‘Internal talks’ begin on Arsenal home revamp

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The Premier League team Arsenal F.C. may have placed a very respectable second last season but right now ‘the Gunners’ home venue – the Emirates Stadium in London (UK) – is only the fifth largest in the Premier League. Now, bosses at the North London football club have teased that that could be changing and talks have slowly begun on revamping the Arsenal home.

‘Time Out’ stated that the Emirates Stadium on Holloway Road in London (UK) has been Arsenal’s headquarter since 2006 and when it was first built it cost a mega £390 million. The ground’s current capacity is 60,000 but there’s been a surge in demand for tickets thanks to the team’s recent success.

The Arsenal Football Club, commonly known as simply Arsenal, is a professional football club based in Holloway, North London, England (UK). The club competes in the Premier League, the top tier of English football.

The Emirates Stadium (known as the Arsenal Stadium for the Union of European Football Associations [UEFA competitions]) is a football stadium in Holloway, London, England (UK). It has been the home stadium of the Arsenal Football Club since its completion in 2006. Arsenal’s women’s team (Arsenal Women Football Club) made the stadium their home in 2024. It has a current seated capacity of 60,704, making it one of the largest football stadiums in England by capacity.

London (UK)-based the Premier League is the highest level of the English football league system. Contested by 20 clubs, it operates on a system of promotion and relegation with the English Football League (EFL).

Nyon (Switzerland)-based the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) is one of six continental bodies of governance in association football. It governs football, futsal and beach football in Europe and the transcontinental countries of Turkey, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Kazakhstan, as well as the West Asian countries of Cyprus, Armenia and Israel. The UEFA consists of 55 national association members. Since 2022, due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the FIFA and UEFA suspended all Russian national teams and clubs from any FIFA and UEFA competitions.

‘Time Out’ further stated that it’s very early days and the bosses are pretty tight-lipped about the whole thing, but Josh Kroenke, Arsenal’s Co-Chair, revealed that there have been “internal discussions” about renovating the stadium.

Commented Kroenke, “It would be premature to talk about any plans in depth but the internal conversations are starting to occur about [the stadium]. It is not an easy renovation but we see the possibilities of what’s there.”

Repair work has already been done on the stadium’s roof and the giant screens inside the grounds have been replaced. What the next steps are for the home of ‘the Gunners’ is yet to be revealed but it’s certainly something the fans can get excited about.
 

Full-circle Moment

‘ESPN’ stated that the Arsenal Co-Chair Josh Kroenke is in a tent looking out over a field at the Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles (California, US) where the Arsenal Manager Mikel Arteta and the National Football League (NFL) team Los Angeles Rams Coach Sean McVay have just finished coaching 100 children at a community event.

Observed Kroenke, “Just seeing Mikel and Sean out there standing, talking with the kids around, it is kind of a full-circle moment that we have been building towards for a number of years. I’ve always preached that we need to figure out a way to get our different groups together because it is apples, oranges and watermelon but it’s all fruit to fruit.”
 

Ripe Spell

‘ESPN’ further stated that the Kroenke Sports & Entertainment (KSE), founded by Josh’s father, Stan, has enjoyed a ripe spell of late. It owns six professional teams and, in June 2023, the Denver Nuggets won their first National Basketball Association (NBA) championship in their 48-year history. It was KSE’s fourth title in 18 months after the Los Angeles Rams won the Super Bowl (the annual league championship game of the NFL) in 2021, the National Hockey League’s (NHL’s) Colorado Avalanche claimed the 2021-2022 Stanley Cup (the championship trophy awarded annually to the NHL playoff champion) and the Colorado Mammoth (a professional box lacrosse team) were crowned 2022 National Lacrosse League champions. Altogether, the KSE was valued by Forbes in January at $15.59 billion making it the world’s largest privately-held sports group.

The Kroenke Sports & Entertainment is an American sports and entertainment holding company based in Denver, Colorado, US. Originally known as the Kroenke Sports Enterprises, it was started in 1999 by businessman Stan Kroenke to be the parent company of his sports holdings.
 

Reaping Rewards

The Arsenal are beginning to reap the benefits having finished fifth in the 2021-2022 Premier League table before two second-place finishes in which they pushed their peer team the Manchester City F.C. in incrementally closer title races. (Their points total in those last two seasons, 89 and 84, would have been enough to win the league nearly any other season were it not for Pep Guardiola’s (Manchester City Manager) remarkable work at Man City. A steadfast belief in a transposable template is what enabled the KSE to navigate the mutinous atmosphere that for so long threatened to define its involvement with the Arsenal.
 

Growing Skepticism

The KSE’s 2007 decision to buy a minority stake in the club was viewed with skepticism among Arsenal’s fan base many questioning whether the US owners with no background in elite football could truly have the club’s best intentions at heart. That skepticism grew into widespread hostility over the next decade as Arsenal’s last Premier League title, back in 2004, increasingly felt like a bygone era.

The club’s 2014 Football Association (FA – the governing body of association football in England) Cup win belatedly ended a nine-year wait for a trophy but the Arsenal’s inability to challenge for bigger prizes led many supporters to feel that the then-Manager Arsène Wenger was not sufficiently held accountable for the expanding distance between former glories and present travails. The debt repayments linked to the move to the Emirates Stadium limited Arsenal’s transfer activity and sights were consequently lowered from challenging for the title to simply qualifying for the Champions League. Between the second-place finishes in 2015-2016 and 2022-2023, ‘the Gunners’ finished no higher than fifth and failed to even make it into the UEFA Champions League (an annual club association football competition contested by the top-division European clubs).

A reluctance to communicate with those disgruntled fans led Kroenke Senior to be monikered ‘Silent Stan’, and protests were held time and again – the supporters raging at what they believed was the dying of the light.
 

Holding Reins

The KSE eventually assumed full control in 2018 before the Arsenal controversially became one of the six English clubs to join the European Super League project in April 2021. It lasted barely 48 hours but the damage had been done. Fans revolted, with thousands attending yet another ‘Kroenke Out’ protest outside the club’s home ground. The other clubs involved in the doomed breakaway faced similar opprobrium but at Arsenal the hostility was exacerbated by stirring up all that longstanding ill-feeling.

First launched in 2021, the European Super League proposed a breakaway competition involving some of Europe’s biggest teams in a “closed shop” format. The controversial plans were met with fierce opposition from the fans and football’s governing bodies leading to its stunning collapse within days of being launched.

So, was there ever the temptation to sell even when those bids came in at what felt like the darkest hour?

Recalled Kroenke, “No, there was never really … offers this, offers that. My dad, our family are long-term investors, long-term holders. For me personally, I have been involved with the club for over 10 years now, around the board, and I really enjoy it and I love the club. I knew it would be very rewarding to get it back in a position to succeed and prove a few people wrong along the way. The real reward is when you enter the stadium, you feel the energy of what’s going on, that is the absolute payback of anything I could have ever imagined. My dad has given us the ability to invest back into the club in a way that maybe wasn’t done previously but he does that because he trusts the group of people that we have. We’re in this business because we’re competitive. It is a lot to process at times, but the only reason we’re here is because we’ve got a great group and we want to try to keep it together for as long as we can.”

Josh Kroenke said that the criticism of his family and the KSE “was not fun. But it is also a challenge and I really am a personality that likes to embrace challenges”.

He added, “There’s a certain amount of change that exists in an organization that is healthy. But if you go through too much change, it is very difficult to stay stable.”
 

COVID Curse

COVID hit all the clubs hard as matches were played behind closed doors in 2020 and the crowds were only gradually phased back in but ‘the Gunners’ were particularly vulnerable.
 

Old School of Thought

Football finance expert Kieran Maguire pointed out, “The Arsenal for many years were one of only two clubs regularly getting into the £100m a year bracket for matchday income. This often was 20 percent or more of the total revenue whereas the average in the Premier League is around 13 percent and for some clubs it is as low as four percent. It is also indicative of the club perhaps taking an old-fashioned attitude towards commercial income which allowed clubs such as Liverpool, the two Manchester clubs and also Chelsea to power ahead. This is an area the club needs to address.”

The KSE was widely criticized for announcing 55 redundancies as part of cost-cutting measures which included the man behind the club mascot Gunnersaurus while the scouting network was also radically cut back.

Continued Kroenke, “It is difficult to remember and underestimate how crazy the world was. On the back of that, we came out and I know for myself in particular, I got with some of our best supporter groups, got some feedback. As with any human being, if you feel like you’ve done something wrong or you’ve upset someone you raise your hand and say ‘How can we be better and can we work together?’ That’s what we did as a club in a major way and that requires a lot of humility, a lot of very direct communication that sometimes is tough because fans are coming at you with emotion but if they don’t have that emotion, they don’t have the same passion for the club that we need to keep things moving.”
 

Big Spending

After Arsenal’s mass clearout of players, big spending followed. Arsenal’s net spend in 2021-2022 is estimated at £94.8m. The following year was £187.4m, the year after £145.2m. Declan Rice (English professional footballer) was acquired for a club-record £105m in the Summer of 2023.

Arsenal amassed 89 points and had the best defensive record in the Premier League last season while also breaking a series of club records – 28 Premier League wins, 91 goals, the highest-ever goal difference (+62) – but still fell short as the Manchester City lifted the trophy for a fourth year in succession. ‘The Gunners’ also returned to the Champions League for the first time in seven years and made their first quarter final appearance since 2010 losing to the Bundesliga giants FC Bayern Munich (Germany) 3-2 on aggregate.

Surely, then, the KSE has answered the two big criticisms: That it lacks ambition and is unwilling to invest?

Remarked Kroenke, “The results that we’re having on the pitch obviously help but from the time that my father was able to purchase 100 percent of the club – and I know that came with its own criticism – that allowed us to enter a different phase of how we wanted to operate the club and operate it like we operate our teams over here. I just know this because we have experience winning with other teams, winning is not a linear process. Winning at the highest level is very difficult and putting a group together to go and win things and having a chance to win things year-in, year-out requires a lot of different elements. If you watch what ‘the Gunners’ have done in the last few years, we went from fifth to second, to second. You see that finishing fifth, it stung because we wanted that Champions League slot but that missed opportunity gave us all of a sudden more firepower and a mentality to come back. We were playing out of our minds that following year.”

He further stated, “We kind of ran out of gas. You could see that there was an element that we didn’t quite understand towards the end of that season the weight of everything and within our squad, we had a few injuries. But then last year, you saw us and I was wondering ‘this group might be ready for it’, but then we fall short. But I think this group is ready for the challenge and we’re going to keep adding some talent to it so we have a chance to get one spot higher and really give our fans something to celebrate.”

Explained Kroenke, “Our goal was always to compete for the Premier League title because if you look around the world, if you are competing for the title year-in, year-out, you are competing for everything else. What can our fans expect? Everything they’ve gotten in the last few years. We’re going to keep adding to the group. I know Mikel’s energy is through the roof in the best of ways. In our women’s team as well, you see how women’s sport is taking off around the world. We are really excited about that part of the business.”

Concluded Kroenke, “But as a club our main goal is to continue to make our supporters proud.”

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