I posted the following on your board the other day Brunel, and would be interested to hear your thoughts as (perhaps unsurprisingly) no-one responded at the time:
This is part of the reason I don't get the animosity amongst Arsenal fans towards Kronke. No, he isn't spending what the likes of City & United are spending, but if as you say your current starting XI cost £290m...to put that into perspective, and I don't say this to WUM, this is our strongest line up:
Lloris - £11m
Trippier - £3m
Toby - £10m
Jan - £11m
Rose - £1.5m
Sissoko - £30m
Winks - FREE
Son - £22m
Alli - £5m
Eriksen - £9m
Kane - FREE
Total: £102.5m
Kronke clearly sanctions regular expenditure. He also clearly sanctions regular wage increases, to the extent that Ozil now earns twice as much as Harry Kane does. Is it Kronke's fault his trust has been betrayed repeatedly by the poor judgement of your manager and his staff? By your own fans' admission, Kronke knows next to nothing about football and involves himself minimally in the on-field decisions. Did he know who Mustafi was before you pissed £30m up a wall on him? Mkhitariyan (sp)? Xhaka? Monreal? I highly doubt it. So why should he be blamed for others' mistakes? And, more to the point, why would he think that throwing even more of his own money at the problem will solve it?
I can understand your frustration but I and many other Spurs fans would be delighted if Levy suddenly raised our wage ceiling by 38% to match yours. We would be equally as delighted to spend another £180m on our first team. I don't see what else Kronke could have done other than be far less trusting of clearly incompetent managerial decisions during the Wenger era.
Kroenke isn't a big footballing man, but he gave the fiscal responsibilities to Ivan Gazidis and Wenger to make us a competitive side again. Kroenke put his trust in these men to build a competitive team and they failed. Kroenke didn't force Gazidis to give Ozil a £350k per week contract. He didn't force us to pay Sead Kolasinac £120k per week. He wasn't the one directly responsible for letting our players' contracts run down and lose them on a free. He wasn't responsible for us paying £70m for Xhaka and Mustafi (and then giving the former a contract extension
). So you are right in that, for all of the vitriol directed at Kroenke for not backing us a la Abramovich and Sheikh Mansour, we have done a damn good job of sabotaging ourselves even without him directly pouring money into the club.
Where I think Kroenke has failed, however - and this is where his nonchalance and general apathy towards English football has become a problem - is he didn't get rid of Gazidis and Wenger for their misdemeanours. He allowed them to continue in the same fashion, even after Wenger finished 5th in 2017 - his lowest league finish (at that time) during his tenure at the club.
We then gave Wenger a two-year contract extension and a £2m salary increase on the back of the 2017 FA Cup win, despite the board and the club KNOWING that this self-sustainable model is heavily dependent on Champions League football, which we had not achieved. It was a reward for failure.
This was all during a period where the toxicity and negativity around Arsenal had been magnified because there was just no faith in Wenger or the 'yes men' to deliver on their promises. We then went into the 2017 Summer transfer window in an even bigger mess and resorting to last minute deals on deadline day when we were in urgent need of reinforcements prior. Again, the anger and frustration was magnified, yet Kroenke was silent.
Above all else, if he was even slightly in touch with what had been happening at the club, he would have known that our own players were not happy with the coaching staff, that the club had practically become an autocracy with Wenger having and desiring absolute control/power of the club without wanting to be questioned, that anyone who dared to raise a single doubt to his methods was akin to committing treason...this culture of complacency from the top-down had manifested to a point where it was not conducive to a healthy environment for players or staff members. By the time we tried to make changes to this, it was too late.
Kroenke as owner was not proactive in this sense.
The other issue which many Arsenal fans have with Kroenke is his lack of communication. There is no clear strategy or direction for what he wants to do with the club apart from the usual soundbites of "I want to win leagues and Champions Leagues". Which is great to hear, but how are you going to achieve that? What exactly is your plan for the club? If he had developed a healthier relationship with the fanbase, we wouldn't be on his case as much. But as it is, it is hard to identify his intentions.
What I will say is this is the first Summer where Kroenke will have 100% ownership of the club, whereas before, there was a tussle for power and internal politics between Kroenke and Usmanov. Now that he has complete control, he will be scrutinised much more. This upcoming transfer window will tell us whether he truly wants Arsenal to be a force to be reckoned with or whether he is happy to keep things as they are and rely on the manager to overachieve with limited scope for improvement.
The player it's given to seems absolutely mystified. Nearly as bad as the actual penalty.
