Full transcript from Josh Kroenke's appearance at Arsenal fans' forum

Published date23 April 2021
It was announced on Sunday that the Gunners were one of six Premier League sides who had signed up to the controversial breakaway tournament as one of the 12 founding members.

However, following intense backlash against the idea, Arsenal and the other five English clubs all withdrew from the competition on Tuesday.

Kroenke and Venkatesham then addressed supporters at the fans' forum on Thursday and below is a full transcript of everything they had to say, courtesy of Football London.

Venkatesham: "I just wanted to say first of all to all of you on this call and obviously to all Arsenal fans, I am really, really sorry for Arsenal's part in what has been I know a hugely difficult, really disturbing week for football, and in particular our fans. I just wanted to be really clear how sorry I am for what has happened this week. I thought I would try and give you just a little bit of background to this sorry tale. None of this meant to excuse what happened at all or meant to water down the apology. But I wanted to talk a little bit about it and correct some of the things out there that aren't correct.

"The first thing I want to talk about is despite the stories to the contrary, Arsenal were absolutely, 100 per cent categorically not the authors or drivers of this proposal. That doesn't excuse what happened but we were not the authors of this proposal. As I said in the last Fans' Forum, there are frequently Super League proposals out there that are developed by others, not by Arsenal. Our approach that we have said publicly and privately lots of times, is always to listen and to make sure we protect the best interests of Arsenal. In this situation, what was clear to us is the train was leaving the station. This project was about to be launched with some of the biggest clubs in Europe, and we needed to assess if this launch happened without us, and this tournament came to fruition without us, what that would mean for the club.

"Due to concerns of that becoming a reality and us being left behind, we made the decision to join. I'm not trying to justify it, absolutely 100 per cent and I'm not trying to say that's OK but I'm trying to explain it. It became immediately apparent that we made a bad decision, but a terrible one. When you make a bad decision you don't want to follow up with another one, so we immediately got out as quickly as we possibly can. Now we need to say sorry to lots of people. Our players, our staff, the authorities, other Premier League clubs and most importantly our fans. From a personal perspective this has been incredibly painful.

"I hope you know that I love this football club. I work every hour of every day to make us be the best we can be and to build the best relationship we can between the club and our fans. I hope I demonstrated that to you over many months and years and I certainly haven't become a different person overnight. For me I found it really, really tough and my focus now is doing the same. Doing what we can to repair any damage that is done and moving forward to move the club forward. I certainly won't be forgetting the mistakes that I made here and it's made me even more determined to move the club forward."

Kroenke: "I'm here today to talk and Vinai echoed many of the sentiments to the word. Leadership from my perspective, if any of you lead different organisations in your own lives, making unpopular decisions that you feel benefit larger groups over time is part of leadership. Leadership is also recognising when you are wrong. Quickly correcting your course of action, apologising for your actions and then educating yourself on how to lead better in the future. That's what I'm here to do today. I'm here to explain and listen. As this project took shape in a very, very fast manner we asked ourselves two key questions.

"The first question we asked ourselves, what is worse -a Super League or a Super League without Arsenal That was a very tough one for us to weigh, but basically the decision we made was a Super League without Arsenal was the worst of those answers. That's what we acted upon. The second question was 'what do the fans want'. We tried to answer that question in many ways as possible. We are obviously bound by certain confidentiality aspects of the decision we were thinking about making. It was a much more complicated answer then we had time to contemplate. I think the global fan wants to see Arsenal vs Barcelona regularly, as much as possible. I think the European fan wants to see more big matches between top clubs because their domestic league is so predictable. I think from an English fans' perspective, this is what was so educating to me over the last 24 or 48 hours, going back 36 hours now -sorry this has been kind of a blur of a week, I haven't slept much.

"For the English fan they want to see more big matches, but as one Chelsea supporter wrote on a sign I saw online the other day -you still want your cold nights in Stoke. To me that sent a strong message that the EPL, football in the UK as a whole and the fan sentiment in England. We got it wrong and that's why we're here today apologising and to discuss with you. That doesn't mean a lot of our concerns and frustrations weren't addressed or we don't still have those concerns. None of our intentions as part of this project were to harm the Premier League or English...

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