American rents out stadium on night of huge basketball match
WWE owner Vince McMahon has challenged Arsenal’s majority shareholder Stan Kroenke to a steel cage match after an embarrassing scheduling screw-up.
Kroenke owns the NBA team Denver Nuggets, who are scheduled to face the LA Lakers in a home Western Conference final match next Monday. However, Kroenke Sports Enterprises agreed last August to rent out the Pepsi Center to the WWE for their televised Raw show - an arrangement that was confirmed last month with no escape clause.
As Gabriele Marcotti in The Times points out, it’s the equivalent of Arsenal
The basketball supporting lady with the craziest name in the game
New York DJ, VJ and film star Alani Vazquez is better known in her home nation by the name ‘La La’, presumably due to a fondness for a little-known Ashlee Simpson song. La La appeared in the Sports Illustrated 2008 Players’ Wives section for her engagement to basketball player Carmelo Anthony. Despit being 6′8″, he plays as a ’small forward’ for the Denver Nuggets, the team owned by Arsenal board member Stan Kroenke.
Arsenal this morning confirmed that American billionaire Stan Kroenke - the gent on the right in the picture above - has been invited onto the board to take a non-executive director role. The owner of the the MLS’ Colorado Rapids and the NBA’s Denver Nuggets has held a 12.4 per cent stake in the club since last year, and his invitation to the board appears to counter the takeover ambitions of Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov.
On the club’s official website, Arsenal chairman Peter Hill-Wood says:
“We are delighted to welcome Stan to the Board of Arsenal. He brings with him a wealth of experience through his direct involvement in sports clubs in the US and we expect to benefit from his commercial insights and knowledge.”
It’s great that Hill-Wood is so welcoming, particularly as he once remarked of the American: “We don’t need his money and we don’t want his sort.”
Kroenke is not party to last year’s lock-down agreement (whereby directors can only sell their stakes to board-approved persons), but has agreed not to extend his shareholding beyond 29.9 per cent in the next year. If either Usmanov or Kroenke reach thirty per cent, they would have to launch a formal takeover.
Next week, Arsenal’s annual results will be formally announced, revealing a huge £225m turnover and record pre-tax profit of £36.7m.
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