Arsenal latest news: Gunners chief Ivan Gazidis handed £919,000 bonus last year boosting wage to £2.61m

MONEYBALL mastermind Billy Beane has hailed Arsenal as the model for how to run a football club.

More and more Arsenal fans are unhappy with the regime of owner Stan Kroenke after years of failing to challenge for football’s biggest prizes.

It is now claimed that chief executive Ivan Gazidis received a £919,000 bonus last season, taking his total package to £2.61m, despite the team dropping out of the Premier League top four for the first time in 20 years.

But Beane, executive vice president of Oakland Athletics and pioneer of data analysis in elite sport, is a fan of Arsenal and of the way it is run.

Beane, speaking at the Leaders in Sport Summit, said: “I’m hugely fond of the Arsenal team – the team, the stadium, everything.

“It’s an admirable football club. It’s the whole entity when all is said and done.”

Arsenal recently released accounts for the 2016/17 season which showed record income of £422.8m.

Kroenke is now attempting to buy out minority shareholder Alisher Usmanov.

Some fans already believe Kroenke is using Arsenal as a cash cow to support his American sports investments and believe taking the club private would only cement the team’s position as also-rans in the Premier League and Champions League.

Although Beane transformed the on-field fortunes of the Athletics, he made it clear the bottom line was turning the baseball team into a viable business.

Beane has been linked with a Chinese-American group consortium interested in buying Championship side Barnsley and believes his Moneyball principles could work in English football.

Beane, who fell in love with football on a trip to London with his wife in the early 2000s, said: “We were Leicester City, we were Burnley. We were competing against teams with much bigger revenues.

“I was attracted to the emotion. If there’s that much emotion, there’s probably a lot of emotional decisions going on here.

“There’s a lot of things happening on a football field that you can collect and if you hire smart enough guys they can figure out the correlation between them and winning.”

And making money.

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