Kroenke buys £1.7m share from Arsenal chairman

American sports billionaire Stan Kroenke has bought another 200 shares in Arsenal, taking his stake to 29.9 per cent and leaving him on the brink of the threshold at which he would have to make a takeover bid for the club.

He bought the latest parcel of shares this morning from the club's chairman, Peter Hill-Wood, for £1.7m; earlier this week he spent £3.6m on 427 shares from the estate of British industrialist Ernest Harrison.

The flurry of activity seems to suggest that the 62-year-old, who also owns the Denver Nuggets basketball team and half of the NFL side the St Louis Rams, is lining himself up to make a bid for the club. However, the fact that he bought the shares from Hill-Wood gives credence to the growing belief that the club is happy for Kroenke, already a non-executive director, to be a major player in Arsenal's future.

After initially dismissing Kroenke rather sniffily by saying he didn't want "his sort" at the club, Hill-Wood could now be considered a fully signed-up member of the Stan Kroenke fan club. At last month's AGM it was Hill-Wood who stifled a question from the floor that would have forced the American to admit his intentions for the club. [Under the Takeover Panel's rule 2.8, anyone who makes an unambiguous statement about their intentions towards a company is prevented from making a formal move for it within six months.]

The view at the Emirates would appear to be a case of better the devil you know. Kroenke's background in sport, and the relative transparency of his business dealings, compares favourably with that of his principal rival for the club, Alisher Usmanov. The mysterious Uzbek billionaire owns a quarter of the club's shares, but has a chequered business history including a jail term "for complicity in an official's receiving bribes and extortion". ·