Arsenal’s Annual General Meeting is starting to feel like a pointless smokescreen that occurs on a yearly basis to feed fans more and more useless nonsense and this year was no different. Just when you thought the club couldn’t value fans any less than the last few years the AGM proved that wrong.
Now I don’t proclaim to know a huge deal about Sir Chips Keswick but from what I have heard I don’t like this guy one bit. I only think we hired him because of our past association to the Bank of England and there is no proof to even suggest that he is an Arsenal fan. When he took over as chairman there was no indication of his plans and he’s almost as silent as Stan Kroenke which is a quality we all detest.
Now I am highly suspicious of the statement Keswick made yesterday in regards to Wenger, mainly because I don’t know what he stands to achieve from saying this.
“If Arsene has a plan we back it, if he doesn’t have a plan we keep quiet,” said Sir Chips.
‘Don’t doubt who calls the shots at Arsenal Football Club. It’s not the board, it’s not the fans, it’s Mr. Arsene Wenger.”
In saying that he is admitted they pretty much don’t know what is going on at the club, at the very least with the football side and that is worrying for someone who is in charge of running the whole club. He should at the very least have the knowledge of what occurs in his workplace given that he is the manager.
Reading between the lines he also sold Wenger out in a truly unprofessional manner, even if it was in a praising nature and intended to fill everyone with confidence it really didn’t. Instead he has provided the perfect scapegoat an protecte himself in case it all goes wrong this year which looks very likely.
The statement confirmed what many Arsenal fans thought and hoped wasn’t true; Wenger really does have a lot of control within the club and it shouldn’t be that way. The main focus for Le Boss should be solely on the football especially as that is where we are weakest at the moment but clearly we have learned nothing in the last ten years.
Stan Kroenke is the person that concerns me most at Arsenal. In all our history we have never had a shareholder or owner who has ever taken money from the club in the way that he did. Do Keswick and Lord Harris really believe we are going to buy into the ‘Strategic and advisory services’ nonsense and accept it as normal then they are wrong. The Glazers have taken many a payment out of Man United and we’ve all seen the damage done there. It seems that Kroenke wishes to use Arsenal in the same manner, all at the price of fans as it is our money they are taking.
If these ‘Strategic and advisory services’ are truth then why aren’t we allowed to see the breakdown of where this money has been spent especially as the ticket price increase is what has probably covered the loss of paying the money out to Kroenke.
Ivan Gazidis attempted to cover up the amount of money Arsenal have in the bank to spend, foolishly forgetting that the company’s finances are open to the public and we all know there is more than £20million to spend.
“I am afraid it (the cash reserve) is nowhere near the numbers quoted, which fuel some dissatisfaction,” he said.
“It is untrue to say the club is sitting on a huge cash-pile we are afraid to use.”
If this is true then where on earth where the figures of £220m plucked from a few months back…thin air I am imagining.
This AGM has not reduced any of the fans frustration in fact it has only increased how much we distrust the people that are ruining the great foundations our club has been built upon.
If Herbert Chapman was alive he would be spitting feathers at the sight of what his Arsenal had become, especially if he saw the football we were playing now. However I think he would be more bothered by the fact that we are moving further and further away from the ‘greatest football club’ vision that he once had, he would be so disappointed to see that we are a franchised business that sold out on their fans….for money.
