ARSENAL’s remarkable Premier League title challenge this season is not only down to manager Mikel Arteta and his hungry young team, but also leaders behind the scenes, such as CEO Vinai Venkatesham.
Anyone who watched the Amazon Prime series All Or Nothing, a documentary based on the club, would’ve seen the day-to-day leadership Venkatesham shows to steer the club in the right direction.
Venkatesham’s support for Arteta when ushering out club captain Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, who had become a disruptive influence, was an example of tough decisions the CEO has to make.
“Like many people that work at this football club, I spend pretty much every waking minute thinking about how we can improve and how we can achieve our goals and objectives going forward,” he says.
At 42, not only is Venkatesham the youngest CEO at any Premier League club, he is also the only ethnic minority head of a club.
Venkatesham told the GG2 Power List that one of his goals is to develop a culture of diversity at Arsenal.
“We have rebuilt the executive team at the Club, which will be 50:50 male/female by the end of the season, leading the way for diversity in football which has traditionally been a male dominated industry,” said Venkatesham.
“This is part of a wider strategy to drive greater diversity and inclusion at all levels of the club for the benefit of the industry as a whole.
“Earlier this season Arsenal hosted a South Asians in Football event at Emirates Stadium where I opened the event as keynote speaker in front of 300 current or aspiring South Asian football players and staff.”
Whilst all eyes are fixed on the men’s team potentially winning their first Premier League title in almost 20 years, there has also been sustained progress with the Arsenal women’s team under Venkatesham’s direction.
“In the summer Arsenal player Rafaelle Souza captained Brazil to win the Copa America, and Arsenal players Leah Williamson captained the team and were player of the tournament Beth Mead in England winning the European Championships; inspiring a generation of new players in Britain and beyond,” said Venkatesham.
“Arsenal continue to lead the way in growing the game, breaking the record attendance for a Women’s Super League game earlier this season by selling 53,000 tickets, and recently opening a new dedicated building for our Women’s players at our training ground.
“We continue to compete at the top of the Women’s Super League and Champions League, following the appointment of an at the time relatively unknown Head Coach in Jonas Eidevall.”
Venkatesham urged other clubs to embrace women’s football so it can grow in revenue and become ‘financially sustainable’.
“Long-term, I’m really excited about the future of women’s football. I think there’s a huge opportunity ahead. The WSL is on the right journey, getting more and more competitive, but we want to get to a point where lots of teams are investing heavily in women’s football and then you’ll have a very vibrant WSL,” he said.
“The reason I’m so excited now is it feels like, for so long, we have been really trying to push women’s football and it feels like we’re reaching that tipping point where everything we’ve been hoping for, everything we’ve wanted it to be, we can start seeing it.
“You can see already more clubs investing in their training facilities, in their squads, so I think it’s coming. You’re seeing more and more clubs taking women’s football as seriously as we think they should be.”
The Arsenal CEO’s desire for his club to be inclusive also saw him hail the impact of the LGBT football group Arsenal Gaygooners - which has more than 1,400 members across 51 countries - when it celebrated its 10th anniversary earlier this month.
Venkatesham described them as ‘true trailblazers and fearless campaigners’, and added: “They have had a profound influence on ensuring visibility for the LGBT+ community in football and wider sport.
“They embody the values of the club with a determination to push forward in a courageous pursuit of progress. We’re so proud of their ground breaking work and everyone at Arsenal wishes Gaygooners a very happy 10th anniversary.”
After reading economics and management at Oxford, Venkatesham began his career at accounting giant Arthur Andersen, but the collapse of the firm in 2002 following the Enron scandal would cost him the job.
After a brief stint as an oil trader, he would be again on familiar terrain at Deloitte. Spotting an opening for a commercial manager for the upcoming 2012 London Olympics would, however, became a turning point.
“I wasn’t necessarily looking to leave Deloitte, but I thought, this is the world’s biggest sporting event, happening in my home city: the definition of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” he said.
The task ahead was risky, with a target of £2 billion to raise from sponsors, but he decided to take up the gauntlet:
“I was young enough – I didn’t have kids, didn’t have a mortgage – I was able to be drawn into this exciting challenge.”
By 2010, when his office was closed after securing the target, he had already found a niche for himself.
He says, “I went from having no experience of working in sport to having done some of the world’s biggest sponsorship, hospitality, ticketing and licensing deals.”
He continues to support major sporting events of importance to Britain on an unpaid basis in his free time. He was on the board for World Athletics Championships in London in 2017 and currently on the Board of the British Olympic Association
Since joining Arsenal in 2010, Venkatesham has worked his way up the career ladder, from head of global partnership to the role of chief commercial officer, which he began in August 2014. He has played a significant role in expanding Arsenal’s range of sponsors and is credited with playing a leading role in negotiations for the club’s new kit deal, which has seen them switching from Puma to Adidas.
Alongside his current role as Arsenal CEO, he also sits on the Board of the European Clubs Association (ECA), the Board of the UCCSA (joint venture between UEFA and the ECA which commercialises the rights to UEFA Club Competitions) and also on the UEFA Club Competitions Committee which is one of the most important committees in European Football.
Though Venkatesham considers himself as a private person, he is fully aware of the ‘weight of responsibility’ that comes with the role, and also acknowledges that he would be a role model for many because of his ethnicity – son of a doctor who came to England on his own from Hyderabad in south India in the early 1970s.
Settled in Twickenham, the family ran a medical practice in Chiswick, which is now manned by his elder sister, also a doctor.
Venkatesham lives in Hertfordshire with his wife and three children.
