Arsenal owner Stan Kroenke pledges backing for manager Arsene Wenger and vows to keep control of club

Stan Kroenke, the Arsenal owner Stan Kroenke, has given his first joint interview with son Josh to Telegraph Sport Credit:  Getty Images

• Jeremy Wilson, Deputy Football Correspondent

25 October 2017 • 10:30pm

Stan and Josh Kroenke have outlined a vision for Arsenal to extend over generations of their family and reaffirmed their emphatic support for Arsene Wenger by explaining why they took the “harder” decision to extend his contract.
Ahead of Thursday’s annual general meeting at the Emirates, father and son sat down together for almost two hours for their first joint interview since Stan became majority shareholder in 2011 and Josh became a director two years later.

In it, they:

• Rejected suggestions that they were in football for the money and vowed not to sell.
• Described Wenger as more focussed than ever.
• Explained how winning both the Premier League and Champions League was feasible.
• Promised to protect Arsenal’s traditions and history.
• Outlined a determination to keep Alexis Sanchez and Mesut Ozil.
• Described “rabid” and “wonderful” fans as both the best and worst thing about owning a sports team.

The Kroenkes will on Thursday face shareholders after a rollercoaster year that has encompassed heated fan unrest, fevered debate about Wenger’s ongoing position as manager and the future of key players but also an unprecedented 13th FA Cup win and a new club record signing in Alexandre Lacazette. One rumour that they would like to squash is that the family’s 67 per cent shareholding is attainable. A £1 billion bid from Alisher Usmanov, who himself owns 30 per cent, was immediately rejected earlier this year and it is understood that there have been no further offers since. “Just go look at our history,” said Kroenke Snr. “We get into these things to try to grow them .You don’t see us selling things. You just don’t. We are committed long-term.”

Asked if there was “ever” any chance of him considering an offer, he replied: “No. Absolutely not. That’s just not our model.” Kroenke is now 70, long established among the richest billionaires in the world and, as he further weighed up the question, there was a shake of his head. “I’m at a stage in life where…what good does that do? I love Arsenal, love being involved with Arsenal. There no finer feeling than going out and winning like we did with the FA Cup.
“That whole afternoon and evening, we talked about what happened on the pitch. Wonderful. The feeling is contagious and it makes you want to keep doing it. There’s so many easier ways to make money, I can assure you.Much, much easier.”

Josh Kroenke (left) watches his basketball team, the Denver Nuggets, with father Stan, but football, he says, is their ‘first love’ Credit: Getty Images

Kroenke Jnr, who is 37, runs the family’s Denver Nuggets basketball and Colorado Avalanche ice-hockey teams but describes “soccer” as his “first love” in sport. “My body type became more a basketball player unless I was going to be a goalkeeper or centre-back,” he says. And could Josh see Arsenal remaining “through the generations” of the Kroenke family? “Without a doubt,” he said.
The big overarching decision of the past 12 months clearly related to Wenger. A solid start to last season was followed by a dreadful sequence of results between January and March but the campaign did then end with 10 wins in 11 and an all-time record seventh FA Cup win for the manager. The Kroenkes are confident that his new two-year contract was ultimately vindicated.

“When you make decisions like that you are weighing lots of different factors but you hope that you weigh them correctly and come out with the right decision – I think we did,” says Kroenke Snr. He then refers to Sean McVay, his new 31-year-old the head coach of the Los Angeles Rams American football team, and draws comparison to Wenger and his obsessive work ethic. “He’ll win a big game and see the imperfections – when you have someone with that passion the whole organisation benefits and the players buy into it in a different way,” he says.

We have dealt with this a lot and we believe Arsene is doing a great job and is the right guy

“It’s easy to change coaches and people do it all the time.” So how did he as owner approach the difficult period last year? “With clear-headedness, calmness, thinking for the long term rather than the short-term. An easy answer is to do something. It’s harder not to do something. We have dealt with this a lot in different organisations and we just think that Arsene is doing a great job and he’s the right guy.
“Both sides have to get comfortable as they move forward, not just us. I’m sure he was thinking through if he wants to go on. We have a lot of respect for Arsene – we are not going to be pushy about things. I think he treated us with respect as well.”

And does he sense any change in Wenger after almost a decade now around the club? “I think he is more focussed than ever. Focussed on winning. I really think I do see that.” Kroenke also believes that Wenger’s record should not be easily underestimated, even during the second part of his tenure as Arsenal. “The hardest thing is to replicate success and remain competitive,” he says. “Look, we want to be champions of everything.
“Premier League, Champions League. We have to do better but don’t sell short the FA Cup and Arsene’s record setting and consistency through 20 years.
“For 20 years we were in the top four, no other English club has done that and the year we fell out we had four more points than the previous year when we were second.”

Kroenke has vowed to stick with manager Arsene Wenger Credit: GETTY IMAGES

Kroenke Jnr felt that Wenger’s importance was crystalised in how he salvaged the final months of the season. “Coming down the stretch, when there was an extreme amount of adversity from an external standpoint, on the players, on the club, on Arsene, the group came together and really rallied, not only for themselves but for Arsene,” he said. “I think it speaks volumes as to who he is as a manager and a person. Something I've learnt from my dad is that it’s important to take the emotion out of decisions because if you are making decisions with emotion then they can come back to haunt you. I think three out of four FA Cups is pretty darn good.”

That pressure and tension will inevitably be evident to some extent at Thursday’s AGM, where the Arsenal Supporters’ Trust will call for boardroom change and vote against the re-election to the board of Kroenke Jnr and chairman Sir Chips Keswick.
It will be a symbolic gesture and the Kroenkes evidently do not feel that the ‘Silent Stan’ characterisation of their ownership style is fair. They attend the yearly AGM and this is the fourth interview time that Kroenke has been interviewed by The Telegraph. More interaction between supporters and owners would be welcome at every leading club but their accessibility has compared favourably to their counterparts at Manchester United, Manchester City, Tottenham Hotspur or Chelsea. “Sports fans are wonderful,” says Kroenke Snr. “They are rabid. That’s the good news. They are rabid.
“That’s the bad news. They are passionate, always have opinions and they are certainly entitled to them. The only part I worry about is how it affects the players and the coaching staff. It can have a deleterious effect on that group and that’s the last group you want it to have a bad effect upon.
“There’s going to be a percentage that really don’t like you. Thankfully, most people are in the middle. I run into fans all of the time, they are always interested in the club and I love chatting to them. I can be in the mountains in the summer and someone can come up to me and they will say: ‘Do you think you will get a striker signed?’”

Premier League, Champions League. We have to do better, but don’t sell short the FA Cup and Arsene’s record-setting

When Kroenke Jnr says that “we as fans feel that range of emotions as well”, his dad interjects.

“We might feel the same way,” he says. The frustrations of fans most obviously focus on the now 13 year gap since the club’s last Premier League title. With the Kroenkes evidently still committed to the self-sustaining ownership model, they believe that can be achieved through finding best-practice off the pitch, a £40 million investment in training facilities, growing commercial revenues and upholding the basic traditions and values of the club under Wenger. “We have done a lot of things and will continue to,” says Kroenke Snr.
“We have doubled our people on the football operation side. On analytics, we have a central office, with really sharp PhD types watching the rest of the analytics trying to make sure we are creating best practices. We are building new ways of looking at things that we think will get us better.”

So is this what Ivan Gazidis meant when he talked about this summer being a ‘catalyst for change’? “Yes, we have added (first team coach] Jens Lehmann, (director of high performance) Darren Burgess but just doubling the football staff doesn’t make it better. We think we are making it better and, as we identify areas that need help, we go get the help.

“It’s about the ability to be efficient and spend it in the best way to make your club the best.
“Yes, I think it’s a big responsibility but I also think it’s an even bigger opportunity and that’s the really exciting part. Arsenal is a great club – it’s been here for 130 years. It will be here a 130 years from now and still be a great club. Our job is to do everything we can to keep it that way and push to make it even better.”

Culled from Telegraph