The original book was informative.
Alex Fynn has a very good scan on the business side of football, while Kevin Whitcher knows all about what the Arsenal team does and needs to do.
So the hardback of Arsènal -The Making of a Modern Superclub was a valuable book, even for those who know a lot about the subject.
In similar vein, the new chapters in the paperback grapple boldly with the recent issues at the club and benefit from Alex Fynn’s access to board members.
I talked to Alex on Wednesday about the new paperback.
Let’s start off with the Lady Nina’s re-election charade. She was re-elected at last year’s AGM, then told afterwards she had to leave.
She wasn’t on the same wavelength as Danny Fiszman. They were probably looking for a different contribution from her.
She said : Once they got Kroenke on board, I was expendable.
She has a huge number of shares, so I thought that it could be a dangerous decision because she could have turned spiteful, and instituted a renegade action, and she didn’t. All she did was to say, with some justification, that she was unfairly treated.
What do you think her intentions are now?
Difficult to know. It’s almost a year on, isn’t it? Ivan Gazidis has made an attempt at a rapprochement, and since she certainly enjoyed the privilege and status that an Arsenal director has, and if the privileges are going to be returned to her, if not the status, then maybe she will enjoy watching Arsenal again.
Surely she could negotiate the sale of her shares on terms that allowed her to keep her privileges?
Yes, but I don’t think Arsenal as a board are interested in acquiring her shares. They’ve left it to Stan Kroenke to acquire as he wishes. On the assumption, presumably, that if he gets to 30% he will make an offer for the entire company. Which they’re presumably happy with, otherwise they wouldn’t have brought him on the board in the first place in such a substantial way.
Absolutely. Don Garber, Ivan’s old boss at the MLS, said the other day that Stan is a very, very bright guy and a great owner for Arsenal. Which suggests that’s it only a matter of time before Stan owns the whole club. Is that a fair interpretation?
I think it’s probably inevitable that he will reach 30%, and make an offer, which will have the support of the existing board. They’re in the position at the moment of not having 50% of the shares, although they are fairly sanguine about that because they have 40% plus between them and the board, and probably, as they put it, their friends account for another 5%. Of course they would like to have a combined total of over 50%.
Danny said he would never sell but then he sold 8% to Stan.
I don’t think he said he would never sell. I think that’s how it’s been interpreted. He said he would always be around. He has established a very good working relationship with Stan Kroenke and Danny helped to build the stadium to leave a legacy for future generations. He can now see that he would leave the administration of the club in equally good hands. So Danny looks to the future. He’ll be around for a while yet. But he’s diminishing his role because he’s in his mid-Sixties now.
Sure, it’s good. And Gazidis is in his mid-forties.
Yes, Gazidis has been a very important influence over a short period of time, both on and off the field. On the field, he’s establishing a relationship with Arsene Wenger. And for the first time Arsene has a boss who is going to be hands-on. And secondly, off the field, he’s grappled with the Highbury Square development and they’ve turned the corner on that in the last few weeks.
They sold 142 flats to London & Standard at £200 per square foot and L&S then sold them at £600 per square foot?
Doesn’t matter. Arsenal probably paid £100 per square foot. The other point to remember is that they refinanced the loan. They were due to pay back a loan of over £100 million in the new year. And that has now been reduced by two thirds. So on the one hand they don’t have prospect of having to replay a huge loan, because they’ve refinanced it on good terms, and they’ve had revenue from the sale of flats which a few weeks ago wasn’t expected, and that has enabled them to report a very good financial performance for the last year.
Was the London & Standard deal a recent one?
No, there had been an agreement in principle that they would acquire a certain number of properties on behalf of a range of their clients. But with the recession that commitment was chugging along with nothing happening. And then it was finally realised, which meant that Arsenal were in a much better financial position than they were few weeks ago.
What’s going to happen with the Fraser & Neave deal where they were gonna buy 120 flats? That went very quiet, didn’t it?
Yes, that was a similar situation.
Arsenal are very untransparent, really, aren’t they?
Yes. You have to look at the way the AGMS are managed –
All AGMs at all companies are stage-managed, scripted PR events, aren’t they?
Of course they are, but some are more transparent than others. For example, to insist on all of the questions in advance? There is a need for more dialogue. They could learn from the floor because there are shareholders who are professional people as well, so there could be more of a dialogue between shareholders and the board.
That’s the arrogance of old money, isn’t it?
I wouldn’t put it like that. I would say that it’s the standard football view that fans are different from customers. A fan can’t take his business elsewhere, a customer can. And that pervades football. And that means you only tell people what you need to tell them.
Many of the shareholders are accountants, solicitors and barristers, people who are better at public speaking than anybody on the Arsenal board.
Not just public speaking, but they could contribute to any analysis. They could contribute and they should be wooed. I don’t think either shareholders or fans are wooed enough by boards in general. So you can’t single out Arsenal.
Did you happen to hear Gazidis on Radio 5 Live last night? Because I missed it.
No. I did speak to him on the weekend. They had a few difficult weeks on the property side but he was optimistic that they had turned the corner on that. And of course he was very pleased with the financial results. And , like everybody else, pleasantly surprised by how well the team has done this year.
Apparently, what he said on air was that Arsenal had made £35 million profit and all of that money, plus the £40m from sales to Manchester City, was available to Arsene to spend. That is, over £70 million, should he want to do so. Gazidis also said : we have to win a significant trophy this season with this group of players.
Yes, the quote that we use in the book, that people have misinterpreted slightly was,” If we don’t deliver success, Arsene is under the same pressure as anyone in that position.” What people took that to mean was : Arsene is under the same pressure as any manager. He didn’t mean that. He meant that Arsene is under the same pressure as anyone who had delivered performance to a club over and above expectations, over a number of years. Which has bought him some time, but not infinity. So Arsene is under the same pressure as Alex Ferguson. He’s not under same pressure as Benitez is or Scolari was. But I would have to say Gazidis is a force for good.
I definitely think so. But even the most loyal fans do become tired of a sustainable business model that finishes fourth every year.
I agree with you. What is unfortunate is that Arsene has raised expectations, and in raising expectations he awakened opposition who decided the way to achieve success was to throw more money than anybody had ever done before at it. Namely, Chelsea and Manchester City. And therefore he is now fighting a beast which he helped to create. And the only way he can fight them on equal terms is to add to his professional acumen, his genius as a manager. Rhat isn’t sufficient in today’s climate, with Chelsea, Manchester United, Manchester City and Liverpool all spending huge amounts of money. You’ve got to supplement your genius with funds. And Arsenal up to now have not been prepared to do that.
I always think it’s a control issue with him. He’d rather have a younger player who has been brought up under his tuteleage and owes his entire career to him. What happened was that in 2004 Abramovich moved the goalposts and in 2009 Abu Dhabi moved the goalposts again. As you’ve always said, if Arsenal don’t qualify in the Top Four it could cost them £40 million.
It would cost them that. The way that the revenue is shared out for the Champions League depends on what position you finish in your domestic league. If you finish fourth you get a smaller share of the television pool than if you finish first. So to finish fourth is to finish in the worst position to take advantage of Champions League money. But the bonus is that Champions League money is structured up front, so you get to the Group Stage and you started earning money. Most of the money from the television pool is divvied up at the Group Stage, so that’s why it’s so important to qualify for the Group Stage. The other stages – the quarter-finals, semi-finals, the final itself – although important, are less important financially than reaching the Group Stage.
I didn’t realise that. I don’t think most people do.
Of course, the more matches you play, the more matchday income you earn, the more bonus income you earn, but you don’t earn the same proportion of television income. Most of that is divvied up at the Group Stage.
So it’s not like golf, where the winner takes all, or an astronomical percentage?
No, an English loser of the final will take more than the winner, if the winner is a Spanish, German or Italian team. Because the television income from the UK is so much more important than from any other country.
The Shareholders Q &A at the end of last season shocked Arsene to the core. Did that indicate that he lives in a bubble and should get out more?
Yeah. It indicates that he should be challenged more. Because he is master of all he surveys, and before Gazidis arrived, his area of power and influence encompassed off the field as well as on the field as well as on it. He was living in an unreal world if he could not take a comment from a shareholder, who was a season-ticket holder for 50 years and a shareholder for 40 years, and who prefaced his remarks by saying, “Arsene, we’re among friends.” But Arsene felt he couldn’t be a fan if he criticised Mikel Silvestre.
I did think that was astonishing. An Arsenal fan has to believe in his own players or he can’t call himself a real fan? That’s a weird definition of a fan.
It is. Last season was a very difficult year for Arsene and his quote to me was, “I’ve never worked so hard or been criticised so much.” The inference was that he wasn’t being appreciated. He also, I think, took the point that he had got it out of proportion to some extent.
I had conversations with Philippe Auclair while all that was going on. From talking to him, I got the distinct impression that Philippe and Guillem Balague believed for about three days that Arsene had been talking to Florentino Perez and was going to join Real Madrid. That’s what they believed. That was the impression I got -which I poo-poohed completely.
You were right to do that. But like all impressions, there was an element of truth to it. You’ve got to remember that those two guys are exceptional journalists, exceptional both in their cosmopolitan knowledge of football in general, and Arsenal, in particular Philippe Auclair.The situation was summed up by that quote : “I’ve never worked so hard or been criticised so much.” And he felt that he’d worked so hard and been unsuccessful, and for people not to support him, almost unilaterally, was to aggravate his situation.
It was unlike him to be so emotional.
Exactly. It really got to him because there was nobody he could turn to. He’d made a rod for his own back because there was nobody who he could rely on who could say, Arsene, you’ve got this out of proportion.
In the old days, David Dein would have taken him out to dinner?
Well, David Dein wouldn’t have said that. David Dein was a tremendous sidekick to him. He was the junior partner in the duo. I asked Hill-Wood once, ‘Have you ever known David Dein to disagree with Arsene Wenger?’ And Hill-Wood shot back, ‘Never !’
So I don’t think Dein would have challenged him. I think what Dein would have done was taken a load off his shoulders both in terms of having to deal with the criticism, and , if they were looking for players, Dein would have done, as Arsene put it, “‘my dirty work for me.” That is, the travelling and the negotiations with agents. So he lost a friend and an ally and a working companion when Dein went, and that was never replaced.
But is there anybody else on the planet who could have that same relationship with him?
The same relationship, no – that is true. Dein was a very close friend. But there are people who would get near to that if he would let them. Grimandi or, if Arsene is still going in 10 years time, Thierry Henry. These are people who will say to him, “Arsene, you’re wrong.” Remi Garde was the No.2 at Lyon a couple of years ago. Gilles Grimandi is scouting for him at the Under-20 World Cup in Egypt. And Thierry Henry, who I imagine is his favourite player, has yet to finish playing.
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