My advice? Come clean on Kroenke’s £3m

SIR CHIPS KESWICK, the Arsenal chairman, was most affronted. ‘I am not Mr Platini and I am not Mr Blatter,’ he told shareholders at the Annual General Meeting. ‘There is not a written whatever-you-want because good advice is where you can get it and how you can get it, and if you get good advice then you succeed. The fees were advisory. You cannot codify how many times we have taken advice or how we have taken it. I will make no attempt to do so.’ Then, in a way that was not at all like football’s great dictators, Arsenal’s chairman said he would close the meeting if he was asked another question on the subject. So we still do not know what Arsenal owner Stan Kroenke does for his £3million in consultancy fees; we remain unaware of the service that is approximately twice as valuable as the basic salary of chief executive Ivan Gazidis. All we can say is that Kroenke must have provided exactly the same amount of useful advice last year, too, because he was paid the same money then. What a remarkable coincidence. Was there due process, or a tender? Did Arsenal’s board look around to see if anyone else was interested in this advice-giving lark, and would charge a more competitive rate? For a club that quibbled over the value of Luis Suarez to the last £1, handing £3m to the first chap with an opinion just because he happens to be handy seems a rather cavalier way to do business. And no contract, either. That’s a rarity, too, one imagines. You should see the requirements to be so much as a casual matchday steward at the Emirates Stadium. ‘Relevant customer service experience, the ability to communicate effectively with all guest types working in a fast paced and busy environment, desire to achieve targets, live and breathe “The Arsenal Way”…’ — it certainly sounds like the sort of job that would have at least a little paperwork attached. To stand in an aisle wearing a yellow hi-viz, Arsenal wouldn’t just take the first applicant and lob him an arbitrary sum. There would be a contract — just as there was for Alex Iwobi, a 19-year-old forward who hasn’t made a single appearance in the first-team, but signed a new deal on October 6. No gentlemen’s agreements there, either. ‘We don’t want speeches,’ Sir Chips loftily told a shareholder who dared to question Kroenke’s consultancy fee. Indeed we don’t. We just want plainly understood answers — and sadly that’s the one thing Arsenal, Blatter and Platini are struggling to provide.