Arsenal fans angry with Kroenke
Imagine the COMMERCE
Broncos being run from Helsinki. Imagine the thing you love most after your family and faith was being steered by a conglomerate that you never saw, that you never heard from, separated by miles of ocean and light years of culture.
And welcome to how, more or less, Chris Davies feels on a good day. And why, even after watching his beloved Arsenal F.C. hold off the Rapids 3-0 on Monday night at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park, Arsenal owner Stan Kroenke still drives him straight up a wall.
“He is single-handedly sucking the soul out of the club I love,” said Davies, a native Londoner and member of the Denver Gooners, the local booster club for Arsenal, one of the most popular sporting brands in the world and a fixture — albeit a fading one — of England’s Premier League elite. “He’s a businessman. He’s not a sports fan.”
Yet Kroenke was also in the house Monday evening, for the first time in what natives say feels like ages. Arsenal and the Rapids are sister clubs, the soccer jewels in the Kroenke Sports & Entertainment crown. Although on the global stage, the Gunners shine far brighter; Forbes.com currently ranks Arsenal’s value at $2.26 billion and No. 7 among world soccer franchises, making it the second-most lucrative property, after the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams, in the KSE sports stable.
Meanwhile, one of the club’s mainstays, midfielder Aaron Ramsey, bolted to Italy in the offseason. Team captain Laurent Koscielny is effectively on a salary strike, declining to join the club on the four-stop American preseason tour that began in Denver.
The Gunners are long-standing members of the Premiership’s “Big Six” clubs, but they’re also perceived, at present, to be among the most vulnerable — the Pac-12 of England’s soccer giants.
Arsenal has gone three straight seasons without the lucrative payouts that come with qualification for the Champions League, and hasn’t won a Premier League crown since 2004.
To Gunners fans such as Davies, Kroenke is Helsinki, and they’ve had it, collectively, up to here. On Monday morning, several Arsenal supporters’ groups and blogs composed a joint two-page letter that described Stan Kroenke — who a KSE spokesperson said could not be reached for comment, although son Josh Kroenke issued an open-letter rebuttal early Tuesday — as “passive” and “absent,” accusing KSE of turning the club’s 60,260-seat Emirates Stadium into a “soulless place.”
“From the fans’ point of view,,” explained Tom Childs, a longtime Arsenal and Kansas City Chiefs fan who also follows the AFC West as part of his “Arrowheads Abroad” podcast. “It appears to us that Stan doesn’t give a monkey’s (bum).”
In other words, Rapids faithful, Londoners feel your pain. Davies — who’s lived in the metro since 2007, the same year Kroenke first snatched an ownership stake in Arsenal — feels it, too.
“There are some diehard fans who go there week-in and weekout,” sighed Davies, who hails from the London suburb of Greenford, 14 miles due west of the Emirates.
“That’s just real estate to (Kroenke) out there.”
“I don’t think there’s anybody in London who thinks Stan Kroenke’s doing a good job, let’s put it that way,” a longtime Arsenal reporter in London recently told The Post. “It’s really not great for him.”
It’s even worse for Davies, who like the thousands of Gunners fans out in force Monday along Victory Way — the stands at Dick’s were at least two-thirds full of Arsenal red and white — fear for their club’s future.
“We’re still going to eat it up. We’re still going to go,” Davies said.
“It’s like putting (Kroenke) in charge of the Catholic church. He’s ruining it, but people still go to church every Sunday. So it’s just not fun with him in charge.”