Ivan Gazidis on Thursday evening implored a gathering of Arsenal supporters to unify behind the club for next season. After a period of division that he admitted made him feel “real regret”, the club’s chief executive, speaking at an end-of-season event at the Emirates, urged the fanbase for a clean slate. “There has been disagreement. There has been a lack of unity and a dissatisfaction. The board knows that. I beg you, please come together and give our manager and this team support. I want the atmosphere to be united and it has been a struggle because we haven’t had that.”

While Gazidis insists work is ongoing to try to improve in a variety of departments, he still found himself having to defend the way the club is run. He reiterated the board view that Arsène Wenger has all the qualities they look for in a manager, then launched a firm defence of the majority owner Stan Kroenke, who at the end of last season dismissed a substantial takeover bid offered by the shareholder Alisher Usmanov.

“I don’t really understand the argument that Stan Kroenke is only there to make money,” Gazidis said. “All he has done in my interactions with him is to try to support us in what we try to do. He’s very focused on achieving success for the football. He hasn’t put debt on the football club. He has been nothing but supportive. He’s the guy who wanted us to go out and spend the money we generated from commercial deals, which we did in signing players like Alexis Sánchez.”

Gazidis explained that the controversial £3m consultancy fee that was briefly paid to KSE, Kroenke’s sports business, was offered to him by the club chairman and that the American cancelled it once he realised it was upsetting supporters. “Stan, who comes to the AGMs, saw that and said, I don’t want to get involved in that, I’ll just waive the fee and my company will provide those services for nothing. The idea he would spend hundreds of millions of pounds investing in this football club to take out a million quid a year is frankly preposterous. The reason that he gets stick – and in my mind it’s the equivalent of kicking a dog – is that results on the field are not what we [really] want. That’s the essential issue.

“There may be people who want an oligarch owner and I understand that is an attractive solution for some people but I believe we are stronger and can be successful pushing this football club forward and nobody has ever held us back. Stan Kroenke has been nothing but supportive. All of our conversations are based around how we get to the level where we are winning the Premier League.”