- Target:
- Arsenal Football Club
- Region:
- GLOBAL
We, the undersigned, come from many backgrounds and nations. The main thing we have in common is we are all Gooners and we all love Arsenal Football Club.
Most Arsenal supporters – many signing below – have long and happily recognized that Arsenal Football Club is a business to its investors, a football club to its custodians, and a way of life to its supporters within the communities of Highbury and Islington and beyond .We have respected and admired the Club and the Board’s efforts to balance these varying aspects of Arsenal football Club and to do so in the right way for everyone concerned with the club and its success both on and off the pitch.
However there is a genuine – and increasing - concern that recently the Board has forgotten its duty to respect and maintain that unique balance to the detriment of the football club - and potentially the business as well - in pursuit of shorter-term or less- certain goals which may not be in the best interests of the football club but primarily and even solely in those of our larger shareholders. That Arsenal may no longer be the first concern of some major shareholders or Directors at this point adds further uncertainty to this concern.
With these worries in mind that we seek genuine reassurances that the best interests of Arsenal Football Club short and long-term are still being served by the Arsenal Board here and now. We believe the efforts to inform the supporters of late about the Club’s actions have served neither the supporters nor the Club well at all to this point in this specific regard.
While the Board or Manager have shared information which could be said by some to answer these concerns, all too often the information has proven incomplete or contradictory, and led to confusion, doubt, disappointment and even distrust arising among the supporter base - and increasing with each passing year that this lack of complete information persists.
We need more than barely minimal or partially complete replies as in the past few years and a greater sense of the actions planned going forward, as to our great concern that the actions simply have not matched the words from the Club in recent years - whether spoken by the Manager or a Board Member. We fear if this continues it can lead to a very unhealthy situation for Arsenal Football Club.
We hope and believe that improved transparency and increased information from the Board about these matters can go a long way toward resolving much of this uncertainty about the direction of Arsenal is headed, while reassuring supporters that the current commitment of the Board to maintaining the balance of all the Club’s interests, as it has so successfully in the past, remains as strong as ever.
We the undersigned seek more complete candid and specific assurances From The Arsenal Board on the following issues:
- That the wage structure has not been deliberately restructured to prevent acquiring players of higher quality, development, and cost who would require more competitive wages than this wage structure apparently allows for at this point while claiming money is available to spend
- That the youth system under construction is meant first and foremost to benefit the football team on the pitch and not solely to increase the Club’s profits from the transfer market annually
- That any or all of the well over 100 million in savings now in the bank is intended to go to the football team first and not to shareholders or to help finance selling the club
- That the Board is fully behind the manager spending any part of that money as is best for the football team and only behind a manager ready and willing to spend any portion of it that way
- That if that money is meant to be used for early debt repayment instead how using it that way is of primary benefit to the football club now and/or in the future and if it is not being used for either at this point why and how that benefits Arsenal Football Club in any way primarily on the pitch
- That if the Club is being sold imminently that the Board would publicly commit to not selling to any individual or group of owners who would be using debt leverage to purchase Arsenal. Given the very real problems at Liverpool and the potential problems at Manchester United that have resulted from debt leverage at those clubs we would like to know that the Board consider selling to anyone else using debt leverage unacceptable altogether.
We are confident you would want to provide us these reassurances, as we are eager to receive them, and solidify the bond between the club and its supporters once more, and to show that once again that Arsenal Football Club indeed continues to do the right things the right way for the right reasons.
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The Making Sure Arsenal Are Actually Doing Things the Right Way petition to Arsenal Football Club was written by Martin Daoust and is in the category Football at GoPetition.