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Stan Kroenke has purchased even more shares in Arsenal today taking his holding to 29.9% of the club. With only another 0.09% required to reach the threshold to make an offer for the rest of the clubs shares, Kroenke has purchased 627 shares this week for the princely sum of £5.3 million. The oddest part of the share purchasing is that 100 of the shares were purchased from Arsenal chairman, Peter Hill-Wood.
Hill-Wood seems to have had a change of opinion about Kroenke, after originally stating that the club didn’t need his money or his sort back in 2007 when he purchased his first shareholding in the club. Now the club seem to be relying on him to protect themselves from a takeover from Red and White Holdings, the share vehicle of Alisher Usmanov and ran by former Arsenal vice chairman David Dein.

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Now for me, there is no doubt that Stan Kroenke is man who knows his sport. He owns 40% of the St. Louis Rams, the Denver Nuggets, the Colorado Rapids and Colorado Avalanche. Perhaps annoyed that he doesn’t own a MLB franchise, Kroenke set his sights on Arsenal and has quietly and effectively gone about his business with a minimum of fuss over the last 30 months. Now I know why they call him “Silent Stan”, as his refusal to answer questions about his intentions at the recent Arsenal AGM saw.
British football still has a somewhat rose tinted view of foreign ownership and with the comedy roadshow at Portsmouth shows, with such investment comes a high degree of risk. Yet, British football is littered with teams destroyed by English and Scottish owners who had no idea how to run a football club. Xenophobia is still alive and well in the Premiership, but it is something we English based fans have to get used to and since Roman Abramovich took over Chelsea, most fans would welcome any Billionaire to splash the cash at their club.
When you see the damage people like Geoffrey Richmond, Robert Maxwell, Ken Richardson, Darren Brown and Anton Johnson did to clubs, the chance to bring in proven sporting expertise from outside of the UK becomes an obvious option for me. I’m sure the fans of those clubs almost destroyed by such mismanagement would gladly pay for people to fly over and buy their beloved clubs.
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Arsene Wenger must be getting a bit fed up about the constant questions about the share dealings going on, two press conferences this week seem to have missed the fact that his side have climbed nicely in to 3rd, tucked in nicely behind Manchester United and Chelsea and qualified to the next round of the Champions League. All questions focused on the money changing hands in the financial markets and quiet correctly, Wenger calmly and politely avoided answering the questions with a stock answer.
“I do not know what Kroenke will do,all I know is the rules, that if he gets to 30%, he has to make a bid for the club. At the moment, he flirts with the 30, but is not there. I do not know what his intentions are, I have not spoken to him about it.”
With his side bucking all the preseason predictions of falling out of the top four, playing some lovely football and with a Billionaire shoring up his stake in the Gunners, Arsenal could be on the cusp of a wonderful new era. In to the next round of the League Cup and European football once again assured after Christmas, Wenger has continued to keep his head when everyone outside of Arsenal thinks the dream is over. Shame I’m a Spurs fan but that’s life.

The Cold War For Arsenal Continues

The Cold War For Arsenal Continues - World Soccer Talk

When a team only wins 2 games out of 18, you’d fully expect them to be propping up the Premiership table, already planning for life in the Championship the following season. Thankfully for Hull City, their fantastic start to the season has kept them out of the bottom 3, hanging on by their fingernails to 17th and desperately looking over their shoulder, at the three teams below them and hoping they can struggle to the finish line and not fall away at the last.
It would be simplifying matters to point out that they just need to get some points on the table as the Hull City side that are currently in deep, deep trouble seem to bear no relation to the one that began the season. With 20 points from the first ten games of a debut season from heaven in the top flight, no-one surely at the K.C. Stadium could have imagined it would come to this would it? A side that were like a breath of fresh air, knocking so called bigger sides’ noses out of joint as they racked up away wins at <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2008/oct/06/premierleague.tottenhamhotspur" target="_blank">White Hart Lane</a>, <a href="http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/sport/football/article1742445.ece" target="_blank">The Emirates</a> and St James’ Park.
Playing a brand of swashbuckling football that saw them come up against more illustrious opponents and bloody their noses, they are now reduced to reverting to type. Thumping it forward and playing for set pieces, desperately clinging to the long ball game and getting nothing for it. The side who were gaining all the plaudits as Summer turned to Autumn, now find that for a season that promised so much, time is beginning to run out.
Of course, it may not matter, as up the coast, Newcastle and Middlesbrough are doing a fine job of preserving Hull’s Premiership status for them, but 3 points for the Tigers would be the best medicine that Browns sickly side could be prescribed, rather than facing the placebo effect of Newcastle’s visibly draining confidence and Middlesbrough shot shy side. Phil Brown is also beginning to suffer from the pain of the dogfight, so in demand for his refreshingly honest appraisals at the beginning of the season, now the media twists his words to spitting barbs from his tongue. Brown hasn’t changed, but the way in which he’s being reflected in the media certainly has.
People point to the <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/eng_prem/7787560.stm" target="_blank">Manchester City game</a> as the defining point of the season for Hull City, as Browns fettered ego saw him ride roughshod over the norm, holding his half time team talk on the pitch as Eastlands as his side recuperated from a first half battering against Mark Hughes’s millionaires. Yet that was on Boxing Day, coming into that game, they were already falling away with only 1 win in the 8 previous matches, a confidence sapping 2-0 lead had been dropped at Anfield two weeks previously, an embarrassing 4-1 defeat against Sunderland the week before had laid the foundations for the capitulation in Manchester.
The transfer window couldn’t come soon enough for Hull City and as it opened Hull threw some money at the side to freshen it up, making Jimmy Bullard the key signing. What a mistake that was, well known to be carrying an injury, to the extent that Fulham wouldn’t offer him a contract based on their concerns, <a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/premier_league/hull/article5769244.ece" target="_blank">Bullard’s knee went after just 37 minutes in a Hull City shirt</a>. Now that for me was the moment the wheels fell off Hull’s season, he was the big signing and there is no doubt that a fit and buzzing Jimmy Bullard is a smashing player. Yet this is not the Bullard that we saw at Wigan Athletic and sporadically at Fulham and that injury deflated the sails of the Tigers survival schooner. Couple with the strikers drying up and reverting from football to hoofball, the points are slipping through their fingers.
Sure they picked up 3 surprising points at Fulham, but they are falling away at the wrong moment and Phil Brown has it all to do to rescue a Hull City season that promised so much but is beginning to rely on the failings of others. Unfortunately, that’s when you have no control over your destiny and they have to try and snatch something, anything from the next 3 matches, the last game I fear may be too much to ask unless Manchester United have the Premiership in the bag and have beat Arsenal in the Champions League, with the final 3 days after the end of the Premiership season.&nbsp; I hope that there is a happy ending to Hull’s Premiership season, I really do, but I’m beginning to fear the worst for them and that would be a terrible shame.

Where Did It All Go Wrong For Hull City?

Where Did It All Go Wrong For Hull City? - World Soccer Talk

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Where Did It All Go Wrong For Hull City?