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Vinai Venkatesham

Vinai Venkatesham

ARSENAL chief executive officer Vinai Venkatesham has been instrumental in transforming the club on and off the pitch so it came as a surprise to many when he announced he would be leaving at the end of this season. “It’s a hard decision to leave. You can sense from the passion in my voice how much I love the football club – I love what the club stands for, I love our values, I love the fans, I love the people we have working for the club,” Venkatesham tells the GG2 Power List.

“I think the job of a chief executive is to leave at a time when the club is in a great moment. If you leave at a time when the club isn’t doing so well, I don’t think many people will ask ‘why are you leaving?’, he laughs. Venkatesham joined Arsenal in 2010 as head of global partnerships before becoming chief commercial officer. In 2018, he was made managing director and later CEO, giving him the daunting challenge of steering the club after the departures of manager Arsene Wenger and CEO Ivan Gazidis. The 42-year-old admits it was a “period of great change” as Wenger had been at the club for 22 years and Gazidis for 10 years. “Arsene (Wenger) is obviously a remarkable manager and a wonderful human being – it was a real giant of the game leaving. Ivan was the chief executive when I joined and somebody that I had worked with for a long period of time,” said Venkatesham. “When I became chief executive, it was actually my sixth job at the club.


One of the really positive things when you are promoted internally, is it’s a real sign of trust. It’s a group of people that have worked with you a long time, that respect and value you and think that you can do more.” The last years of Wenger and the year of his replacement Unai Emery saw little success on the pitch. Venkatesham says his goal was to change the culture of the entire club and that started with the hiring of former club captain Mikel Arteta as manager, seen as a risk at the time in some quarters as the Spaniard had never held a managerial role previously. “When Mikel came in, the club was not performing at the level that everybody associated with the club expects us to,” said Venkatesham.

“The history and heritage of this football club means that the expectations are always high, that we are competing for the biggest trophies in the game, both in England and also in Europe. “We’ve also had to grow our commercial revenues so that we can fund the business.” He added: “The other big success we’ve had over that period is the continual growth of women’s football. We’re just delighted to see over the last three or four years, the acceleration of the growth of women’s football.

A great example of that is our recent game against Manchester United at the Emirates Stadium that was completely sold out and set a new record for ticket sales and attendance for a women’s game in this country. “But it’s much more than just the players on the pitch. It’s the culture that we’ve created throughout the club with everybody being together, having a forward and positive mindset, always behaving in the right way.

“Turning the fortunes of the club round and reconnecting the club with its supporters is what I am most proud of.” Though he has had an incredibly successful career in sport not only at Arsenal but also as commercial director for the London 2012 Olympic Games, Venkatesham admits he didn’t set out for a career in sport. Born in West London to parents who had immigrated to the UK from India, Venkatesham’s father was a hospital doctor and later became a GP at Chiswick Health Centre with his mother becoming the practice manager. His only sibling, an older sister followed in their parents’ footsteps and became a GP, taking over the Chiswick practice. When asked why he didn’t go down the medical field, Venkatesham says: “When you are surrounded by it, it goes one of two ways, you either think ‘right, that’s what I’m going to do or I am going to do something completely different!’” Venkatesham’s foray into the sports sector came after London was awarded the 2012 Olympic Games. “As a really proud Londoner, I thought, ‘wow, this the biggest event that’s going to happen in my city in my lifetime. I just want to be part of it’,” he said. “It was really that London being awarded the privilege to host the games that I guess catapulted me into the into the sports industry.”

Venkatesham was tasked to raise £2 billion in private finance, with £800 million of that coming in the form of sponsorship. “It was a monumental challenge,” he admits. “I joined having never done a sponsorship deal before in my life. I had no experience in any of those areas. I kind of learned and developed and acquired the skills on the job, which was remarkable.” His success with the London games led him to joining Arsenal football club. Looking back on his career, Venkatesham admits he has been fortunate to work for organisations who have driven diversity and inclusivity, and he has strived to implement that at Arsenal. “There’s been a massive focus at Arsenal to drive greater inclusivity. The executive team has 50-50 male female split, which is in a football club is incredibly rare.

It has been fantastic for the business because I firmly believe that diverse organisations perform better,” he said. “We’ve also done quite a lot of work to encourage people, either from an ethnic minority background and or specifically south Asian background, to think about how they might be able to develop a career in football.” When asked about him being a role model and blazing a trail for others, Venkatesham humbly says it is a difficult question for him to answer. “When I announced that I will be leaving Arsenal, I was really touched by how many people got in touch with me, either with the same ethnic background as mine, or others from a different ethnic minority background, to say what it has meant for them to see somebody with my background being able to reach the position of chief executive at such a high-profile organization,” said Venkatesham. As for his next role, Venkatesham says he hasn’t thought that far ahead and is just focused on spending time with his family this summer. “I have a been here (Arsenal) for 14 years.

The job is enormous and incredible privilege but it’s also 110 miles an hour, 365 days of the year, seven days a week,” he said. “I’ve never taken a break throughout my whole career. I’m going to have a little bit of time off over the summer holidays with the kids. And then I’m sure I’ll find an exciting challenge that’s going to be just as demanding and require just as much as we go forward.”

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