The protests are great, but Arsenal won’t be sold so easily. by Konstantin Mitov
Welcome Lovely Arsenal people. Lots of events have happened around Arsenal, mostly for the wrong reasons, but after spending a few days in Zagreb and seeing the Dynamo fan store and remembering how Spurs were dumped out, than seeing them lose the Carabao cup final, my footballing mood has slightly improved.
The news that Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek showed interest in buying Arsenal are good, but the rumours of an incoming bid sound more like click bait than anything else. Valued at around 3.4 billion pounds, he will need partners to prepare a bid that has any chance to intrigue the Kroenkes. And it’s not like Usmanov didn’t try to buy the club before selling his share, and Dangote who is valued almost triple of what Ek is has also expressed desire to buy the club, but unless 2 billion pounds are coughed up, you shouldn’t be holding too much hope.
On that fan forum where Josh Kroenke spoke, he said the KSE have no intentions of selling Arsenal and that’s probably the only true thing he said. You shouldn’t trust one word coming out of the Kroenke family. They’ve moved teams in the US, after saying they won’t do it, and when money is around the corner, they’ll do anything. The super league was an attempt to make money the easy way and Stan was supposed to be a vice-chairman of that competition. We weren’t there so we don’t miss out, we were a driving force.
There was a protest with people numbered in the thousands before the Everton game and if that continues something may be achieved. This season has been atrocious and the super league fiasco doesn’t help. If fans were at the stadium for games, it would’ve very easily gotten toxic.
We’ve lost 13 games already. In Emery’s first season we amounted to 70 points and lost 10 games, finished with a GD of +22 just a point short of 4th spot, we played in the Europa League final and that was deemed not good enough for us, and Emery was sacked.
Ironically we’re once again in the semis of the EL playing a team managed by our former manager. Imagine the hypocrisy of the situation where our entire season lies on winning Europe’s second tier competition to enter the Champions league which a week ago we tried to leave, so that we can play a “super” league where we don’t need to qualify, but we’ll get an insane amount of money. That would’ve sentenced us to complete mediocrity and achieve Kroenke’s dream.
Now it’s a bit more different, because finally most of the fans have a bullseye on his back and a dart in their hand. I do not rule out a possible attempt to buy out of this situation by spending some money for once in the summer.
This would actually be a very welcome improvement on the footballing side, but again, I don’t trust the Kroenkes and hardly see them dropping 150 million on new players, which is the absolute minimum considering we need a goalkeeper, a new RB, a backup LB, a midfielder next to Partey, a creative number 10 (if we don’t sign Odegaard) and a new striker.
As much as I want to see Arteta gone yesterday, he’ll likely be here no matter of the results in the Europa League and if that is the case, they better back him big. Nevertheless the Europa League still means something to us fans. It’s only for the fans! It’s the only thing left that can put some pride and justification for why we stick our necks out for this football club. Hopefully the players and Arteta realize that and put a solid performances. As dead as we have been, it’s just a total of 3 games where we need to be good. It’s possible, they won’t be in a row, so as bad as we have been, we still have a chance to salvage something.
What we shouldn’t do it use it as cover. The EL doesn’t undo the damage off the pitch, nor our league position.
Konstantin