Kevin Carty
May 2016
Dear Mr Kroenke,
Thank you for the email inviting me to renew my season ticket for next season for the sum of £1400. I write to inform you that I will be declining your generous offer and I would like to give you a few reasons. Please bear with me as my association with Arsenal FC goes back a little further than yours and I may appear emotional at times.
I was born in Finsbury Park (quite close to the Arsenal Stadium at Highbury) in 1954 and my dad, who came from Sligo in Ireland, first took me to the ground in about 1958. In those days 20,000 people would turn up for a reserve game against Spurs and I would get lost on the terraces.
I never got to see the double matches in 1971. I walked to White Hart Lane for the final league match and couldn’t get in and I didn’t have a ticket for the final against Liverpool. I’m not going into it too deeply as I’m sure you are aware of all the historical details and emotional impact 1971 has.
I was at Wembley in 1972, 78, 79 and 80. I went to the Heysel in 1980 and got into big trouble at work because of the extra time and penalties and getting back a day late. But you know all about that obviously.
I supported through the wilderness years until George Graham taught the team how to win again. We were functional but we won. “One-nil to the Arsenal”. I was even in the Parc des Princes in Paris when our fans inaugurated that song in the Cup-Winners’ Cup semi-final after Wrighty scored. Remember that?
Then in a flash Stroller was gone and this professorial French guy comes in and we’ve signed Bergkamp and Vieira and Diawara. Okay you can’t get everything perfect. And all of a sudden we’re no longer boring boring Arsenal but everyone’s second favourite team and young kids who live near Chelsea and West Ham and Shanghai start supporting us.
I was never a particular fan of David Dein but when he was kicked out things seemed to get nasty. Arsene managed the finances incredibly well. We moved from Highbury to the new stadium. I shed tears listening to Roger Daltrey singing “Highbury Highs” against Wigan. You know, Mr Kroenke, the guy from The Who who sings stuff on CSI.
And I was prepared to dig deep to fund the move. We had to compete with ManU and Real and Bayern and those new stadia don’t come cheap as you well know. So I bought into the idea that we, the fans, were doing our bit to push our beloved club towards solvency and beyond. We even accepted the idea we couldn’t compete for the signing of certain players because they were pricing themselves out of our realistic range.
All this time we were paying more than any other fans in the world and you, Mr Kroenke, were sitting pretty and laughing at us. I have never been anti-Wenger. I was one of those who chanted his name recently to quell the protesters. But I’m too old for this lark now and, frankly, I can’t afford live football, Sky and BT. The obscene amount of money flooding into Premier League clubs now warrants a drastic reduction in prices. We can never go back to squalid, cramped standing areas. We can never go back to the days when my dad searched frantically for me in a dense crowd.
But we can say “Enough is enough”, and stop letting people like you take the mickey out of true supporters. I’ll continue to scream at the TV and attend odd games when tickets become available, unless the Thought Police see me coming and bar my entry. I’m off. I’ve had enough. But I do have a long, long memory,
Yours
Kevin Carty. Life-long Arsenal fan and author of “The Moray”, a book about growing up in Finsbury Park, going to a great local pub and supporting Arsenal.
