Nasty evil Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov has offered about £1 billion to probably somewhat less evil American billionaire Stan Kroenke to gain a 67% share in Arsenal. The money he’s offering is about 30% over the valuation of the actual shares, and would double what Kroenke initially paid for control of Arsenal (and I’m not sure if Usmanov is offering to buy all his shares or just enough to gain full control of the board - think the latter though). Kroenke has reportedly turned it down, probably in part because he hates Usmanov.
Fairly ambivalent about which billionaire owns shares in Arsenal tbh, more concerned about how it would affect our managerial structure from board level down. Atm we don’t have one, as Kroenke has left it all to Arsene and done virtually nothing himself. Fairly sure Usmanov would get rid of Arsene (probably in a completely classless way but can’t argue with the motive), but what he’d do after that I dunno. Has always said he’d pump money into the club (which I’m not too enamoured with), imagine that’d initially include a marquee DoF and Manager.
Dunno, Usmanov is representative of something very shit in modern football, but on the other hand so is Kroenke in a different way. I honestly don’t know what Kroenke gets out of owning Arsenal since he clearly has no interest in it whatsoever. I suspect it’s something to do with accounting that I don’t understand - maybe him spreading his wealth into diverse sporting assets with lots of readily available capital makes him a lower risk to lenders and therefore gives him cheaper access to credit, idk. I would quite like him to fuck off though, and apparently Usmanov isn’t the only interested party.
