Supporting Arsenal

I don't enjoy the way we play, I don't like the way we are managed and I don't like the way we are run. It is frustrating to support this club.

I don't like our transfer policy, I openly don't like some of our players (parasites), don't like that we're tactically inept, don't like the way our legendary and most successful manager ever has fallen from grace and that he now accepts 2nd best as good enough or even a trophy. Immensely frustrating to see all of this and that going on and yet absolutely nothing gets done about it.

I know we are in a better position than most clubs, but it seems like we've been in slow decline for years.
Slowly all the world class players leave and aren't replaced, our quality of play goes down, our manager seems more and more deluded, but Kroenke is making money.
I'd like to know where the future lies, and I guess there is Jack and the new"core of British players", but I can't get really excited about that at the moment.

Michael Schatzky wrote:I don't enjoy the way we play, I don't like the way we are managed and I don't like the way we are run. It is frustrating to support this club.

This pretty much sums it up. The worse thing is that I can't see anything changing in the foreseeable future.

Maybe it's just that I'm biased but I do believe we have quality players, especially our first eleven and certainly better than Spurs. We could be up there competing if the team and our resources were managed more efficiently. But it's just the same nonsense season after season. That's where the frustration comes in. We've gotten used to seeing the same shit happen all the time, with a manager who's pretty much become a parody of himself, who makes some bizzare and nonsensical statements and decisions.

I could accept most of this if I felt that this was the extent of our capibilities. I believe we're capable of more though, and it hurts so bad to see us fall so far behind when you think about where we where a few seasons back.

Won't be finishing in the top 4 if we keep this up - certainly don't deserve to.

Don't worry, Kroenke won't mind as long as he is making a profit. Though it will become harder to sustain a profit with a "business" whose product isn't as good as it used to be and doesn't compare favourably with the competition either. From a business perspective, he will be selling off his share while he can still make a profit on the sale (of shares). I don't see him investing in the team or replacing Wenger either.

http://angryofislington.com/2012/11/20/if-stan-kroenke-sells-arsenal-how-much-is-his-profit/

"If Stan Kroenke Sells Arsenal, How Much Is His Profit?
Posted on November 20, 2012
A lot of people say to me, ‘Phil, if Stan Kroenke sold his Arsenal shares now how much profit would he make?’ And I’ve never worked it out so I say, ‘I don’t know, but off the top of my head I’d guess maybe £300m.’

This has been my standard guess for a while, so I thought it was about time I tried to work it out. It’s difficult to be exact because I don’t know how much Stan paid for every share he’s bought, as he spent quite a while buying relatively small numbers on the open market. I know where he started though: he paid ITV £65m for 9.9 per cent of Arsenal plus half of Arsenal Broadband. The split announced for this was £42.3m for the shares and £22.7m for half of Arsenal Broadband, which is slightly odd when you consider these facts:

Arsenal Broadband had never (and still hasn’t) made a profit – so why was it apparently worth £45m?
9.9 per cent of Arsenal is about 6,220 shares; £42.3m for 6,220 shares is about £6,800 per share; the going market rate for an Arsenal share at the time was about £8,500.
Is that the smell of dodgy accounting? Can’t be, can it?

So officially that’s £42.3m spent so far, but on market rate it’s about £53m.

After that Stan bought many smallish blocks of shares, anything up to a couple of hundred at a time, at prices ranging from £6,750 to £9,000 each. I can’t account for all of these individually, but I know from various points what his total was at the time and I know the prevailing market price at any time, so I can make reasonable estimates of his expenditure. The ones I can’t easily trace come to about five per cent of his total purchases.

On the big blocks, he bought 5,000 shares from Danny Fiszman at £8,500, then 2,720 from the Carr family at the same price and a further 2,119 from the Carrs at £10,500.

The last and biggest purchase was at the time of his general offer, when he bought Danny F’s remaining shares, Lady Nina’s shares and others from small shareholders. These totalled around 22,900 shares at £11,750 each, taking his shareholding from just under 30% to 66.8%.

Add all this together and my estimate of the Stan’s total expenditure on Arsenal shares is:

£422 million.

Or £433 million if you add in the extra ten or eleven that he would have paid for the shares he got when he got his 50% of Arsenal Broadband, if he’d bought them for market price. I’ll stick with the dodgy official valuation of Arsenal Broadband for the rest of this, though.

So how much would Stan make if he sold up? Well the multi-million dollar question is, how much is someone going to give him? (The other multi-million dollar question is would he sell at all?)

Alisher Usmanov still insists he isn’t paying more than £14,000 per share, so if that’s his maximum and that’s what he pays Stan, then Stan gets £582m, or a profit of £160m.

Stan has 41,581 shares, so for every thousand pounds his selling price rises, he pockets another £41.5m. Thus his potential profit looks like this:

Share price of £14k – Profit £160m
£15k – £202m
£16k – £243m
£17k – £285m
£18k – £326m
£19k – £368m
£20k – £409m
So my standard guess of £300m was actually pretty good based on current market price. However, current market price is not necessarily a good indicator of what a serious buyer is prepared to pay.

There are two other factors to take into account. No doubt there will be a few million of miscellaneous expenses, but that won’t affect things too much. Of a bit more concern to Stan will be the dollar/pound exchange rate. In the last five years it’s varied between $1.39 and $2.06 to the pound, though has been reasonably stable in the $1.55 to $1.65 range for the last two and a half years. Unless that changes dramatically it’s not going to have a huge effect either."

Highest price an Arsenal share has sold for - GBP 16,500. So approximately at GBP 260 million profit for Kroenke on a GBP 420 investment. Not bad at all.

Usmanov allegedly ready to pay GBP 14,000 per share. That means a profit of GBP 160 million for Kroenke.

So how does Usmanov, the 2nd richest man in UK, make money if he buys into Arsenal?

Personally I feel if he buys in at a time when Kroenke is willing to sell ie the team are out of CL, which could be as soon as end of this season - Usmanov would then have to invest a further neat little sum of money to get the club back into the top 4 / challenging for trophies to be able to realise the full economic potential of the global Arsenal brand should he should to cash in with an IPO.

Does any of this mean that this club is no longer about football anymore and just the greed of a couple of very rich men?

If that is the case - it just goes to show how the club has been a victim of its own success, attracting these people to "invest" in the club in the first place.

In that respect, clubs like Chelsea, Manchester City, PSG and Malaga have been "better off" just being the playthings of very wealthy owners.

(Not sure about the Malaga story to be honest but there are also a couple of Russian clubs who are enjoying similar "success" I believe).

Highest price paid for an Arsenal share, from what I could find online so far, GBP 17,250 (August 2012).

That means a profit of over GBP 285 million for Kroenke should he choose to sell now.

ROI of over 65%!!

I'm just waiting for some sheikh to offer a ridiculous sum of money for control of the club so that Kroenke can fuck off and something will be done about this club's decline.

Desperate times. Very reasonable posters above quite upset with the club and questioning how much they currently enjoy supporting the club. And very reasonable posters preferring we were the play things of a billionaire.

The whole billionaire owning clubs thing is still relatively new. Jack Walker did it with Blackburn. Especially foreign billionaires is even newer. We don't have good examples of what can happen in the long run. Leave the club with crippling debts which sees the end of the club?

I hope this is just a low point and there are good times ahead.

Jonathan Prendergast wrote:Desperate times. Very reasonable posters above quite upset with the club and questioning how much they currently enjoy supporting the club. And very reasonable posters preferring we were the play things of a billionaire.

The whole billionaire owning clubs thing is still relatively new. Jack Walker did it with Blackburn. Especially foreign billionaires is even newer. We don't have good examples of what can happen in the long run. Leave the club with crippling debts which sees the end of the club?

I hope this is just a low point and there are good times ahead.

I know I'm overreacting about the whole billionaire thing, but we're all very frustrated right now I suppose. With Wenger seemingly unable/unwilling to make any purchases and the way we've been playing this season, it's hard to stay upbeat. We are a very responsibly run club, financially speaking, and this will do us good in the long run. But our current situation is hard to swallow, and I don't blame anyone for being upset with the club. But hopefully this is the dark before the dawn. Hopefully something ipositive will happen, and we'll be a strong club again.

Why I want Wenger out. Not saying I blame him for yesterday's loss, but Vermaelen's "closing down" of Milner was ridiculous for their first goal. Koscielny's stupid penalty and red. What I want to say is that even if we get Baresi, Maldini, Nesta, and Cannavaro all in their prime, we'd still concede those totally avoidable goals under Wenger's management. My dog was able to see at the start of this season that we were one injury for Arteta away from disaster, look at the timing of his injury and our fixtures. Wenger can give Gervinho, Squillaci, Chamakh, Bendtner 50K a week but can't give RvP 150? Give those fuckers 10, and give your class players what they deserve. Ferguson pays the extra 1-2m for players he wants, we lose out on players we desperately need for 1-2m (Alonso-Reina). As an engineer, if I want a fucking truck that costs 400000 now and 350000 3 months later, I can't wait that long, I pay the 400000. Why? Because I'd be losing so much work during those 3 months which will cost the company a lot more than that 50000 difference. He says he wants to find top quality and people who are better than what he has, anyone is better than Gervinho. He uses money as a stupid excuse for not winning trophies, but losing a final to Birmingham, or a game against Bradford with your strongest XI, and not playing Arshavin when he was in red hot form in the 2009 FA Cup semi final against Chelsea, has nothing to do with money.

one of the main problems with having stan onboard is a willing to at least stand and take note of what is happening at least to his investment...
we are at a very bad point in time..the team is obviously in need of a huge pick me up..the transfer window is open and there seams no movement what so ever...starting the season by selling our best player to a main rival,ok we seam to be run right..oh so we are being told so...but lets face facts our club is nothing more than a huge money making machine at the moment..business first and football second...all the calls for wenger out make no logical ideals what so ever...if anybody needs to go its stan and most of those upstairs...
usmanov..would have and should have been the logical choice to have on the board..stan has done nothing for us..and yet usmanov has constantly spoke out about the welfare of our club and what is need to help put it right...in this day and age of sugar daddies and the like we need every bit of help we can get right now...its sad to see us 6 points off spurs yet again..no lessons learnt from last time around.....

2 steps forward...5 steps back....

god help if we dont at least hit a CL spot...its looking like year 8 and nothing and still no change for the good....

The worst part of all this malarkey is at the start of the season I truly believed we had a squad good enough to challenge for trophies. And to add to it, almost all our troubles can be attributed to Wenger and Wenger alone.

i knew from the start and adding after robin being shipped out finishing anywhere higher if not 4th would be a monumental task...and not adding players and in our current state....its looking like a no chance situation!!!

our next 3 league games

chelsea
west ham
liverpool....

hard to find points there...