Since Stan Kroenke announced his intention to take over the club, there’s been precious little media analysis of his ambitions for Arsenal or why he has chosen to become so deeply involved. So I decided to do some of my own by contacting bloggers who follow the other major sports teams he or his company owns – the Denver Nuggets (basketball), the Colorado Avalanche (ice hockey) and St Louis Rams (American football). I didn’t bother contacting any Colorado Rapids fans as the club has only existed in its current form for a few years but, in fairness to Kroenke, I should point out that they were Major League Soccer playoff champions last season.

I asked the fans about their overall views of the man, how he handles squad improvement, what they thought Kroenke’s motivation was and how they would expect him to handle Arsenal’s situation. The full Q&A is worth a read if I say so myself but I’ve summarised things below.

Overall Kroenke has been pretty successful and the supporters of two of the three franchises are happy with him. The Nuggets fan said “his impact has been great” – they have been regular participants in the NBA playoffs recently having had a poor record prior to Kroenke’s takeover. In the one year that Kroenke has had full control of the Rams they enjoyed a steady and respectable season after a horror show the previous year and he has apparently provided “guidance and stability”.

On the other hand, the Avalanche have been on the slide for the past five years, seemingly because the replacements for departing club stalwarts have not been good enough. They had been the most successful of the three when Kroenke took control in 2000 and the Avalanche blogger summed it up thus: “(Kroenke) helped build the (winning) 2001 Stanley Cup team and the division champs that followed for the next several seasons. He's also been at the reigns during the two worst seasons in franchise history.”

The most significant thing from an Arsenal perspective is that the supporters said Kroenke leaves the executives in charge to run their club rather than interfering directly. The Nuggets fan said the owner had done “a great job of letting his general managers do their job” while at the Avalanche “the day-to-day operations of the team have been left to the experts, not Kroenke. He’s supported management and personnel decisions 100 per cent”. So you can’t imagine him installing a raft of yes-men, or following the lead of the six Glazers that sit on the Man U board, to carry out his orders. Any decision to sack Arsene Wenger, for example, would have to be something that the people responsible for Arsenal the business believe is the right thing to do, not necessarily what Kroenke wants.

To a certain extent his hands-off approach is inevitable considering the size of his business empire. And to a large degree it is very reassuring – we aren’t going to get newspaper headlines about our new owner issuing Roman Abramovich-style ultimatums. But equally, because Wenger is a de facto board member, I don’t think we should expect the boss to come under any more pressure to truly address the team’s weaknesses.

What doesn’t come across is a sense that his franchises follow a particular business model, though he does appear to be willing to approve big spending (should our tight-wad manager actually want it, of course!). The Nuggets “have been among the top spenders” and at the Rams he “believes in building through young talent, and isn’t afraid to spend top dollar to acquire them if necessary”. At the Avalanche, though, Kroenke has “no longer appeared willing to ‘overspend’ on talent” and, more worryingly, their fan points out that because of revenue sharing within the National Hockey League “there is an argument that a viable business model can be had by keeping costs low and being mediocre or even bad at times”. In terms of our spending, the lesson from the three franchises is that we should probably expect continued emphasis on teenage potential rather than the proven, experienced talent.

The question that bugs me most about Kroenke is what motivates him to get involved in sports and why he chose Arsenal. Reassuringly, the supporters gave the impression that Kroenke balances any desire to make money with a will to win. “In the end it’s extremely likely that he’s a millionaire with an interest in sports and making money in sports”, said the Avalanche fan. The Rams fan probably summed up the vagaries of a billionaire’s whims by saying: “Arsenal has a storied history that dwarfs that of any of the other teams he owns. I guess the devil’s advocate might ask ‘Why wouldn’t he be interested?’.”

So the responses were generally positive and encouraging – Kroenke appears to back spending when required, there are no revelations about asset-stripping and in essence he lets clubs run themselves.

But they also reinforced my feeling that Kroenke faces quite a set of different challenges at Arsenal compared to his American franchises. We are starting from a much stronger position compared to his biggest success story, the Nuggets, so it will take a lot more to make us happy. I would also say Arsenal is in a much more vulnerable position should big decisions (like replacing the manager) go wrong – the concept of promotion and relegation does not feature in American sports and we operate in a far less egalitarian world without draft systems, salary capping or huge amounts of revenue-sharing. I would expect Kroenke to tread a cautious path and avoid making any costly errors, especially as we are a much bigger entity in terms of worth, profile and global reach than anything he has owned before.

At least let me end on an optimistic note and leave the final word to the Rams fan who suggests our new owner won’t accept continued failure: “Kroenke is in this game to win, and I don’t see him being satisfied sitting back and counting gate receipts while running a team of perennial also-rans who act as a talent farm for bigger clubs. My guess is that he will lean towards giving the current regime a full season of working under him before he makes any evaluations or major changes in course.”