Aside from the usual avalanche of almost certainly baseless transfer speculation drivel there’s no Arsenal news of substance around at the moment.
Myles Palmer on his Arsenal News Review blog says that he’s been told that Lady Nina Bracewell-Smith’s asking price for her Arsenal shares is £13,500 a pop. This would amount to an eye-watering £133.5555 MILLION for her 9,893 shares (15.9%). I’ve no idea whether the figure quoted by Palmer is accurate or not. I almost always disagree with Palmer’s views but he does occasionally come up with a factual nugget.
This could conceivably be the price Blackstone, the American bank she has appointed to sell her shares is asking. If it is, whether they achieve it or not is another issue. In a market economy anything for sale is only worth the highest price a purchaser is prepared to pay. I can’t see why any buyer would pay Lady Nina a huge premium on the price being paid by Stan Kroenke (£8,500 a share) or Alisher Usmanov (around £10,000 a share) when they wouldn’t even be guaranteed a seat on the board, never mind any real influence over events at the club as the current memorandum & articles of association (the Arsenal company constitution and rules) stand.
Without an alliance with either Usmanov or Kroenke/Fiszman, buying Lady Nina’s shares would be the ultimate vanity purchase. Who is going to pay out over £133 million for that? I just don’t see Lady Nina “hooking” a new fourth currently unassociated party to buy her shares and join Messrs Kroenke, Usmanov and Fiszman as the club’s senior shareholders. The sum in question is so large as to rule out all but a tiny handful of people around the globe. On the other hand at £13,500 a share it’s conceivable that the latter three might push back from the table and sell their shares to a new “player” at that price. It would represent huge profits for all of them, particularly in the case of Danny Fiszman who has already cashed in hugely on his relatively modest outlays to David Dein to buy his Arsenal stake.
Such a bid would represent an outlay of nearly £840 million however for a club that still has debts of over £200 million. It certainly would make no business sense but the normal rules of sane business are all too often suspended when it comes to football. I doubt very much whether Lady Nina will get anything close to her alleged asking price however.
In the wider game, the Football Association has suffered yet another implosion with the resignation of Lord David Triesman as the chairman of both the FA itself and the 2018 World Cup Bid Board. His resignation, honourably swift, came after a piece of typically despicable gutter journalism from The Mail on Sunday. I despise this rag and its weekday sister The Daily Mail. The next time I buy the poisonous, festering pile of pooh will be the first time. I truly detest the uptight, holier than thou, reactionary, xenophobic hate-mongering it which it regularly indulges itself.
The comments that Triesman made were made in private to a woman who is also worthy of deep scorn. Which of us hasn’t made unguarded comments in private? I have no interest in whom Triesman is or has got his freak on with. That’s a matter for him and those closest to him. To my knowledge Triesman has never pronounced on family values so the defence of exposing hypocrisy cannot be prayed in aid of The Mail on Sunday.
Aside from anything else, this piece of sewer journalism has probably done real damage to the England World Cup 2018 bid. Shame on them. They love to tell us all how patriotic they are at The Mail. That nonsense has been well and truly exposed as what it is – nonsense. Their only interest is in selling newspapers.
For what it’s worth I thought Triesman had done OK in his period of office. He pointed out that the professional game here was sailing into very stormy financial seas with its addiction to debt. The collapse at Portsmouth and the problems at a long list of clubs, including Liverpool and Manchester United showed he was spot on. He got absolutely slaughtered by the Premier League for his troubles. Most informed commentators and analysts have finally caught up with him. Uncontrolled debt to subsidise club purchases by hard-faced money men on the make, transfer fees and wages is now accepted as a problem the game has to deal with.
Triesman wasn’t perfect but he was better than those who went before him (admittedly not hard). I regret he’s been forced to resign by the hacks and muck-rakers at The Mail.
Keep the faith!
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