after one wash.
Next season will be interesting. So will next summer. Maybe Wenger and the Yanks are on a collision course.