Orange face; black heart: David Dein is personally hollowing out the soul of Arsenal Football Club

Q: What's worse than an eerie, jeans-rocking hotshot Russian billionaire with an immorally-acquired pile, a risible semi-beard and a fleeting interest in English football?

A: A fat, balding, greasy old Russian billionaire with an immorally-acquired pile, vicious lawyers and a fleeting interest in your English football club.

It's close — mighty close — but Alisher Usmanov takes it.

And this, my friends, is the grubby territory in which we Arsenal fans now find ourselves: rating football’s bloated Soviet super-fiends.

While it would have previously been impossible to view Roman Abramovich in a preferential sense (over any other object in the known universe, living or dead), one orange-faced former Arsenal linchpin has succeeded in bringing about this minor miracle: by saddling our beloved club with a Russian oligarch even more disreputable and despicable than Chelsea's whey-faced pension plunderer.

Step up, David Dein: the self-styled Messiah who now finds himself jostling for contention on the All Time Football Villains podium, next to the likes of Kenyon, Edwards, Bates and the amassing hordes of crooked foreign sugar daddies like Usmanov. How, one wonders, did it come to this?

Glib put-downs aside, Dein's literally breathtaking desire to move heaven and earth to sell Arsenal to dubious American and Russian uber-investors (read that again: move heaven and earth to sell Arsenal to dubious American and Russian uber-investors) has genuinely left me feeling furious and crushed in equal measure.

…Which is far from a good combination. Remembering what it’s like to be a lump-throated, brooding, powerless adolescent does one no favours on a bleary-eyed Tuesday morning at work. Chairman Peter-Hill Wood chillingly described Dein last month as the “architect” of Arsenal’s just-beginning saga of instability and turmoil. Never, for me, has that word carried such menace, or signified such a heartbreaking blueprint as the one that looms ahead.

The situation beggars belief. What on earth possessed Dein to begin crudely and aggressively hollowing out the venerable infrastructure of English football's most treasured club — a club he once helped dazzle the world with its modern, Wenger-branded incarnation of free-scoring teams full of Highbury-made superstars?

The answer, of course, lies therein. David Dein believes it is his Arsenal that have reached the cusp of immortality; his years of globe-schmoozing, of clearing and shoring-up Wenger’s path that have chiselled the club into the sparkling, poised vehicle it is today. But Dein has made that classic egotists’ mistake: substituting the part (his part) for the whole. When he speaks of what is ‘crucial to Arsenal’s future’, the ‘Arsenal’ in question is simply the Arsenal of Dein’s mind’s eye — a club made in the London businessman’s fallow, megalomaniacal image.

Make no mistake: Arsenal was there long before this speculative chancer, and even longer before the Murdoch-inspired hubris of the 1990s — the swollen footballing puberty which made craven, turn-tail millionaires of every one of Dein's jackpot generation. His, ultimately, is a cautionary tale of the highest order: fattened and blinded by the gruesome stratospherics of the modern football machine (the machine that made him the bullying cash-calf he is today), David Dein’s soul, intellect and loyalty have been irreparably derailed.

Accordingly, his warped notions of how Arsenal should ‘progress’ are, of course, as transparently self-serving as they are misguided. What, in the grand scheme of things, does an organisation like Arsenal Football Club really need? Step back and consider, in layman’s terms, a happy, successful, respected, family-owned club with bulging gates, loyal fans, an incomparable manager and a crop of abundantly talented young players; consider a steady, honest business with exciting new premises and an on-target repayment plan — Christ! Every sports club or business in England would weep tears of blood to boast such a sturdy, successful ship.

As I write, this Dein-less ship currently sits clear at the top of the Premiership, and top of its Champions League group, having recently dispatched one of Europe’s most highly-fancied contenders, Sevilla, 3-0 in front of 120,000 enraptured eyes. Pay a visit to the Emirates any time in the near future (if you can find a seat) and you’ll come away with a much better idea of what Arsenal Football Club is ‘lacking’.

Now consider that the man who professes his “love” for Arsenal at every available opportunity has decreed that dragging the club through a hostile takeover, dismantling the powers of the country’s longest-serving board and injecting an unsustainable speedball of immorally-obtained roubles is the way forward. Forgive me if I have failed to spot the romance here. To say Dein is fooling no one would be the biggest understatement since a young Reichstag clerk casually remarked that he felt Hitler was becoming a little “narky” with the Jews.

The truth is, of course, that David Dein probably cares for the Ruskies and the Yanks as little as Peter Hill-Wood does. But all sentiments have been cast aside — including any shred of care or respect for Arsenal itself — in his now-unfettered crusade to become both club chairman and (moreover) the shiny-toothed public pivot of a Deinist-Arsenal superfuture.

The plain facts, however, will forever convict him: Dein, an investor, invested; and, some years later, he got an investor’s return — to the tune of £75m of dirty Russian notes. Job done; transaction complete. Moreover, it seems to have entirely escaped Dein that Arsenal is just a football club — not a globe-gobbling corporate canvas to be leached, bleached and scrawled on with ludicrous multinational designs.

You got yours, David, and so fittingly, too. How I wish that you had left us to ours.

The awful reality, however, is that the fuse is now lit, and our fate lies essentially in the hands of Stan Kroenke — the American who surely will only take a certain amount of fiscal ‘convincing’ from the Dein-Usmanov vehicle to relinquish the key to the city: those all-important, balance-tipping (and again, Dein-brokered) shares. Nice work, David. You vile, poisoned, retributive, sanctimonious, puffed-up, fickle, graceless, shortsighted excuse for a person. What an awful, crude, unnecessary mess.

If we can force ourselves to treat Dein as a human in any manner, it can only be to ascribe him this sorrowful epitaph:

Streaking oil on white sand. Grinning crazedly. Burning the past. Irradiating the future.

For these, apparently, are the words endlessly repeating in his delusional mind.

Thank you, David Dein. For selling out the club to a Manchester United fan; for colluding with a despicable mercenary; for schmoozing brazenly with Spurs; for abusing and destroying everything Arsenal gave you. Thank you so much. Rest assured: there will never be a single Arsenal fan, present or future, who is not made fully aware of the ‘part’ you have played in our history.

Vultures may circle, but we must stand firm.

A version of this article is featured in this month's Gooner, Arsenal's premier fanzine

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For the latest on the deplorable affair entitled "Usmanov and his bully-boy lawyers create a PR implosion by shutting down the blog of former Usbek ambassador Craig Murray (and also the blogs of Tim Ireland, Boris Johnson and countless others in the process) because he vehemently denounced the corpulent thug for the corpulent thug he is", visit the specially created bloggerheads site:

http://b-heads.blogspot.com/

For Murray’s original (and now removed) article, click here:

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/09/380565.html

Let's see, as an experiment, whether Usmanov's shadowy net police are thorough enough to incinerate a mere whippersnapper, such as myself, for offering a few droplets of 'untruth' to the world...