So Paddy Got Up - an Arsenal anthology (23 page)

By the time we arrived the Arsenal influence could be spotted in several small ways. A section of the Rapid’s home stadium had been renamed ‘Cannon’s Corner’ and it housed an actual cannon that was fired when the Rapids scored. There was a choice of Arsenal home and away shirts in the club shop and a global map in the front office with Arsenal, London highlighted. There were also extensive youth football facilities and plans for an Arsenal Academy.

During our visit, the AST was introduced to many of the senior executives of KSE and had a presentation from Paul Andrews on the business plan. It was explained to us that Kroenke Sports Enterprises (KSE) saw themselves as the Rocky Mountain West’s leading provider of live sports and entertainment events. Based in Denver, KSE is a privately held company owned by Stan Kroenke that operates Denver’s Pepsi Center arena, sports franchises and presenting live entertainment events. More than 3 million fans annually experience professional sports and entertainment through KSE. In addition to the Colorado Rapids and a separate interest in the NFL’s St Louis Rams, the KSE sports teams are, the Colorado Avalanche, a National Hockey League team who moved to Denver from Quebec in 1995 and has since won two Stanley Cups; The Denver Nuggets, Colorado’s National Basketball Association representative for more than 25 years and the oldest NBA team in the mountain states region; Colorado Mammoth, Denver’s indoor Lacrosse team play at the Pepsi Centre and won the NLL title in 2006; the Colorado Rapids and the Colorado Crush who play indoor Arena Football – an indoor, small-sized version of the NFL which didn’t particularly grip Nigel when he took in a game.

We were informed that KSE operated under the corporate tag ‘Memories are played here’ with a mission statement that reads:

Kroenke Sports Enterprises is committed to providing world class sports and entertainment for both live and broadcast audiences. We will welcome fans into our venues as family, providing respect and care from the purchase of a ticket, to the drive home. We will celebrate the best in sport and entertainment by recognising the diversity and human spirit around us, and by working within our community to improve the lives of all those within the community.

Our visit also allowed us to see the emphasis placed by KSE on commercial revenues, driven by ticket sales and the sports television station, Altitude. Altitude is a regional sports network for the Nuggets, Avalanche, Mammoth and Rapids. The channel is an important marketing and branding tool for KSE’s sports teams and distributes sports coverage across the United States on satellite and regional TV.

We certainly saw evidence that demonstrated no stone was left unturned in the commercial application of KSE’s sports teams, driven by an emphasis on service quality and excellence, and the importance the club places on its links to supporters and the local community. It was also clear just how different US sports are to those in England and the different expectation of the supporters. It was noticeable that there was as great an emphasis on the supporters ‘match-day’ experience as well as the team’s actual performance. Something the Emirates has sought to replicate with a focus on ‘Arsenalisation’. Many of those we met in Denver spoke well of Stan, but admitted that they had never met him and reiterated his preference for keeping a low profile and letting their sports teams do the talking.

In the round, we saw that KSE was about building a sports portfolio business that serviced itself through ticket sales, commercial revenues and broadcasting rights. This was a long-term endeavour with commercial benefit secured through asset growth.  Adding an English Premier League team to the mix was the logical next stage in the expansion, alongside Kroenke taking full ownership of the St Louis Rams.

As Jeff Plush, who had previously had responsibility for spearheading KSE’s strategic business initiatives, new media enterprises and brand development, explained, “This ground-breaking alliance with Arsenal, a team that has been in the first flights of the sport for more than 100 years, is the one of the stepping stones to continue pushing our sport into the next level. In today’s international business community, soccer is the only true global sport that transcends ethnicity, culture and language and with this type of relationship we are making sure that our company is expanding this vision through worldwide sport.”

One big difference we saw was the focus, and effort, put by KSE into selling tickets for matches. KSE teams have a business model driven by an emphasis on ticket sales that ranges from sixty to eighty-percent of revenue across the teams. Banks of sales executives were executing ticketing strategies that included season tickets, mini plan sales, group sales and single game strategy. With Denver hosting many sports teams in a relatively low population area, this is a necessary factor. Of course Arsenal have for many years had little need for such actions, as 42,000 people sign over a year’s money on June 1st each year, and while demand has softened, there is still a waiting list for both club level and general admission season tickets

In more recent times the AST’s dialogue with Stan Kroenke has waned. Perhaps not surprisingly as in this time he joined the Arsenal Board and his energies would have been diverted toward spending time getting to know the other directors and learning more about Arsenal’s business before launching his takeover offer in the early summer of 2011.

The AST did urge him, and still do so – in fact more than ever – to speak up and talk to fans, believing that his words will be well received. Saying nothing only fuels concern and mistrust. His silence before the takeover was often explained on the grounds that to say anything on his intentions would fetter his freedom to make a bid. In fact, the reporting of Kroenke to the takeover panel for allegedly being in concert with Danny Fiszman led to noticeably more reticence as the lawyers got to work defending the charge.

Now, fast forward to late 2011 and although his words at the recent AGM and a couple of press briefings are encouraging, Stan hasn’t really found a way to step forward and create a connection and understanding between himself and Arsenal fans that builds on some of the welcome words that were included in the formal offer document. In that document Stan Kroenke states that if he does takeover Arsenal he plans to “provide Arsenal with continued stability from an individual who not only understands and greatly respects the history and traditions of Arsenal, but who also has a proven record of successful long-term investment in sport.”

He also said that he would make it a priority “to meet with supporters and fan groups in formal and informal settings and recognises that fans are at the heart of the Club. Their opinions and involvement are important to him. Mr Kroenke fully expects himself, the Arsenal Directors and Club executives to continue to engage supporters for the long-term good of the Club”.

To date he hasn’t really expanded in much detail on these comments or answered many of the other questions that supporters have. One thing is certain – if he doesn’t communicate there will always be a sense of unease amongst Arsenal fans. A survey undertaken by the Arsenal Supporters’ Trust (AST) in June 2011 found that 96% of its membership wanted Kroenke to ‘improve his communications with supporters including setting out his ambitions for the club and explaining the strategy he has to achieve them’.

This doesn’t necessarily mean arranging an interview with Newsnight’s Jeremy Paxman, but could manifest itself through attendance at more matches and engaging with not only the AST but with other supporter’s groups such as AISA and RedAction. Such action would allow information to cascade to fans via word of mouth and Arsenal’s voracious social media led by sites such as Arseblog. There are also established channels such as Arsenal.com and the match-day programme where over the years the owners of Arsenal have taken the time to communicate with the club’s fans.

I hope he does take this course of action and allows more fans to see the Stan Kroenke I met in 2007 – the billionaire in the Arsenal tracksuit.

***

Tim Payton is a board member of the Arsenal Supporter’s Trust and founder member of Arsenal Fanshare.

21 – GLORY DAYS - Jake Morris

I had assumed it to be a love affair whose passion would never dim. Only death or the loss of faculties would, I thought, take us away from each other: Arsenal and I. For so many years nothing occupied more of my waking hours. It was never one of life’s truly important things, but as Pope John Paul II apparently observed, of all the unimportant things; none is more important than football. The gap between games was always too long and the regular fortnightly international breaks seemed profoundly unfair. The summer was to be endured rather than enjoyed, the second Saturday in August such a blessed relief that even now I can recall what I was doing on the day Arsenal opened their league campaign.

United away (1-4) 1989-90: I was in the garden and Dad called out the result from inside. Wimbledon away (3-0) 1990-91: heard on the radio in the car. QPR (1-1) 1991-92: France, on the balcony trying to get some decent reception on the World Service.

Pinpointing the beginning of the affair is not easy. A 1-1 draw at Old Trafford on 2nd April 1989 is my best guess; a Sunday afternoon at Grandma and Grandpa’s; Grandpa in his big green chair nearest the TV, and me to his left. Tony Adams scored at both ends, which when you’re three days past your 7th birthday is the kind of thing that sticks in your mind. There were a couple of earlier dates – Norwich at home on Bank Holiday Monday afternoon. Mum let us watch some of it and then decided we’d been in front of the TV for long enough and should go and play with our toys or something. And Derby at home – news of our shock 2-1 defeat relayed in the car by Dad as we drove past Lords Cricket Ground. And then, well, there was Anfield a fortnight later.

Come the fourth home game of the following season we were in the family enclosure for Arsenal v Manchester City to see John Lukic’s long goal kick from the Clock End disappear from view (for those sitting far enough back in the west lower), before dropping back into orbit in time for Michael Thomas to stab home in front of the North Bank. And so I became obsessed. Fast-forward twenty-odd years and, as usual, I’d spent the week anticipating the visit of Wolves to the Emirates stadium. We’d drawn 1-1 at Birmingham the previous weekend, conceding a last minute equaliser in a fashion hauntingly familiar to events on the same ground two years previously in a game that had spelt the beginning of the very quick end of a title charge built up over 26 games.

Despite that 1-1 draw, we still, by most people’s reckoning, had a decent stab at the title if we could beat Wolves. For 90 minutes we laboured. Four of the five minutes of injury time were up and it was still 0-0, then Denilson had it. “Long, long, long,” I screamed, almost crazed, from my seat down by the corner flag. He didn’t go long. But of all the short passes in his Arsenal career (and there were a few), this turned out to be one of the better ones because when Bacary Sagna eventually crossed, Nicklas Bendtner squeezed his header into the corner of the net and people sunk to their knees and thanked the heavens. I was one of those people. Rarely, in my two and a bit decades of watching Arsenal had I seen a single league goal greeted with such an outpouring of emotion. On that night I went to the pub with Arsenal supporting friends and agreed and disagreed about whether we were talking about Arsenal too much, or as much as we ever had in all our time watching the club. I imagined we’d do the same for decades to come. But two weeks later something changed and that, really, is the point of this piece.

When we went to Wigan, our chance of the title wasn’t great but it was still a lot more likely than it had ever been at any point for Liverpool or Spurs over the previous years. Watching the game meant making my excuses early at a gathering of my girlfriend’s family, so on a cloudless spring afternoon, I sat in an almost deserted home-counties pub, eyes fixed on a television. My thinking: if I thought we could still win the title, it was not a lot to ask for the players to think the same and give it a proper go. But that day, Arsenal didn’t. Going 2-0 up was celebrated with about as much seriousness as the same score would elicit in a testimonial. The subsequent conceding of three goals in the final ten minutes, turning victory into defeat, would have been pretty alarming even in such a game. When I left the pub that day and joined my girlfriend for a walk along the canal towpath in the last of that afternoon’s light, I knew something had changed.

 Even when we’d lost 6-1 at Old Trafford a decade earlier, I’d have rather seen the game than not seen it. But now, for the first time ever, a part of me actually regretted watching Arsenal that day. Since that Wigan day it has never been the same; I know it hasn’t.

A year after the Wolves game, the Emirates witnessed another incredible finish. Arsenal v Liverpool was 0-0 after 95 minutes, 1-0 after 96 minutes and 1-1 after 97 minutes. No less an emotional rollercoaster than the Wolves match and yet I watched it with a sense of detachment. Among the same friends, as obsessed as I, the same feeling is true. We miss far more games than we once did. We can sit through someone’s birthday lunch without checking the score every five minutes, with ease. But how is this possible and why now?

A part of me wonders if perhaps on that day in Wigan the contract between player and fan was completely broken. I had never considered it an equal relationship; I’d commit not just my time and money but also vast amounts of emotion and an arguably unhealthy degree of worship for individual players. In return I don’t think I’d expected too much. I didn’t expect them to play well every game and I’m not particularly picky about what they are like as people. That said, when Arsenal have been linked with one or two players whose lives and criminal history are impossible to plead ignorance to, I’ve not wanted us to sign them, on the premise that I know too much for the necessary suspension of belief to occur. My point here is that when you think you’re watching hugely well-paid footballers frankly not trying, that same thing can happen.