Arsene Wenger and Stan Kroenke are a dream ticket
ANR received many emails from readers when I suggested that the Arsenal board should bow out gracefully and sell the club to Stan Kroenke.
The arguments put forward by supporters were generally intelligent and persuasive.
However, I don't think many Gooners know much about Stan Kroenke, so I'm going to rectify that today.
Stan is not Satan. And he is not Malcolm Glazer either.
He is a college basketball player who became a real estate developer before he became a sports tycoon. He owns four teams in Colorado and is co-owner the St Louis Rams, an NFL outfit .
With his partner Charles Banks he has three wineries in California, and a home in Malibu, as well as one in his college town of Columbia, Missouri.He also has penthouse at the Pepsi Centre. where his NBA team the Denver Nuggests play and also his NHL team the Colorado Avalanche.The Colorado Rapids, his MLS soccer team., have their own new stadium in Commerce City near the airport.
Kroenke grew up in Mora, Missouri, where his parents had a hardware store and young Stan swept the floors and kept the books while he was at high school. He was a top scholar and a basketball player who scored 33 points in a game, a school record which stood for ten years. Mum and dad were baseball fans who named him after St Loius Cardinals stars Enos Slaughter and Stan Musial, so their son was called Enos Stanley Kroenke.
He says, "As I grew up I played baseball, basketball and ran track. I think, at their best, competitive sports teach many valuable lessons about life."
He worked at a student clothing store and later co-owned the business, which was profitable enough to pay his college bills.The store was sold in 1972 and he got his MBA in 1973. While on holiday in Aspen, Colorado, he met Ann, a nursing student, and they married in 1974. She is a daughter of the Waltons, founders of the Wal-Mart chain, and Stan learned a lot about business from Bud and Sam Walton, with whom he went hunting.
Kroenke says, "All of my mentors told me to find something I loved to do and try to be the best at it. I've been passionate about business, sports and real estate since a young age."
He went into real estate with Raul Walters, who had built some of the earliest Wal-Mart stores, and they developed more than 20 shopping malls, which usually included a Wal-Mart store, around the Midwest. He was on the board of Wal-Mart between 1995 and 2000.
Kroenke also developed apartments and malls with another partner, Jim Gordon, who recalled that Kroenke once said that, "deals are like driving fence posts - you have to hit the post over and over. The key is to stay with it every day."
Charles Banks and Kroenke own a hotel in Hawaii and are developing another in Mexico. Banks says "Stan is one of most intellectually curious people you'll come across. He's interested in a lot of things. He throws himself into it, and he fully understands every aspect of it. It's not micro-managing; it's micro-comprehension."
Most of this info was gleaned from A look inside Kroenke's empire, written by Greg Griffin and Robert Sanchez in the Denver Post on July 7.Consider these lines from the most comprehensive article I've read on the guy :
Friends say Kroenke is a voracious reader - Westerns, biographies and historical novels are favorites. He sometimes reads past midnight and rises by 6 a.m. to work out before breakfast. When in Denver he enjoys private workouts with Nuggets trainer Steve Hess.
He's fiercely dedicated to keeping healthy, forgoing breads and pasta for lean buffalo meat, fish and egg-white omelettes. One friend says Kroenke is so fit that his body-fat percentage is lower than most collegiate players who were taken in this year's National Basketball Association draft.
In business meetings, Kroenke takes an interested but quiet role and relies on his employees to thoroughly debate subjects before bringing issues to him for approval. During a meeting among Nuggets officials last winter, superstar guard Allen Iverson came up as a possible trade target. Kroenke had three words for his staff: "Go get him."
Stan is 59 and tall and slim and he's very focused on what he is doing. He is a detail man but also a big-picture guy. He got heavily involved with the architect when building the Rapids soccer stadium. He has four ranches in Wyoming, Montana and Canada, where he hunts and fishes with friends and business buddies. But he is very normal and sent both his kids to state schools.His son is an now an analyst with Lehman Brothers in New York.
Does Stan Kroenke remind you of anyone?
He reminds me of Arsene Wenger. I reckon the Yank and the Frenchman have a lot in common. In fact, they might be made for each other.
Together, could they could turn Arsenal into the Manchester United of the 21st century ?
Like everyone else I have reservations about a takeover but I simply don't believe that Stan Kroenke would do a £600 million deal for Arsenal and want to take £60 million out of the business in the first year.
His entire career, and his current activities, prove that he is a super-smart strategic businessman who thinks long-term, delegates, and forms productive partnerships.
He can see that football is the biggest sport in the world, and that London is the biggest city in Europe, and that the biggest football club in London is Arsenal, which now has the infrastructure to compete long-term with Milan, Manchester United and Barcelona.
He probably knows that Arsenal is the most expensive ticket in world football. He can see that Gooners are paying up to $180 a ticket to watch a mainly Under-23 team. He must wonder how long that can go on and whether 60,000 fans will still be coming if Arsenal finish fourth in 2008 and fourth in 2009.
If Stan Kroenke bought Arsenal he wouldn't do it in the same way as the Glazers and he could borrow money at more favourable interest rates. There are many types of deal and many ways to finance a deal.
Clearly, it would be insanity to sell the club to Arabs or Russians. So it has to be a Yank and Stan Kroenke, a low-profile, hands-off owner, is what Arsenal need.
Think of it this way : David Dein met Kroenke and realised that he could take Arsenal to the next level. Here was a guy with a vast knowledge-base, someone who knows which buttons to press.
Keith Edelman has met Kroenke at least twice and said nothing. If you were paying attention, and I'm sure most of you were, you may have noticed that after Edelman and Hill-Wood went to New York for that hotel meeting with Stan, Edelman said nothing. His silence spoke volumes. Edelman said nothing about the meeting, and
Kroenke, true to his reputation as the quiet billionaire, also said nothing.
Hill-Wood's comment was, "It went perfectly well. I hope we will be able to work with him in the future just as we would with any interested people."
It's obvious that Kroenke wants to meet Danny Fiszman and it's even more obvious that Fiszman wants to avoid such a tete-a-tete. Both men like to drive a hard bargain, I'm sure, but, unlike Fiszman, Kroenke is not under any pressure. He can afford to wait and say nothing and do nothing.
Soon after that New York meeting, Arsenal arranged for Matt Scott and David Bond, two broadsheet reporters, to be briefed off the record by Edelman. Their slightly different stories appeared on the same day. Matt Scott wrote in The Guardian that Danny Fiszman has said privately that he intended to keep his shares beyond next July. That is, after the agreed "lockdown" period in which the directors will not sell any shares.
In the Telegraph, David Bond said that relations between Arsenal and Kroenke were cooler than ever and that Kroenke had not signed the marketing agreement sent to him eight weeks ago, or bought the ITV's 50% of the broadband rights. Some weeks previous to that I heard that the Emirates Cup was going to be Boca Juniors, Colorado Rapids and one other team.
The AGM will be in October and so August and September are the run-up to the AGM and Arsenal will want to avoid controversial stories during that period. So Edelman will probably brief selected reporters and give them a line from time to time in the next 10 weeks. But he might not give them a quote.
In the meantime, questions for the AGM have to be submitted in writing and will be hand-picked by the club, as usual.
Everyone, including me, has doubts about foreign ownership and whether someone is a fit and proper person to own such important English institutions. But foreign owners are not the future, they are the present reality. It's future shock, it's already happened.
Manchester United is owned by Malcolm Glazer (Tampa Bay Buccaneers), Aston Villa was bought by Randy Lerner (Cleveland Browns), while Liverpool's new owners are George Gillett (Montreal Canadiens) and his partner Tom Hicks (Dallas Stars and Texas Rangers).
Those acquisitions have all happened in the last two years, followed Roman Abramovich's takeover of Chelsea in 2003.The Russian billionaire has since spent about £400 million on players and his bald minion Peter Kenyon apparently aims to make the club profitable by 2010.
For me, Arsene Wenger and Stan Kroenke look like a dream ticket.Let's hope they can work together sooner rather than later.
I guess it all depends on Danny Fiszman discovering an appetite for hitting fence posts.
Jul 17, 2007