Gazidis launches aggressive defence of Arsenal's transfer policy at AGM

Ivan Gazidis, Arsenal's chief executive officer, did nothing to calm the Gunners' supporters who are worried about the future and thirsty for change.

Arsenal held its annual general meeting at the Emirates Stadium on Thursday, and Gazidis was heckled as he defended the Gunners' spending and booed by shareholders. The CEO claimed that "objective metrics" show the club is out-performing the big clubs, and referenced a £200-million spend on transfer fees in the last three years.

"There are many agendas at play and many stories during a transfer window - only a fraction of which are accurate," Gazidis said, according to the Guardian's David Hytner. "In that environment, it becomes very difficult to see clearly through the noise. Fortunately, there is one very accurate and objective way to assess how well and how consistently clubs perform in this area (transfers) over time.

"This method is accurate enough to be the industry standard way to analyse the efficiency of spending of football clubs. It is very simply to compare team performance by a series of objective metrics, usually league position or points against expenditure on transfers.

"No club has a perfect record every year under this scrutiny but Arsenal has probably been, of the big clubs certainly, the most consistently over-performing team over time. That is despite the criticism we get and the emotion here in the room and despite some very loud subjective narratives and a great deal of inaccurate information. In fact, on an objective basis, we perform very well and have over a long period of time."

One shareholder interrupted Gazidis' justification of Arsenal's recent record, saying, per The Associated Press' Rob Harris: "Is losing 10-2 to Bayern Munich successful?"

Sir Chips Keswick, Arsenal's chairman, was also booed, but was re-elected as a director with 99.7 percent of the vote. Of course, that's largely because Stan Kroenke, the majority shareholder, and Alisher Burkhanovich Usmanov, owner of Red and White Securities, own 97.09 of the Gunners' shares.

When a question-and-answer session was brought to a halt and the meeting was declared as over, boos and a slow handclap were heard.

Gazidis, who was reportedly paid £2.6 million in 2016-17, was appointed as Arsenal's CEO in January 2009.