Charlie Sale broke the Ivan Gazidis story in The Daily Mail yesterday.
The CEO Arsenal are trying to hire is the 44-year old deputy commissioner of the MLS, who lives in Connecticut. Sale says he’s reluctant to come to England.
Ivan Gazidis is a corporate lawyer with a good CV. Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, Gazidis moved to England when he was four and graduated from Oxford in 1986. He was a “blue” twice, having played football against Cambridge University at Wembley in 1984 and 1985. He took his Final Examination at the Guildford College of Law in 1987 and worked as a corporate lawyer in London and Los Angeles until 1994, when he was recruited to help set up Major League Soccer.
Charlie Sale wrote :
Hapless headhunters Spencer Stuart have also tried to lure Post Office boss Adam Crozier, the former FA chief executive, to the Emirates Stadium without success in their second campaign to fill the prestigious post.
Their first recruitment attempt ended with Peter Lawwell preferring to stay at Celtic while second choice, Vodafone’s Paul Donovan, did not impress manager Arsene Wenger.
Adam Crozier? No, no, no !!!
When Gazidis spoke to the BBC at the Leaders in Football seminar in London he was keen to put Beckham’s arrival at LA Galaxy into a broader context. “The David Beckham signing was a hugely positive thing for us. But it is not the beginning and end for us in the US. What had been happening before David Beckham was that the market place had really been gaining traction.”
There are currently 14 MLS teams with Seattle and Philadelphia set to join in 2009.
Gazidis, who sounds like a good salesman, says, “There is a tremendous confidence and improvement in what is happening in the US. Owners in the US have a different business model. A lot of our owners are part of a new ownership trend in the US. For example, AEG, which owns the Los Angeles Galaxy – it is a conglomerate which owns sports teams, and stadiums and arenas such as the O2 in London and Berlin Arena, as well as entertainment businesses.”
He says this model of diversified sports-entertainment ownership is a new trend, and that some club owners also own a broadcasting network.
“Look at Stan Kroenke in the Denver market. He not only owns sports teams, he owns stadiums and the TV station that distributes the sport on local TV. He aggregates content and he distributes it. We don’t have any kinds of issues about that in the US, although you might have in the UK. Our ownership group is one of the strongest groups of any sports league in the world.”
Owners include Stan Kroenke, Phil Anschutz, the Hunt family, the Kraft family, Paul Allen of Microsoft at Seattle. Those rich owners attend MLS board meetings three times a year and make collective decisions driven by strategic aims. Fascing huge challenges, they are very smart and businesslike.
Ivan Gazidis might be the hard-driving deal-maker who can make Arsenal the biggest club in the world.
But if he came to London and Americanised everything about the club, and completely Disneyfied it, it would be horrible, absolutely horrible. The Emirates is already very sanitised. OK, most of the legislation is sensible. You can’t stand up, you can’t arrive drunk or drugged, you can’t chant anything abusive, you can’t wave flags, it’s an American catering company, and it’s supposed to be middle-class family entertainment, so the Arsenal Experience is already half-Disneyfied anyway. The hardcore supporters, who spend every penny they have supporting the club home and away, will be extinct in 20 years.
Right now, Arsenal is licensed by Islington Council to hold events. And the Council milks the club for everything it can get and fears local residents who complain if a cigarette end is flicked into their front garden. I’m told the Council plan to knock down the Michael Sobell Sports Centre and make Arsenal pay for a new sports facility.
What’s slowing down the arrival of Ivan Gazidis ?
Why are negotiations taking so long? What’s the snag in his contract? Maybe he’s saying : If I sell Arsenal for £800 million, I want a cut. If he had a cut, he could retire. Although Gazidis doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who would retire at 50.