your reply has reassured me. i am concerned because of the circus that is happening over at old trafford.

hope that we will never ever have to go through such a joke.

There was a lot negative comment on this.

When people comment about Arsenal not being an English club, I just tell them, that is how it was founded, and I don’t see why it should suddenly be forced to change after 124 years.

Re Kronke, I have no inside information but can only look on from outside and draw conclusions.

First, he was invited onto the board – and for that to happen he must have talked to the board about his intention, and the board must have put their views and been satisfied. That would indicate a “no bid” agreement of some type.

Second, we know from public reports (that have not been denied) that he has not paid for his shares in full – again suggesting that he might not even have the money to make a full bid. The fact that he has bought shares from other board members without paying them in full backs up the first point.

Third, and putting this together we might take it that the deal is that he gets to 29.999% of the shares and sits. If Usmanov makes a move to buy over 30% of the shares then immediately there is a big block against him. It might also allow Kronke to get in first with a bid, although I am not sure what advantage there would be in that.

And do remember, bids at 30% are irrelevant if other people don’t want to sell to you. The rules in England say that at 30% you must bid for the shares at the highest price offered recently – and maybe a few people will sell, but if most don’t all you have done is bought a few shares at the highest price.

The chances are that in the next couple of years football share prices will drop (see my post on Football 3.0 for a discussion of the way football is moving).

So personally I can’t say “no he won’t bid” but I am not expecting a bid.

Tony

Just like Paul C said the role of media is also another factor. I don’t know how media was in football 1.0 and football 2.0 but certainly sites like this are an integral part of football 3.0. The readers of sites like this (is there any one) would be much more informed and much more understanding. And when the views of the readers of this site starts proving right that we will see people coming more often to these sites than to some stupid gossip mongers(even I go there, but now for fun).

Great role Tony, hope to see your readership improve very soon.

Would you for instance prefer, say, 50K a year working for , say, BP
or 1 Million a year working for Joe and Johnny’s Online Get Minted Ltd PLC…………?

Likewise footballers: a long-term contract and 10k a week with Rocksteady FC will soon look a lot more attractive than 50k a week for Lala United.

Ofcom is the regulator in the UK. They feel that Sky, who pay the PL billions, is not competing in a proper way and are considering allowing competitors to tap into PL Football at lower prices, creating true competition. It is the exact same thing that happened in the telecommunications industry years ago, leading to cheap telephone. Google “Ofcom Sky Football” and read all about it.

i wonder if bigotry is part of fooball 1.0 or 3.0, but it deserves to be back at 0.001

great article.

What do you think of Northern Rock’s decision to sponsor Newcastle United? According to them that’s in the “best interests of tax payers”.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/leagues/championship/newcastleunited/7018012/Newcastle-United-sponsors-Northern-Rock-defend-signing-new-deal.html

i enjoy reading your posts, because they always make me realise how lucky we are to have a manager with this kind of vision.

you surely know about stan kroenke.

i thought this season has been going well for us. we are picking up momentum at the right time, and i am secretly confident that we will win the league this season.

but i am worried about stan kroenke’s activities, and how it could disrupt the stability we have.

i personally don’t wish to see him take over the club, be it in the near future, at the end of the season(i hope any takeover moves would be left till the season is over), or forever.

i would like to hear your take on this issue.

I’m most grateful to you for your piece, which adds another dimension to the argument.

When I started playing with the idea of 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 I did not think through the media implications, but as you rightly point out, they are there.

In Football 1.0 the media was initially reporting the simple facts (reading the reports of 80 to 100 years ago we get little more) and then issues of local interest – not least because there were so many local newspapers. The story of Arsenal and Fulham 100 years ago is often the story of two local papers – The Kentish Independent, and the West London.

In Football 2.0 we get what we consider to be the modern journalism of football – as with Arsenal to sign Crouch, Liverpool to sign Eduardo. This is just invented, as we’ve seen here a million times over, but it creates excitement, and it is now what the papers live off. Even the BBC pander to it with page 338 on teletext.

But in Football 3.0 we have news that is largely ignored (eg Arsenal’s two south American transfers this window.) Where they are reported, it comes with the caveat, “arsenal supporters will be worried as they were expecting big name signings.”

In other words if we can’t turn the clock back to Football 2.0 we can at least pretend that Football 2.0 is better and 3.0 is a wasteland.

Thank you for your addition to the analysis, I really appreciate it.