Rocky the King
Arsenal Football Club is in crisis. It can't decide if it is purely a vehicle for making money for its owner or whether it should give the supporters of the club some hope of lifting a major trophy sometime soon. In the first part of this blog, I identified money as the root of all problems in football. Yet clearly unless we want to commit the club to abject failure, we need to join the bandwagon of throwing some reasonable amounts of money at a solution.
I am not asking for a revolution, neither do I subscribe to the current trendy political ideology that fuel populist movements that cause electoral upsets. Wenger's fate is largely irrelevant to the final narrative for Arsenal Football club as I described yesterday. The next target must be the owner and the Board.
Remember that when Stan Kroenke arrived at Arsenal he was honest enough to admit that it was for mainly to further his business interests. He was not a fan. Nothing has changed, he has zero affinity towards Arsenal fans. His attitude stinks and he does not deserve any respect as a consequence. It will only matter to him if Arsenal loses its profitability, a viewpoint that he knows we as fans cannot entertain.
Regular full stadiums, broadcasting revenues and Champions League participation ensure a steady flow of cash into the club. But how much did Kroenke really invest? Is it true that Kroenke did not actually use any of his own personal cash to buy all of the shares that he now owns? I believe that the answers to these questions will never be known.
His greedy influence at the heart of Arsenal football club is measured by his failure to invest heavily to the cause. Like a parasite, it seems that his raison d'être seems only to be mainly about collecting upon his fortunate opportunity to get onto the Arsenal board. Thankfully the scandalous £3 million a year payment to KSE has come to an end as a direct result of pressure on the Board.
Stan Kroenke is involved in many sports franchises and experience shows that he is not afraid of ignoring the wishes of fans. He has upset interests in Ice hockey, and the NFL among others in the pursuit of bigger and better financial rewards. The recent events have seen his fans across the USA and here at home turn upon him with chants of derision and even accusing him of lying. We now need to make Stan Kroenke realise that soon the world will know of his role in destroying our great club as we turn up the heat on him.
Stan Kroenke likes owning things and you need only check his franchises on Wikipedia to see that. A Republican who is listed as the ninth largest land owner in the US and married to a Walmart Heiress. In Billionaire terms he is a relatively modest though with Forbes listing his net worth as close to £7 billion and a lot of this wealth is in his businesses and property than actual cash.
His entry into Arsenal was as a result of a Boardroom dispute. It has to be said that it was a very great mistake for the late Danny Fiszman to have been taken in by Silent Stan. One will never know if Danny Fiszman's judgement was clouded by his boardroom feud with David Dein, but Kroenke would never have gained a foothold at Arsenal without the decision of Fiszman to sell his shares to Kroenke. This massive mistake resulted in the domino effect which ensured that Lady Nina Bracewell-Smith, and Peter Hill-Wood would follow that lead and be taken in by the softly spoken business man. For once I wish the then Chairman had stuck to his guns in stating that "we don't want his kind here".
Josh Kroenke apparently wants Thierry Henry to become the next manager, which only shows how massive the gap between reality and fantasy really is in the rarified atmosphere of the boardroom. We must now turn up the heat on Silent Stan. The more adverse headlines that are focused upon his role at the club rather than the manager's fate, the more uncomfortable he will be. People around the world need to see the Kroenke brand as tainted and unreliable. Let's get him to speak out about his failure to invest in a meaningful way in Arsenal Football Club.
Change the banners to "Kroenke out" and let's make his rare appearances at THOF as unpleasant as possible. Hopefully the media will pick up the trail, and let's try to identify sponsors of KSE and Kroenke so that we can use social media to organise boycotts. Try to talk to news channels and celebrities and make them realise that the whole mess at Arsenal is down to one man, and that is Stan Kroenke. One word of advice to the fans who will lead the calls for Kroenke to leave our club. You are more likely to get the majority of the stadium singing along with you if the chant is free of obscenities. Just a thought.
Twitter@RTKafc_insider
