Arsenal had reached the nadir when Vinai Venkatesham decided it was worth addressing all the club’s staff to explain why things were not quite so bleak as they appeared in the league table and in posts shared by fans on social media.
They had lost the first three league games of the 2021-22 season, scored none, conceded nine goals, including five in a demoralising defeat to Manchester City in their most recent game. In Arsenal’s worst start to a season in 67 years, they were bottom of the table.
Venkatesham had been at Arsenal for eight years but had only been chief executive for the last 12 months. He had been promoted, at the relatively young age of 39, in troubling times, the club ending the previous season eighth with an FA Cup trophy papering over deep cracks.
Venkatesham joined Arsenal in 2010 before quickly rising through the ranks (Photo: Getty)“While we would love to jump from where we are to where we want to be in an instant, we need to be realistic that the gap is too large to do that,” Venkatesham wrote to Arsenal’s 500-plus staff.
“As such, our activity this window has been focused on youth.”
He listed the players they had signed, noting their ages: Nuno Tavares (21), Ben White (23), Sambi Lokonga (21), Martin Odegaard (22), Aaron Ramsdale (23) and Takehiro Tomiyasu (22).
Mikel Arteta was under enormous pressure – it was the closest he has come to being sacked. But over the next three years, Arsenal became title challengers for the first time in decades and the club’s revenues almost doubled from £340m to £615m, transforming Venkatesham’s standing in football.
From oil trader to Deloitte strategy consultant, to London 2012 Olympic Games commercial manager, to various roles at Arsenal in the charity, marketing and commercial departments, to one of the most sought-after executives in the game.
Since he stepped down in July 2024, Newcastle United are believed to have tried to tempt him to oversee Saudi Arabia’s ambitious project, but Tottenham Hotspur chairman Daniel Levy, who he has known for several years, convinced him to bring his considerable expertise to the bitterest rivals of his former club.
Why did clubs want him so badly? How does he operate? What can his past at Arsenal tell us about Tottenham’s future?
Under Venkatesham, the Arsenal academy enabled stars like Ethan Nwaneri to shine (Photo: Getty)
As Arsenal’s managing director for two years, between 2018 and 2020, Venkatesham had observed the work of Raul Sanllehi, the head of football, in establishing a new club model more fitting for the modern game.
Arsenal’s most recent success had come in the all-powerful, all-seeing manager era, when Arsene Wenger had been in charge. But football was changing.
The manager became “head coach” – focused solely on the players and preparing them for matches. In the new structure, which they drew in a diagram full of boxes and flow arrows, the first team sat at the top, the academy the bottom – two crucial departments forming the top and bottom vertebrae in the club’s spine.
In a world of increasing spending, Sanllehi had analysed successful clubs of any given period, and found academy players at their heart.
It is a philosophy Venkatesham has carried into his work, academy teams playing the same style of football as the first team to ready them for the leap.
Between the two main departments sat all the high performance, data, analytics and medical staff, underpinned by a football operations lead – controlling the budget, the logistics, player contracts – and the technical director, the conduit between the academy and first team, who deals with transfers.
A data and AI specialist
One source, speaking on condition of anonymity to protect relationships, said that Venkatesham had little dealings with agents while at Arsenal, preferring to delegate responsibilities to experts in respective fields.
Venkatesham sees the people around him as crucial to his work and the success of the club. He believes great hires make great clubs, and would rather take longer getting it right, than employ someone quickly to fill a hole.
Starting work at Spurs this summer, it will be an uncertain time for existing staff at the club, particularly chief football officer Scott Munn – who has been widely tipped to leave – and technical director Johan Lange.
Arsenal were one of the bigger clubs to bet early on data. Now Venkatesham considers artificial intelligence the game’s next powerful edge finder.
He places data at the heart of everything, from training sessions, to games, to medicine, to scouring the transfer market for value and comparing fees. But the sheer volume of data poses new problems that AI can solve.
“It can help you get through data quickly and find conclusions you might not otherwise find,” Venkatesham said at the recent Financial Times Business of Football Summit during a discussion about transfers.
This is one area in which he excels.
The former Arsenal chief executive is known for championing the women’s game (Photo: Getty)
His ethos is to be as well prepared for the transfer window as possible, but ready for the inevitable unpredictability that will ensue. Planning for a summer window begins in October time – around eight months in advance.
He considers transfers a sort of inexact science, breaking them down into “macro” and “micro” factors. Macros such as the profile of the player, how many are available that fit it, how many clubs are also in the market for one.
Then micro factors that include age, nationality, if they have Premier League experience. He seems to enjoy the fun and games and brinkmanship of negotiation.
The biggest challenge any club faces, he believes, is balancing the short-term and the long-term. And everyone has to weigh this in their thinking.
A source who has been in the room with Sanllehi says that he is calm, measured, sharp, brilliantly intelligent. Softly spoken and an excellent communicator.
Easing tensions with the board
Venkatesham is credited by many of the people The i Paper spoke to with reconnecting Arsenal’s fans with the club when he became chief executive. Another skillset that will come in handy at Tottenham, where fans have staged protests about ticket prices, called on Levy to resign, expressed anger with the ownership.
A disconnect had opened at Arsenal towards the end of the Wenger years. Tensions simmered in the stadium. Swathes of empty seats could be found where season-ticket holders had not turned up, and, so apathetic, had not even bothered to pass on their ticket.
Working with Arsenal Supporters’ Trust (AST), they introduced the “use it or lose it” policy, meaning season-ticket holders had to attend a certain amount of games, give unused tickets to friends or sell them on the ticket exchange – Venkatesham agreeing to remove the fee – or risk losing them.
Tim Payton, AST spokesperson and long-standing board member, describes it elegantly as “rebuilding the atmosphere at the Emirates”. It got bums on seats.
“Suddenly the ground was fuller again with a much better atmosphere,” Payton adds.
“You’re running hand-in-hand with a more successful team fans want to watch, but there was a lot of improvement on ticketing.
“He listened to us and reversed the decision to remove the senior citizen discount. He greatly expanded the concessions for young adults and juniors.”
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Venkatesham oversaw a mammoth consultation process, with fan groups, forums, ex-players, players’ parents, about new artwork for the stadium. Fans felt like they belonged to their club again.
“He’s got a feel of the fans’ role in the game,” Payton says. “He was willing to engage, he was straight with supporters. He listened to us. You could trust what he said. It was a loss for Arsenal.”
Cool in a crisis
Venkatesham championed the women’s team, pushed for them to be an integral part of the club, and had the vision that they would play home games at the Emirates.
He weathered unpredictable storms and navigated crises. The game stopped by the pandemic, forcing a raft of redundancies to cut costs and squeeze funds for the first team, which included making mascot Gunnersaurus redundant – a decision that caused an inevitable backlash.
He saw captains go on strike, key players attacked with a knife, Granit Xhaka swearing at his own fans.
He was chief executive when Arsenal agreed with their Big Six counterparts to join the breakaway European Super League.
Even then, as fans protested in their thousands, “he was the only chief executive of the Big Six in that remarkable 72 hours who made himself available,” Payton recalls. “He had a call with me in the middle of all that. Afterwards he was very straight that it had been a major error.”
And during all this Arsenal got better. Turning an eighth-place side into one finishing in successive seconds and reaching the Champions League quarter-finals for the first time in 14 years before he stepped down.
Are Arsenal fans worried what he might achieve at Spurs?
“Well, he’s not a miracle worker, is he?” Payton says, laughing. With possibly the faintest hint of nerves.
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