Would you trust this man with your club?

While balancing the books may win Arsenal plaudits in the business world, supporters fail to see the honourable value of trading within one’s own means, and are becoming increasingly impatient with the lack of investment in the playing staff. Arsenal currently have three holes shaped like Mathieu Flamini, Alexander Hleb and Gilberto Silva and no one willing to splash out and fill them.

Unless, that is, Alisher Usmanov, with a twenty four per cent stake in the club, launches a formal takeover, as he is entitled to do, starting today. His advances have so far been greeted with boardroom skepticism - unsurprising, being that the Arsenal board appears to be made up of very grand old English ladies and gentlemen (plus American Stan Kroenke) with little apparent appetite for relinquishing power to anyone so vulgar as an Uzbek oligarch.