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Gunners a foreign club
• WHY is MP Jeremy Corbyn bothering himself about Arsenal FC (MP’s pledge to save Gunners from Russians, May 2)? When, with a total lack of decency and pride in the club’s history, the name of the new stadium was sold to an Arab airline owned by a bunch of despots I don’t remember hearing a peep from him.
Arsenal is to all intents a foreign club. Its manager and players are there not because they like Islington, identify with it or owe it any loyalty, but because they receive large amounts of money.
Islington fans cough up much of this money but if the club had not got its way over Ashburton Grove it would happily have moved somewhere else.
To Arsenal, like all Premier clubs, the fans are nothing more than a great milch cow to be milked for every penny that can be squeezed out of them. If the fans are content with this, so be it. But should their MP be encouraging them in their dottiness? I think not.
Both Mr Corbyn and the Lib Dems have failed to get Arsenal to provide a sports centre.
The club is big business and the bottom line is profit. Financial self-interest will decide who owns it. If Alisher Usmanov makes the owners an offer they cannot refuse, they’ll accept without hesitation, even if it is proved the Russian has a cup of baby’s blood with his cornflakes. There will be nothing any politicians can do about it.
Mr Corbyn is a good MP, but were the board to recommend acceptance of a Usmanov bid, that will be it. He will look foolish and ineffectual, especially if Usmanov decides to put some money into the community.
Naming the stadium was a clever money-making wheeze. Every time the name Emirates is used on TV, radio or newspapers and magazines, the airline gets free publicity.
Why don’t the media refuse to be taken for suckers and simply refer to the ground as Highbury or Ashburton Grove? As for victory parades by Arsenal through Islington, it would make as much sense to extend this privilege to AC Milan.
NIALL WARD
Hampton, Middlesex
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