NickF wrote:Swiss Tony Adams wrote:Midz wrote:I like the story of how Usmanov & have been competitors for years and Usmanov would do whatever it took to make Arsenal more successful than Chelsea.
Now that's the sort of owner we could do with.
Only we've missed the boat with the financial doping, so he can't throw money at us like Abramovich did with CFC.
Now it is regulated and the Financial Fair Play thing is ... unbelievably...working.
And to think Abramovich wanted The Arsenal as his first choice.
Oh well, what might have been.
Wouldn't have made any difference with the whole "moral " thing, as we've all been bought now.
Do we really need someone to do that? Back in the day it was probably necessary but now there is so much money in football is it still required, especially at Arsenal who are very cash rich anyway?
Well, we don't now, but at the time it would have been great.
Abramovich was looking for a Club, wanted to buy The Arsenal, and if he had done so, possibly Chelsea would have folded.
Ken Bares certainly wasn't up too much, and Chelsea had major problems.
Quite clearly getting Abramovich was a serious bit of good fortune for them, even though at the time everyone said that Chelsea had bought the League, and what would happen "when" he goes, blah, blah, and foreign investors were "bad", etc., etc
So, imagine if Abramovich had bought The Arsenal in the summer of 2003.
We would still have won the League in 2004, and then - rather than piss about with selling our Home and desecrating the ground afterwards, we could have possibly ( possibly, I don't know ) but we could have possibly kept Highbury and built that fucking monstrosity of a soul-less bowl we have today - or maybe even have built one that wasn't copied from another Stadium in Portugal, and would have been our second home.
Imagine that!
Highbury
and Ashburton Grove.
Highbury for Arsenal Ladies and the Academy to play, and the new Stadium for us to become Kings of Europe.
As it is, The Arsenal I knew and loved died with Highbury.
And now there's some USA franchise team playing at a concrete monstrosity in North London with the cannon the wrong way on their red and white shirts, who have somehow been allowed to use the name "Arsenal".
You could not make it up!