My open letter to Ivan Gazidis has got a response that I wasn’t expecting. Following my sending the letter to the man in the Highbury House hot seat a personal email was received by me here in Chez Crescit. “I’ve got your letter. Can we talk?”
I was surprised at the personal touch, but not shocked given what I’ve observed of our Dear Leader’s style since he de-camped from his position as Deputy Commissioner of Major League Soccer – North America’s top flight – to take up the chief executive post following the abrupt defenestration of his predecessor Keith Edelman, via a brief substitute’s appearance in the role by director Ken Friar.
Unfortunately I was unable to immediately take up his offer of a meeting as I temporarily lost my hearing for most of the last two weeks. Fortunately the medicos diagnosed the problem and normal hearing service has been resumed. As Joni Mitchell sung, “You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.”!
We arranged a conversation involving myself, Ivan Gazidis and Arsenal’s new director of communications Mark Gonnella which took place yesterday. The short version is that I fear the board will impose a price increase over and above the 2.5% increase in the Value Added Tax rate to 20% introduced back in January this year. I wouldn’t put my life savings on it however.
I’m sure I’ll get flamed by critics of the current club management out there in the Gooner Nation for saying this but the impression I am left with having spent the best part of an hour on the phone with Gazidis is that he gets that football in general and Arsenal in particular has a real problem with affordability for the average man and woman.
Gazidis has been dismissed by some as an overpaid tea boy beholden to a complacent and out of touch board of directors. I don’t believe that’s true. I’m convinced he has real swing with the board. There are limits to that of course, as David Dein found to his cost. He was unceremoniously given his marching orders. This was despite him being a senior shareholder at the time. There is no way that Gazidis would survive a clash of wills over a big issue with Messrs Kroenke and Fiszman.
That said, I’m convinced that those two, who effectively control the club at the moment being both board members and owning just over 46% of the club between them, listen carefully to Gazidis. I believe Gazidis to be a gifted manager and administrator. I’ve met most of the senior figures in the game in England & Wales at club, association and league level. The only one who comes close to him intellectually is Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore. Scudamore is a man I respect but with whom I often find myself philosophically at odds. Gazidis is a man I’m much more at home with in terms of his instincts and views about where the game and Arsenal needs to go off the field.
He made the reasonable point during our discussion that any price increase foregone doesn’t only mean the cash that would have been raised in the year of the increase but in subsequent years too. I estimate around £3.5 million is the order of what would be raised if the four percent increase already imposed on Platinum Club members over and above the VAT increase were to be applied to Gold season ticket holders. That becomes £17.5 million over five years.
Gazidis accepted that the club has room to grow in the field of commercial income – sponsorship, merchandising and so on. This won’t be easy to address in the short term as we’re locked into long term deals for kit, jersey logo (both to expire in 2014 and stadium naming rights (to expire in 2021) with Nike and Emirates Airways. He does accept that we need to do much better than we are in this area however. He’s put a top flight team in place to achieve just that.
Doing so in the current business and economic climate won’t be easy. Never mind the economy being in difficult straights with more hits to come with demand, at least in the next two to three years, being sucked out of the economy as tax rises and public sector job cuts bite. No matter where you stand on the Government’s current economic policy it’s an objective fact that demand will be bumping along the bottom at best for a good while yet with lots of current regular matchgoing Gooners facing the dole or pay freezes/cuts at worst, low wage rises at best.
The problem is of course that Arsenal is attempting to compete with the likes of Manchester City and Chelsea who have uber-wealthy sugar daddy owners. The new UEFA financial fair play regulations should go some way to addressing this problem in the next five seasons or so as they begin to bite. That assumes that the UEFA administration will have the necessary wit and big brass ones to face down the serial over-spenders amongst the Champions League’s biggest regular qualifiers. I think we need to give them support and the benefit of the doubt until they prove otherwise.
As former Football League chairman Lord Mawhinney said recently, football hasn’t got an income problem. It’s got a cost problem. Until clubs here and elsewhere in Europe discipline themselves to spend only what they can raise and stop main-lining debt then the game will be reliant on sugar daddies, some of whom are of VERY dubious provenance. I don’t want that for Arsenal. It’s my football club. Not a rich man’s train set.
Having spoken at some length to Gazidis I’m convinced he gets that. I’m hoping that he and other senior figures in the club will be prepared to speak out publically on these issues.
Bringing in new commercial income isn’t as simple as it might sound. There’s always a balance to be struck. As an extreme example none of us would be happy with Arsenal becoming Nike Arsenal in the same way the Welsh Premier League club Llansantffraid Town became Total Network Solutions Llansantffraid Town in a sponsorship deal or the former SV Austria Salzburg became Red Bull Salzberg. This made many supporters so unhappy that they de-camped and formed their own club taking the original club name and colours with them, very much in the same way that some Manchester United supporters broke away post the Glazer takeover to form FC United of Manchester.
But how much would we care if the second and or third strips were other than what we’ve traditionally worn as away colours, yellow, white or navy/royal blue as part of a sponsorship deal? A lot of Gooners detested the switch away from yellow and blue which we’d worn occasionally in the 1950s and as our regular change strip from 1968 right up to the 1982/83 when we switched for one season to green and navy before going back to yellow and blue.
Speaking purely personally, I don’t give a monkey’s what colours the change strips are PROVIDED they’re smart and not over-fussy. The kit designers all seem to have all been recruited from the bottom decile of textile college graduates. The red with white sleeves home strip is sacrosanct to me. What colours we wear when we have to change I’m not personally all that bothered about as long as the kit has nice clean, simple, bold lines and design and doesn’t open us up to ridicule as some football fashion crimes have over the years. That’s a compromise I’m more than happy to make if it helps the club bring in needed commercial income and takes the pressure off ticket prices.
I’m was also encouraged that Gazidis is actively looking at getting far more creative with the structure of ticket prices and categories at the Emirates. I’m hoping that he will be open to constructive and continuous dialogue with supporters’ organisations on this issue. I know that Arsenal Independent Supporters’ Association has just written to him on this very subject. I think the club needs to start with a clean sheet and look at the whole structure of ticketprices for all categories of members from Red right up to Platinum.
I still believe that the board needs to freeze Gold prices and prices for Silver and Red members for next season. That’s my two bob’s worth. I’m going to really struggle to pay the VAT increase, never mind any further price rise. My season ticket alone already represents over seven percent of my take home pay, never mind what I spend on programmes and the decreasing number of away games that I can afford to get to. That’s more than enough when I’m facing increased essential bills for everything from groceries to rent, water, gas, electricity, fares and National Insurance Contributions.
That said, I do recognise that the club has a delicate balance to strike. I happen to believe that that balance has to be drawn at no increase for next season.
This is already a long blog. I’ll do more on this on Friday. For now though I think Gazidis deserves credit for his personal and timely response.
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