{"id":7048,"date":"2022-11-26T18:15:15","date_gmt":"2022-11-26T18:15:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/?p=7048"},"modified":"2022-12-03T06:24:39","modified_gmt":"2022-12-03T06:24:39","slug":"calling-the-shots-a-look-at-what-arsenal-owes-to-david-dein","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/?p=7048","title":{"rendered":"Calling the Shots &#8212; A look at what Arsenal owes to David Dein"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"550\" height=\"140\" src=\"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/qatarwhy2.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-7058\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/qatarwhy2.png 550w, https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/qatarwhy2-300x76.png 300w, https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/qatarwhy2-75x19.png 75w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px\" \/><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p>I don\u2019t read many autobiographies, especially sporting autobiographies which are inevitably ghost written (this one enlisted help from Amy Lawrence and Henry Winter)&nbsp;and often lack intellectual challenge. There are exceptions but that\u2019s not what I\u2019m here to write about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A few weeks ago our own Clock End Rider was kind enough to supply me with a ticket for the game with Forest. On my way into the ground snaking past the Armoury and up the staircase leading to the outside concourse I saw a familiar figure making his way to the match. I had to blink because I had only ever seen him immaculately attired in a (very expensive) suit. It was David Dein and he was dressed as casually as I was although without the nod to scruffiness that I managed to affect. I\u2019d met David a few times many years ago and felt obliged to waylay him, if only to wind up my good friend Countryman100 who accuses me of flagrant namedropping!&nbsp;I ask you, how unfair can you be? Just as I was saying to Rishi Sunak the other day&#8230;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>My encounters with David were not, in truth, etched deeply in his mind, but he was courtesy itself. We talked about Highbury, his book and the return of Arsene to the ground. I was just going to delve into our mutual interest in the resettlement of prisoners (of which more later) when he was hijacked by a number of young lads wanting selfies with a man that they must have been told about by their Dads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"getty embed image\" style=\"background-color:#fff;display:inline-block;font-family:Roboto,sans-serif;color:#a7a7a7;font-size:11px;width:100%;max-width:594px;\"><div style=\"padding:0;margin:0;text-align:left;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.gettyimages.com\/detail\/651821246\" target=\"_blank\" style=\"color:#a7a7a7;text-decoration:none;font-weight:normal !important;border:none;display:inline-block;\" rel=\"noopener\">Embed from Getty Images<\/a><\/div><div style=\"overflow:hidden;position:relative;height:0;padding:66.66667% 0 0 0;width:100%;\"><iframe src=\"\/\/embed.gettyimages.com\/embed\/651821246?et=90yBjUcxTudSKV2f3bSTWA&amp;tld=com&amp;sig=ji-29Kih33pjxvPyHp19MfQbqwk46rFGN1eFR6_Dmrw=&amp;caption=true&amp;ver=1\" scrolling=\"no\" style=\"display:inline-block;position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;margin:0;\" width=\"594\" height=\"396\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p>\u2018See that man there son? He used to run Arsenal. He brought Ars\u00e8ne Wenger to the club.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>My task in this article at its most basic level is to review David\u2019s book, \u2018<em>Calling the Shots\u2019, <\/em>but I\u2019d like to do a little more and frame a debate about what Arsenal, and indeed English football, owes to a man who has been described to me as \u2018the best networker in world football\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Let me begin with a brief pr\u00e9cis of David\u2019s life. David was born in North London in 1943 to a Jewish family. His beginnings were modest and he developed a business trading sugar, which became very successful but then saw him him&nbsp;heavily defrauded by a business partner. He built strong links with Africa. His love for Arsenal began through being taken to games by his uncle. Like so many of us the spark which his uncle ignited burst into flame and in 1983 he was successful enough to buy 16.6% of the club. Famously, Peter Hill-Wood described his investment as \u2018dead money\u2019. How ill-judged was that comment!?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Dein eventually built up his shareholding to over 40% but had to reduce it because of the aforementioned business problems he encountered. He sold his shares to Danny Fiszman, a diamond merchant and (then) friend, another member of the wealthy North London Jewish community who have strong links with both North London clubs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It didn\u2019t take long for Dein\u2019s influence to be felt within the club although when he joined the board he was rather different to his fellow directors. Arsenal had always been a patrician club with an innate class and dignity and what Dein came to feel was a lack of ambition. His involvement at the club began in a flat period, and there was clearly a culture clash behind the scenes as Dein tried to produce a more successful club. He was heavily involved in the decision to bring in George Graham as manager in 1986 and enjoyed a very warm relationship with him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I was privy [Name drop alert] to see them both together when I did a bit of work with Dein in 1993 and there was a nice, easy rapport which suggested informality and ambition to me. Dein was masterminding the Bond scheme which met huge supporter opposition when it was first mooted. When I first met Dein, I mentioned my work on the Gooner. The temperature dropped several degrees, but I asked him if he had engaged with the fanzines, who were generally crusading organisations then, trying to press for better conditions and fairer prices. Ultimately he reached out to supporter forums much more and in turn those forums came to realise what incredible value the Bond scheme represented. Arsenal were starting to achieve great success and to pull significantly away from their great North London rivals down the Seven Sisters Road. Dein always speaks warmly of Tottnumb and enjoyed a close relationship with Irving Scholar, but as an Arsenal man our success gave him huge satisfaction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It is interesting that Arsenal at that time were an amalgam of an evolving and increasingly ambitious football club mixed with a fairly stuffy&nbsp;institution. The driving force was the VICE chairman. PHW was a figurehead, affectionately thought of but not a power broker in the world of football. While the book begins with the end of Dein\u2019s involvement with the club (to be dealt with later in this post), the most interesting part to me was his relationship with Ars\u00e8ne Wenger. The story of their first meeting, Charades at Dein\u2019s house, and the burgeoning relationship is lovingly described. Dein describes friendships with all sorts of people, inside and outside football, yet he claims unequivocally that Ars\u00e8ne is his best friend. He drove Arsenal to recruit someone who was largely unknown and facilitated Wenger\u2019s complete overhaul of the club. Sometimes in autobiographies one gets a sense that the writer praises a collaborator and in so doing bathes in strong reflected glory. This book doesn\u2019t do this. Dein gives a paean of praise to Ars\u00e8ne, his only criticism being that he is miserable company after Arsenal had lost!&nbsp; The reality, I think, is that they were an incredibly well-matched partnership. Wenger brought a stream of incredible players to the club, sometimes at ridiculously low prices,&nbsp;when he was working hand-in-glove with Dein.&nbsp; Contrast this with the situation post-Dein. After 2007, Arsenal made fewer outstanding purchases and over time paid more money for less gifted players. Of course, the impact of the debt taken on to build the new stadium at Ashburton Grove had a big influence on our transfer horizons, but as time went on I believe Ars\u00e8ne became less and less confident about purchasing players. He badly missed Dein\u2019s influence and faith in his ability to recognise a player.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The closure of Highbury and move to the new stadium with its consequent financial pressures created big tensions in the Arsenal boardroom. Legend has it that Dein favoured hiring Wembley (I\u2019m so glad we didn\u2019t!) and he began to feel that&nbsp;Arsenal required an overseas investor to provide the firepower in financial terms that we needed to compete with Chelsea, United, and Manchester City. He met Stan Kroenke, but that relationship seemed to sour and Kroenke was not bothered about buying Dein\u2019s shares. He sold them eventually to Alisher Usmanov, who Dein saw as more ambitious and a better communicator of the ambition Dein wanted us to show &#8211; and an Arsenal supporter! Relations with Fiszman, Arsenal CEO Keith Edelman, and the Kroenkes deteriorated, and Dein left the board in 2007. He couldn\u2019t face going back to the club for months until Karen Brady\u2019s dad insisted he return with him a few months after his departure. He has been a regular ever since.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He recounts the conversation where he implored Wenger to stay with the club when the Frenchman wanted to resign. Say what you like about David Dein, but his primary desire has always been to see Arsenal become a very successful football club. He has 10 seats and six Club level memberships and gives match tickets to people he meets through the Twinning Project he has created with UK prisons. The head of maths education at the prison where I chair the Monitoring Board tells me Dein offered him a seat when he heard he was an Arsenal fan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The other theme of the book is Dein\u2019s work in helping to devise and create the Premier League and his work with the FA, where he was hugely influential on the International Committee. Without being indiscreet he does suggest that Sven Goran Eriksson\u2019s reputation as a ladies man was well deserved! The trauma of Hillsborough affected him significantly and persuaded him that the game needed to move rapidly into the 21st century. He can fairly be described as one of the architects of professional football in England.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It must be said that in discussing the book with [Name drop alert] Bob Wilson, who likes and admires Dein, he did tell me that opinions at Arsenal are very divided on the truth of Dein\u2019s assertions, particularly those relating to why and how he left in 2007. But perhaps that\u2019s to be expected, as Mandy Rice Davies once implied at the Old Bailey!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Whatever the exact truth, there is no doubt in my mind that David Dein is one of the most influential figures in the history of Arsenal Football Club alongside Herbert Chapman, Tom Whittaker, Sir Denis Hill-Wood, Ken Friar, George Graham and, of course, Ars\u00e8ne Wenger. Without him it is possible that so much of the success we enjoyed between 1987 and 2006 would never have happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Dein is supposed to have made \u00a375 million from the sale of his shares to Usmanov, having already made a substantial sum from the earlier sale to Fiszman. Not bad from an initial investment of \u00a3292,000, that dead money that PHW felt had been wasted while a vain man pursued an ego trip. When I saw him walking quietly across to Club Level before the Forest game, I saw an Arsenal fan off to see his team, not a brash entrepreneur sweeping into the club. I wanted to ask him about his prison work which is appreciated enormously by the prison authorities in the UK and by the prisoners themselves. He has visited 167 prisons in the UK and regularly spends time with Lifers and those on the longest sentences. It\u2019s not a glamorous way for a multi-millionaire to spend his time but it means a great deal to David and he creates really positive feelings among a group that don\u2019t receive much positive public attention for fairly obvious reasons, particularly in the Daily Mail!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Dein will always divide opinion. Many people see a man who has made a fortune out of Arsenal and doesn\u2019t deserve any sympathy for his effective dismissal from the club feeling that he was undermining the board. Others, and I am firmly in that camp, might remember someone who came to sit with bond holders as they selected their seats in the new North Bank, or who took huge interest in improving facilities (he has a thing about better quality toilets!) or who spent half an hour talking with me about how we could upgrade the match day experience at Arsenal. He might have completely ignored my suggestions but at least he listened!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I\u2019ve touched on the direction of the book and the key themes. Given the journalistic expertise that was harnessed to produce it, I found the style a little too conversational. When you are as well-connected and such a good networker as Dein, there is inevitably a progression from famous person to famous person that were and are still in David\u2019s orbit. That can get a little tedious [unlike name-dropping in a Goonerholicsforever article &#8212; Eds.] but it also does explain how he gets things done so effectively. It is significantly more interesting than Ars\u00e8ne\u2019s autobiography, and is quite revelatory about the backstabbing that seemed to take place in the Arsenal boardroom. It&#8217;s nowhere near a classic sporting autobiography but it will interest most Arsenal fans, those over the&nbsp;age of 35 particularly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Dein will be remembered above all as a huge influence on the game of football, a man who rose from humble beginnings in North London to shape the whole structure of club and of international football. Ultimately he was an Arsenal fan who through his own talent and hard work lived his dream. And so many of us have been much richer for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"550\" height=\"140\" src=\"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/qatarwhy2.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-7058\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/qatarwhy2.png 550w, https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/qatarwhy2-300x76.png 300w, https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/qatarwhy2-75x19.png 75w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px\" \/><\/figure><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I don\u2019t read many autobiographies, especially sporting autobiographies which are inevitably ghost written (this one enlisted help from Amy Lawrence and Henry Winter)&nbsp;and often lack intellectual challenge. There are exceptions but that\u2019s not what I\u2019m here to write about. A few weeks ago our own Clock End Rider was kind enough to supply me with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[13,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7048"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7048"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7048\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7062,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7048\/revisions\/7062"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}