Arsènal (32 page)

In fairness though the club had offered to draft in a replacement under the guise of ‘director of football' during the summer after Dein's exit. “David used to do that before he left us,” Friar said (Dein would represent the manager, often relieving him of the travel, trials and tribulations invariably involved in transfer deals). He went on to explain how things worked subsequently. “When he left I was asked by the board if I would take on that role, which I did. Arsène would identify the player – and that always has to be the way. The manager has got to identify the player. Depending on who he was and where the player is etc, generally speaking, either Arsène or I would make a call. It's horses for courses. If the club was Blackburn Rovers or Manchester United it would be me that made the call. If it was Lyon or a team that he knows the people there, he would make that call. Then the appointment would be made, and they would come in. Generally speaking, the meeting would take place at London Colney and there would be Arsène and myself and the manager or chairman of the other club getting things moving. Sometimes it involved more than one meeting. Once we've got the terms agreed in principle, then we get the player and the agent and it might mean us going abroad, which we've done, or them coming here.” (Both Gilles Grimandi, Wenger's top man in France, and Nicky Hammond, who occupied the position at Reading, were mooted for the role of director of football. It seems that Grimandi was reluctant to commit himself as a result of the uncertainty of Wenger's own long-term future. And so the situation was allowed to drift.)

“Arsène takes too much on himself,” a friend opined to David Dein.

“As I said at the time when I left,” Dein responded, “the landscape is changing. Manchester City, Aston Villa, Everton and Tottenham are not going to stand still, to say nothing of Manchester United, Chelsea and Liverpool and with the tax situation changes, costs are just going to get higher as players' salaries will not go down.”

“So you're repeating your mantra,” said his friend, “to get a winning team, you need more money and lots of it? But Arsène wouldn't spend the money even if he had it.”

“He's never had the luxury,” Dein replied and questioning the board's ambition asked, “Is it strong enough to compete with the likes of Barcelona and Milan? Compared to Manchester United, we [Arsenal] are in the Stone Age. Have they [the directors] ever said, ‘Arsène, don't have a conscience over the cost. We've gone past that stage now. We've got to be brave and bold in the market. Just tell us, how much do you need to win the Champions League?'”

Maybe not, but evolution if not revolution was definitely the direction the Board wanted to follow.

The antiquated fixtures and fittings of the boardroom at the old Highbury Stadium may have been moved piece by piece a few hundred yards west to the Highbury House building (including the 1970s green leather chairs in the boardroom which look
passé
in contrast to Ken Friar's wonderful historic desk handed down from Herbert Chapman through successive managers and club secretaries) yet the relocated boardroom could have usefully employed a more contemporary item, namely a revolving door. Since the move, three directors have been effectively booted out, with Richard Carr demoted, to be replaced by the end of 2008 with two fresh faces from the USA.

The idea that the board would eventually view an American billionaire as a potential bedrock of the club must have seemed a very fanciful notion in the summer of 2007, but with Alisher Usmanov a constant presence, Stan Kroenke gradually came to represent a much safer option. His approval rating was also helped by an endorsement from the Arsenal Supporters' Trust, who held meetings with Kroenke and his key men in both London and Denver, as part of their objective to maintain relations with all of the club's major shareholders in their mission to influence its ownership and governance. Even so, it was a surprise when Kroenke mingled with members of the Trust at their 2008 Christmas drinks gathering in the stadium's Diamond Club. The function was arranged for the same day as a board meeting, to encourage directors to come along. Even so, few anticipated Kroenke would be in the country to attend the meeting, never mind the social gathering held by the Trust, which he did in the company of Danny Fiszman.

It was soon apparent that the two men had formed a good relationship (though Fiszman the consummate professional had concealed his estrangement from David Dein for some time, putting on a show of corporate unity in public which even fooled some of his colleagues). If Fiszman, in keeping with his reserved nature, was slightly guarded, Kroenke was open and effusive. The appointment of the club's new CEO Ivan Gazidis, previously Deputy Commissioner of MLS, had recently been announced. Gazidis would start work in the New Year, and there was a strong belief that Kroenke had been instrumental in bringing him to the club. “I had nothing to do with it,” he told his Trust inquisitors as he supped a beer, “If my fellow team owners [in the USA] thought that they'd be very upset with me, but he [Gazidis] is a good man.” And Gazidis himself confirmed the correct protocol had been observed. “Stan Kroenke was not involved in my appointment to this job,” he corroborated. “I was very specific that I didn't want him informed until the decision was made.” A fortunate coincidence, then, given Kroenke's divided loyalties and the high regard with which Gazidis was held back in the States.

The man who took the job was born in South Africa (unlike Danny Fiszman who is often categorised erroneously as South African by the media, when in fact he spent his early years in Antwerp before growing up in Willesden Green in north London where he learnt to love Arsenal) and raised in England. He played football competently enough to gain a blue for Oxford University as a right winger (“I had speed and very little else,” he claims) and even played at Wembley Stadium in the Varsity Match against Cambridge in the mid-1980s. He qualified as a lawyer, and worked for a couple of years in the USA before he was headhunted for a job to help develop a fledgling league born in the aftermath of the 1994 World Cup. The first Arsenal match he attended after the announcement of his appointment was the 1-0 home victory over Wigan in December 2008, a sterile encounter best remembered for substitute Emmanuel Eboue being booed off, his performance so dire he had to be substituted himself. A month later after a similarly insipid 1-0 victory against Bolton (who, according to their chairman, came “expecting to get beaten by 2 or 3-0 and were pleasantly surprised to get within 15 minutes of the end at 0-0”), when it was suggested to Ivan Gazidis that things were sticky on and off the field, he discounted the notion. “I'm certain that's not the case,” he told a guest in the boardroom, “otherwise I wouldn't be here.”

Unlike his predecessor, Keith Edelman, Gazidis was someone who could be termed a football man as well as a businessman. Peter Hill-Wood admitted it was important to start looking to the future in the boardroom: “He [Gazidis] is 45 years old, the younger generation – which is better than being 70-something years old. We are looking to recruit younger people at the top.” But there was so much more than his age that must have commended Gazidis. “In October I was approached by the Arsenal board and asked if I would be interested in this position,” he recalled. “The moment I realised that this was a real possibility something just took over me, and I knew it would be a once-in-a-lifetime chance. It was a purely emotional decision and not a rational decision at all. The decision was driven by the fact that I love watching Arsenal play. There is something about the purity of the way that Arsenal try to play the game that appealed to me. There is something about this club. It's a set of values, traditions, continuity, excellence but not just looking backwards, also a real vision for the future.” Straight away he got to grips with the key issues. “Our fundamental questions are: Are we operating as efficiently and as well as we can? Are we choosing the right players? Are we spending the money in the right way? Are we generating as much money as we can as a business to fund our player acquisitions? And within those parameters you can have a very interesting debate about whether we are being as efficient as possible. This club operates on the self-sustaining model.”

With Gazidis's experience of marketing in Major League Soccer, he should undoubtedly add something to the club's commercial operation, an area that badly needs some attention, as Hill-Wood conceded. “On the commercial side we're lacking and we've got a lot of catching up to do with Manchester United, Barcelona, Real, even Liverpool and maybe Chelsea. There is a lot that we can develop and a lot of things which are probably alien to my background but I'm hopefully realistic enough to realise that I'm going to have to forget that we're not a little old football club in north London. Ivan's going to help develop the club in every aspect of our business, which is now much more than a football club, it's all the commercial activities. It's a big brand.” And it needs a different calibre of person to service it. “I'm just looking for very, very smart people,” says Gazidis, “who are able to help in the development of a business plan, a strategic plan for how we manage our playing pool amongst other things. There aren't many clubs that have a fully developed business plan.”

Gazidis subsequently detailed his way of working. “I'm very systematic in the way that I do things,” he explained. “My focus over the first five months has been one of evaluation. Less on communication of vision, direction and plans so far, more focused on the needs of the club where the club can benefit from additions and adjustments. The focus has been relatively small and inward looking, [about] the changes we need to go through as an organisation so that we can take the next step. And the next step is the big step we have to take, which is to move beyond the Emirates and look at where the club is really going over the next five to ten years and deeply understand which strategies we are going to be adopting and which steps need to be taken in order for those strategies to be successful. To do that requires us to take a little bit of a step back from some of the activity that we're involved in and to come up with a business plan for the club.”

The CEO was certainly aware of the crucial importance of the paying public (who were taken for granted by some of his peers who had been around much longer) and readily met with the various supporters' groups within a few weeks of his arrival – the Arsenal Supporters' Trust, REDaction (a pressure group formed to improve the atmosphere at matches) and the Arsenal Independent Supporters' Association. He immediately tuned into their language. In his very first interview, he talked about the role of the board in terms of its custodianship of the club – using the kind of terminology that could have been scripted for him by the Supporters' Trust. “I do think the fan/club relationship is key,” he emphasised later. “I think that fans have the right to express their opinions in the stadium. Obviously as a club you hope it's supportive and I do think in general fans understand, particularly with a group of young players who we have right now and that if they've got fragile confidence, maybe you're exacer bating the problem rather than helping it by expressing dissatisfaction. Nevertheless, I also accept that fans will feel at some point that this is where they exercise their voice and that's absolutely right.”

He apparently took heed of critical comments regarding the lack of Arsenal identity at the stadium – something both Keith Edelman and Ken Friar had promised to do something about with little to show in the way of change except for the decoration of a concrete ring between the upper tier and the executive boxes which celebrated the years of the club's trophy wins. “One of the things I'd really like to do,” Gazidis said, “is to move away from the architectural vision that we have of our stadium. I think in terms of what it is, it can be more Arsenal. It can be made more into a home. I don't think it will ever be Highbury, you can't recapture that history, but I do think it can become its own place and its own home.” Asked whether the selling of the naming rights made this process more difficult, he replied diplomatically, “I'm very happy with Emirates as a sponsor.”

Hitherto, it had only been the nagging of Antony Spencer, the land agent who found Arsenal the site for their new home, that pressured the board on ‘Arsenalisation'. Disappointed that the stadium was going to carry a sponsor's name, Spencer at least achieved a small concession and ensured a link remained with the historic home, albeit in the name of the company office block, Highbury House. Danny Fiszman on the other hand had wanted to create a completely new era, his focus on the present and the future. Spencer recalled, “He was adamant that the old clock from the Clock End at Highbury was not going to be sited anywhere inside the new stadium.” Finally, after some fan representation, it was mounted on the rear of one of the scoreboards and is visible from the approach along the south, or ‘Clock End' bridge. But inside there was very little – a photograph or two – to suggest the team had ever played at Highbury. Even the naming of the sections of the grounds broke from the obvious nomenclature. No longer did fans enter the East, West, North or South sides of the stadium, but different quadrants. Using colour coding to facilitate different access routes to the Emirates, most ignore it and arrive via Gillespie Road much as they did when attending matches at Highbury.

Peter Hill-Wood explained the reason for the need to bring in a different type of personality at the helm. “Keith [Edelman] did a very good job for us, but to take us forward in the future he wasn't necessarily the right person,” he reflected. “It was the decision of the board collectively. Not me personally, we basically all agreed in the end, but I supported Keith as much as anybody. But we felt we needed a change. He'd done a good job and it was time for him to move on.” The club offered him a seven-figure retainer for ‘consultancy work' for a year after his departure, although the former managing director has not been spotted at the club since the day he collected his personal effects, giving rise to some fanciful conspiracy theories.