Arsènal (23 page)

After the final whistle, especially if events have not turned out as planned, emotions can run high. Certainly, comments are made which are regretted in hindsight. It was surprising that Arsène Wenger should have fallen foul of the strict Arsenal protocol in the aftermath of the match at Birmingham which began his woes in the run-in of the 2007/08 Premier League campaign. Striker Eduardo had suffered a broken leg from a challenge by Martin Taylor, who received a red card and the automatic three-match ban that went with it. “The tackle was horrendous and this guy should never play football again,” Wenger told the BBC after the match. The press office would have briefed any players the broadcaster requested to be non-committal about the incident, but the last person they were going to instruct was the man most responsible for the image of the club. The manager subsequently felt his reaction to have been excessive and issued a retraction later that day.

Another bane of the press office is the close relationships some foreign players have with their native media. Copy approval for many written media interviews is demanded as a matter of course, but if players talk to journalists of their own accord, the worst they can fear is a slap on the wrist. Not something that will cause the likes of Jens Lehmann and William Gallas much trepidation, so they often use their compatriots to get a message across that would never get through the normal British channels.

So when Eduardo, broken leg in plaster, was quoted from his hospital bed by the Brazilian newspaper
O Globo
as saying “To go in like he [Martin Taylor] did, it had to be with malicious intention”, the story was quickly picked up by news agencies and circulated in English. The press office were not happy, and a reproduction of the story on the Sky Sports News website was later withdrawn. Whether or not Eduardo had actually been interviewed over the telephone within 24 hours of the injury is questionable, although it is interesting that Arsenal's own official website carried the remainder of the interview, evidently having deemed the less controversial part of it to be credible enough for reproduction.

Arsène Wenger is of course a law unto himself and will speak to whoever he chooses. So he has direct contact on a regular basis with a couple of favoured French writers on
L'Equipe
and
France Football
(as well as being retained by France's main commercial channel TF1 as a pundit providing regular comments for the weekly news programme
Telefoot
and for the live broadcasts of the national team's games). As a courtesy, they inform the press office that they have spoken with the boss. The information tends to be grudgingly received, probably because there is nothing they can do to prevent it, despite the fact that the French journalists are unlikely to fall into the category of writers who would opportunistically exploit their access.

In elevating Arsenal into the club it has become, Arsène Wenger has encouraged a culture of separatism. The notion of control permeates the organisation. The manager has reason to ensure his players are controlled in what they can eat and drink and how they train, but the idea extends to other areas that cocoon them. There is little exposure to the paying public or the media, except in situations that are heavily supervised. The culture of the club is very pro tective, very inward-looking. There may be surprise and spontaneity on the field, but elsewhere there is none and the club should be confident enough to allow the human touch to proliferate without fear of a backlash.

With the apprehension over terrorism, players are advised not to do lifestyle pieces and interviews carried out under the copy approval arrangement often have mentions of players' religious beliefs removed. You wonder whether, had Brazilian superstar Kaka ended up in north London, his ‘I belong to Jesus' vest under his shirt would have had the postscript ‘but the press office would rather you didn't know'.

The notion of the Milan player plying his trade at Arsenal is not so fanciful, as Brazil was not unchartered territory for Arsène Wenger in less busy times. “It's my big regret now that I cannot travel,” he reveals. “I like to travel to watch players and find people. I found Silvinho and Edu on my travels. I knew Kolo Toure since he was 16. I helped create the Kolo Toure school [in the Ivory Coast].” (And there are other more specific regrets. Claude Makelele and Petr Cech are two notable examples of star quality that Wenger was aware of when they played in France, but who he allowed to slip away.)

As other managers had their eyes opened by Wenger's groundbreaking voyages and followed in his footsteps, so Arsenal had to put together a more structured operation to ward off the increasing intrusion into what once was virgin territory for other British clubs. Nowadays the scouting network does the travelling for him while he sits at home in Totteridge and does the best he can. Kaka had already been snapped up but occasionally television will give him the chance to catch sight of a potential signing his scouting team have been reporting on. He would certainly have had ample opportunity to verify the good reports on José Antonio Reyes and Bacary Sagna ahead of the decision to bring them to north London. However, the number of potential purchases watched
chez
Wenger that have simply fallen outside the available budget is a moot point.

Yet it was one that David Dein was all too concerned about. “Arsène has to sell before he can buy,” he said before the January 2007 transfer window. The perspective back in 2004 was that the stadium was going to make that situation obsolete. “What I want is to put this club on a level where we have a 60,000-seater stadium and if the manager or the board takes the right decision we can compete with everybody in the world,” said Wenger at the time. “At the moment, I am sitting here – if Milan or Man United or Real Madrid is after the same player, I say thank you very much, I'll go somewhere else. And I want one day that the manager – if it's me or somebody else – can say, ‘OK, how much is it? I can compete.' And that gives you a guarantee, but at the moment if we are wrong in the buys, we cannot compete. If you get one or two buys wrong, you are dead. With the biggest clubs it is different. They can say, ‘OK, this year we were wrong. We'll put in £50 million again and we will be right next time.'”

By March 2007 it seemed as if nothing had changed. The team were out of the Premiership title race, still adapting to a life of careful husbandry at the home that was supposed to ensure that they were able to vie with their free-spending rivals. However, the club simply had too much money tied up in property development, particularly Highbury Square. And until all the money was in from the sale of the flats there would have to be economic sacrifices in the short term, a situation many fans, David Dein among them, were having trouble getting to grips with. Now was the time for the man of action who had seen off Terry Neill and Don Howe to return with a vengeance. If Arsène needed £50 million he should damn well have it and in the vice-chairman's view that is exactly what he did need and he was going to ensure that he got it.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

At the end of January 2007, Arsenal entertained Tottenham in the second leg of a Carling Cup semi-final. In the light of Arsène Wenger's policy of using the competition to blood young players and provide match practice for his second-stringers, the home club wanted to reduce prices as they had in previous rounds. However, their opponents were entitled to 45 per cent of the gate receipts and they insisted grade A fixture admission charges should be levied. The stand-off was only resolved with the intervention of the Football League, and a compromise reached whereby Arsenal agreed to apply their grade B rates, which ranged from £32 to £66 apart from the concessions in the family enclosure.

The Carling Cup was not included as one of the games which gave admittance to the 36,000 standard season tickets, so a huge number of upper and lower tier seats were available to see the reserves of a team who had failed to challenge in the Premier League. Surely it would be a tough sell. Remarkably, an attendance figure of 59,872 was posted. It was positive proof that Arsenal's expensive new home could continue its phenomenal financial contribution even under extenuating circumstances.

Watching from the directors' box, David Dein must have experienced some very mixed emotions. It was a triumph to get so many people through the doors and, moreover, the team qualified for yet another cup final trip to Cardiff by defeating the full-strength line-up of their neighbours after extra time. But how did he feel, in the light of his dispute with his fellow board members about the financial hazards of Ashburton Grove, now that it appeared set for a prosperous future? His friend down in the technical area was still being forced to buck the odds. In Dein's view it was all well and good looking to the future when extravagant spending would be possible, but Arsène Wenger might not be around by then and he himself was certainly no spring chicken. He fervently believed that his colleagues were complacent. He felt strongly that the winning of trophies was too far down their list of priorities. He felt that they were concentrating too much on the building of apartments rather than the building of a football team.

Arsenal had their stadium, but not much money in the bank. They needed cash to compete and they needed it now. Unfortunately it didn't appear that the board, four of whom featured on the
Sunday Times
Rich List with an estimated combined wealth of £500 million, were going to reach into their own pockets to buy a Ronaldo or a Kaka, so it was down to him to find someone who would. Keith Edelman's emphasis on the balance sheets meant he was not the football man Arsenal needed at the helm as far as David Dein was concerned, and for him there was one far more suitable and obvious candidate for the role: the rather dapper character he sees on a daily basis in his bathroom mirror when shaving.

Less than a fortnight after the semi-final against Tottenham, the club announced a partnership with Major League Soccer team the Colorado Rapids, with the aim of “building the Arsenal brand in the US; helping to improve the quality of football at MLS team Colorado Rapids and supporting grassroots football in the US”. Really? There must have been other and better marketing opportunities available. Were there thousands of Arsenal fans in the States that a link-up with a team from Denver was going to exploit?

However, although he didn't initiate the association, David Dein immediately saw how it might be better used back home. Stan Kroenke, the proprietor of Colorado Rapids, is a sports mogul who either owned outright or had signifi cant stakes in five other US sports franchises, including the St Louis Rams of the NFL and the Denver Nuggets of the NBA. He was well-heeled, and his wife even more so, being related to the founder of the Wal-Mart retail chain. With the new Sky, Setanta and overseas television deals coming on stream Dein, mindful that his club needed more financial muscle, encouraged Kroenke that investment in a top Premier League club, specifically Arsenal, would be a profit able exercise. Unwittingly, Arsenal's biggest shareholder then gave Kroenke the chance to dip his toe in the water.

Recently moved to Switzerland, Danny Fiszman disposed of 659 shares in March 2007. It was subsequently assumed that he did this in order to test his tax status with the UK revenue. The sale took his portion below the 25 per cent which hitherto gave him a measure of control over any special resolutions the club might wish to propose. (He later admitted to a group of shareholders that he wouldn't have sold the shares if he'd known what was to follow and advised one of them who had a single share, “Hang onto it. Every one is vital now.”) At the time, the board owned 60 per cent of the club so Fiszman's falling below the 25 per cent mark was not regarded as a risk. The buyer of the shares, who acted through a third party, was Stan Kroenke. The entrepreneur's next acquisition a month on was far more substantial. In 2004 two of the main ITV companies, Granada and Carlton, merged and the new company (confusingly now called ITV) was looking to unload its 9.99 per cent stake in Arsenal as part of its policy of selling off its non-core assets. 50 per cent of the ownership of Arsenal Broadband went with the deal. One of the conditions of the agreement was that ITV could dispose of its holding as and when it liked without any obligation to Arsenal. A total price of £65 million was agreed with Kroenke, the shares element being valued at £42.3 million, which was believed to be at the top end of the market. With other smaller purchases, Kroenke soon owned 12 per cent of Arsenal Holdings plc.

At about the same time, 152 shares belonging to Peter Hill-Wood that had been registered in Ken Friar's name in the early 1980s were transferred back to the chairman. It was a tidying-up exercise, but the timing, together with Fiszman's sale, fuelled speculation that the board was preparing for a takeover. Certainly, Dein and Kroenke's holdings combined outweighed that of Fiszman's and if Lady Nina Bracewell-Smith's 16 per cent could be added to the pot then the 43 per cent stake they would then control could precipitate a change of ownership.

To this end, Lady Nina must have seemed a likely ally to the vice-chairman. If that was the case, Dein was mistaken. The daughter of an Indian diplomat, she met her future husband Sir Charles Bracewell-Smith while working at the Park Lane Hotel, which her husband part-owned with his cousins, the Carrs, also Arsenal directors. After marrying him in 1996, she was invited onto the board of the hotel. Over the next eight years, due to the gradual decline of her husband's health, the Arsenal shares registered in his name and others held in trust for him by the Carrs were gradually transferred into her name, eventually giving her sole ownership of 16 per cent of the club by 2004.

Geoff Klass is a mutual friend of Lady Nina and David Dein. In 2005, he was considering whether to dispose of his four per cent shareholding in Arsenal (he subsequently sold half of it) and suggested to Lady Nina that if she was ever of like mind, as a businessman he could get a better deal for both of them if they acted in concert. Chinese whispers then spun the proposal into a tale that Klass wanted to acquire her stake and in so doing was acting as a proxy for Dein. Putting two and two together and maybe making a lot more than four, it struck the board that having such a large shareholder on the inside could only be an asset to them. In April 2005 she was invited to become a non-executive director.