Morning all,
it looks like the gloves are coming off and the relationships between our biggest shareholders are going to be increasingly tested over the next little while.
You’ll have seen some news reports quoting Alisher Usmanov’s partner in Red and White, Farhad Moshiri, after he was interviewed on Sportsweek on BBC 5 Live yesterday. I’m not going to go through the details of what he said because it’s pure propaganda for Usmanov, suffice to say most of what he says can be dismissed simply because of who he is.
What does he know about football? Why should anyone care what he thinks about the sale of Adebayor? And how can he possibly refer to Arsenal as ‘we’? He’s got no connection to the club other than being Usmanov’s ‘advisor’. And much of what he says is just nonsense. He says that we ‘turned down an offer’ to pay our debts. What nonsense. There was no such offer. There was the possibility of a rights issue which is far different from someone coming along and paying our debts.
What is most troubling is the way in which they have been given air time on the BBC. If you listen to interview it’s as plain as day is a fluffy PR piece. David Davies is fawning, no alternative point of view is allowed and essentially the whole thing is a horribly sub-standard piece of journalism, if you can even call it that.
Then you have to think about the various personal links and Goonerholic gets right to it. We know David Dein was involved in Red and White, and the suspicion is that he still is, despite reports saying he’d resigned from the group. We know there are difficulties between the current board and Dein after what transpired a couple of summers ago, they remove him from the spotlight to make themselves look friendlier to the board.
However, Moshiri claiming in his interview that Dein was never adequately replaced and talking up the ‘Dein-Wenger axis’ certainly makes you think the relationship between Red and White and Dein is not dead by any means.
Also, coming back to the BBC and the way they handled the interview – we know Davies and Dein are well connected via the FA, but the relationship goes even deeper. When Dein was selling the shares in the club he loved to an Uzbeki oligarch, who do you think worked for him looking after his media relations? Correct. David Davies. It was Davies who organised the launch for the announcement of his sale to Red and White and organised and attended subsequent events for Dein.
It is therefore inconceivable that Davies and Moshiri aren’t well known to each other and the deeper you look into this the more it looks as if Dein has pulled in a favour from an old friend and employee.
For the BBC to have allowed the interview with Moshiri to take place given the various relationships is nothing short of a disgrace. If the BBC is allowing itself to become a PR outlet for shady businessmen then it’s a sad day indeed. For those of you who might wish to complain, and I would urge you to listen to the interview then do exactly that, there’s a contact form on the Sportsweek page. I can’t find a direct email address but if someone does they can pass it on and I’ll update the blog.
Direct link to the MP3 is here – go to 18′ for the start of the interview. And here’s the BBC’s complaints page.
I think it’s important that the seedy background to all this is reported as it’s so easy for disinformation to become fact and for people to actually believe that Red and White are acting in a way which is good for Arsenal rather than good for themselves. What is becoming clear though is that the lines are being drawn and sooner or later, and I think it’s going to be sooner, we’re going to have serious battle in the boardroom.
Moving away from all that and there are more and more rumours about Kolo Toure and Manchester City. After John Terry said he never had any intention of leaving Chelsea, despite him taking a month to say it, their search for a centre-half brings them to Kolo.
There doesn’t appear to be anything really new, the Daily Mail are saying the two clubs are ‘in talks’ but this is the same paper who said Adebayor had had a medical at City about 5 days before it actually happened. It does seem as if there’s plenty of smoke to this one and probably a bit of fire so we’ll wait and see what transpires.
Meanwhile, the other Ivorian could be a Fiorentina player inside 48 hours if reports from Italy are correct. Apparently they’ve got a representative coming to London tomorrow to do a deal. Again time will tell.
Overlooked amidst all the shoddy journalism and transfer rumours is the fact that we have a game tonight. We play Szombathelyi Haladas at 6pm and hopefully we’ll get to see Eduardo play his first game of the pre-season. It’s live via the official site later on and some football will be timely medicine against all the other crap.
Till tomorrow.
