Josh Kroenke is able to smile about it now, almost with relief. In some of the season’s testing moments, the Arsenal co-chair felt he should text Mikel Arteta.
It was often just a line. “Tune out the noise.” “We’ve got your back.”
In some instances, it’s hard not to feel Kroenke was almost speaking to himself as much as Arteta, as he now happily reflects on his family’s own journey with Arsenal. There’s quite a shift between the younger Kroenke delightedly holding up the Premier League trophy with his father, Stan, and – as he puts it – when fans were “hanging us from lampposts”.
“We’re not trying to hide from it,” Kroenke says of those effigies, describing it as “a moment of reflection”.
The 46-year-old is now enjoying a more extended moment of reflection as he sits with media at Arsenal’s training ground on a glorious Tuesday afternoon between that trophy lift and the Champions League final.
Throughout, Kroenke frequently returns to the idea of “needing to take a step back to go forward”. Duly, his mind goes back to the appropriate bookend that is Arsenal’s last European final. It was the 2019 Europa League final, against Chelsea in Baku, which happened to be the first major event that Kroenke Sports Entertainment had overseen as full owners. They’d finally agreed the purchase of Alisher Usmanov’s stake in August 2018, amid a tumultuous period that saw Unai Emery replace Arsene Wenger.
It was also “the worst 45 minutes of that season”. Arsenal conceded four second-half goals to lose 4-1 and also a last chance at Champions League qualification. Kroenke at least gained a moment of clarity.
Now they had 100 percent control, he told his father, “we need to really embrace where we are”. It was the first time he used that line about a step back, but an equally telling conversation came with Per Mertesacker.
Kroenke asked the then academy manager how you get someone like Virgil van Dijk into the team.
“Well, unless you’ve got 100 million quid, you better not be thinking about him,” Mertesacker responded.
“Well who’s the best young defender in Europe?”
Mertesacker instantly replied “William Saliba”.
Arsenal secured his signature two months later, while discussions were already going on about “building to the future”.
There was much louder public noise from supporters, though, as the Arsenal Supporters Alliance launched the “We care, do you?” campaign about the “passive” Kroenke ownership.
“That was a big moment for me,” he says. “And when I saw it, I understood. But I had already had so much time and energy and emotions invested behind the scenes.”
So, Kroenke personally wrote the letter in response.
“Even though it was painful at the time, it brought me closer to the supporter base.”
Kroenke talks about how “aware” he already was of “the Twittersphere and everything else around it… the ‘Banter Era’”
“I’ve grown up around this.”
Such a volume of noise nevertheless vindicated the view that Arsenal “were a sleeping giant we needed to awaken” – something seen with the mass title celebrations.
A cynical perspective is that this is all a numbers game, and the Kroenkes are just one more entity capitalising on football. The 46-year-old is himself an affable figure, to the point it’s easy to forget he’s an heir to Walmart as well as Arsenal. That’s nevertheless why Kroenke talks of the ownership as long-term custodians, where commercial success intertwines with the sporting.
“We’re in to win,” as he puts it, “but learning how to manage something up to a winner is a process.”
A complicating factor was Usmanov’s share, which created “competing agendas”.
True focus, however, only came with Arteta in December 2019. “Anybody that gets a chance to be around Mikel, you can buy into what he’s selling pretty easily,” Kroenke says.
“He was kind of a madman when it came to football. And so all of our conversation was about culture.” A much wider step back.
Just two months after that, Kroenke was having one of his regular lunches with the late Sir Chips Keswick, a former chairman and a “big mentor”.
“Chips, you know, in the States, we’ve had to take a step back to go forwards at times,” Kroenke said in reference to their US franchises like the LA Rams and Denver Nuggets. “I think at some point we may have to do that.”
Sir Chips Keswick smiled and looked at Kroenke: “Bloody hell, don’t get relegated.”
The former chairman was joking, but there were still performances that could have provoked other concerns.
Kroenke says now they could see the “work behind the scenes”, and believes one benefit of the Covid lockdown might have been sparing Arteta’s side “extra pressure” from crowds. The freedom played into 2020 FA Cup glory.
A more immediate problem was nevertheless how Covid disrupted the club’s entire financial model at a fragile moment.
“Matchday revenue gets shut off,” Kroenke explains. “That’s how the conversation around a Super League actually… you rationalise it in your mind. And now you can look back on it and say ‘what were we thinking?’
“But you’re thinking from a place that you’ve never really been or really kind of gamed in your own mind before.”
Such rocky waters made one Arteta metaphor about the culture all the more apt. He’d talk of being “in the boat or out of the boat”.
“Sometimes we had people that not only were they not in the boat but they’re underwater with a rope tying to pull us back,” Kroenke laughs. “And we had to figure out who those people were and we had to snip that rope along the way.”
The team was gradually honed so, by 2022-23, a good feeling returned and Arsenal were challenging for the title.
They just had to consider one leap forward rather than a mere step. The £105m signing of Declan Rice represented that in multiple ways – including for the ownership.
“I remember Edu, Mikel, Tim [Lewis], Rich [Garlick] all sitting here in the conference room and walking me through it for the first time,” remembers Kroenke. “My eyebrows raised because I didn’t know if we were in that phase just yet to go after a player like that.
“So I asked Mikel a couple of pointed questions about how we might use him which I never really ever do. My main question centred around, ‘if we are going to be spending this, tell me how we’re going to use him’. Because this should be what I refer to as ‘plug and play’.
“But if we are also going to be paying this much, what’s the person we are getting? Because this better be a leader as well.”
Kroenke quickly realised they were getting that.
“Just like Mikel, when you sit down and talk to Declan you understand the person he is, so you get more comfortable with the price tag.That doesn’t mean it still fits into our financial model but that was a big moment for all of us. I don’t think that type of deal would have been possible prior to 2018.”
Kroenke otherwise insists he doesn’t immerse himself in transfers.
“I think my job is to understand the ‘why’ on the front end, so there’s accountability on the back end if it goes wrong.”
Things were now going right, but not yet to the title. The desire could be sensed in a dinner with Andrea Berta when he joined as sporting director last summer.
“It’s not often I really do anything like this and I had brought them for a separate reason… But: I went into Andrea and I laid out our championship rings [from other sports]. ‘This is what we’re here for’,” Kroenke said.
It all informed a transformative summer. “We all thought we’d finally reached a place, last spring, where we had a chance to achieve something special. But for whatever reason, it didn’t happen, and one of those reasons is injuries.”
The key was strength in depth. The season still made them go so deep in terms of emotion.
“There were some big highs and some tough ones as well.” Kroenke cites the ultimate low as the 2-2 draw against Wolves, and one of the highs – to the point his celebration scared his new puppy – the Max Dowman goal against Everton.
“There were some real moments when you’re taking a breath. I thought Declan’s mentality after City was spot on,” says Kroenke. “And I think our group still believed, even if the rest of the world had started to move on. But being in that dressing room after that match, I think the players all looked at each other and were like, ‘we can still do this.’”
Kroenke had actually flown back to Denver the morning after the 1-0 win over Burnley, meaning he was just in the door as Manchester City were finishing their 1-1 draw with Bournemouth.
“My first phone call was to my dad, my second was to Mikel,” smiles Kroenke.
Stan Kroenke was actually preparing for an NFL meeting at that very moment. “There were other Premier League owners in the room with him,” explains his son. “They started coming over to congratulate him.”
Kroenke Jr himself describes it as “a very interesting moment”. It is perhaps a telling image of English football right now but the co-chair, of course, wanted another image.
“I don’t know the exact protocol of how the trophy was presented but I just said, ‘it would mean the world to me if I could carry it out with my father. And the next thing I know, that was the option.”
Kroenke says “different moments along the journey” now come back to him as he watches “the powerful images” of celebration around the stadium. They also point to the potential power of the club.
“We have very strong foundations in place to continue to build and try to sustain,” he insists. “Getting the foundations is usually the hardest part and, now we have all this, it is about trying to stay at the top knowing everyone is trying to climb the mountain after you.
“Keeping Mikel around is utmost priority and I think the good news for Arsenal fans worldwide is he’s enjoying the project, he’s enjoying being here and, from his time as a player all the way up until now, he’s an Arsenal man through and through.”
Hence Kroenke indicates the idea of changing Arteta, even in his own moments of doubt, was never considered.
“Mikel and his staff and our players are the ones that earned those rights to have the patience in those moments by the amount of work and energy they were putting in behind the scenes,” says Kroenke.
“I’m very proud. Especially after coming so close for so many years. Hopefully that’s a good message to send out to boys and girls worldwide. Sometimes you’ve got to fail to succeed. And if you come up short, just keep trying.”
And there still may be more, another line to add to one of those messages.
“Champions of England sounds pretty good and champions of Europe could sound even better…”
