Arsenal are flush with cash
By: Bob | September 24th, 2007
Suspend your short-term memory loss and think all the way back to July of this year. Of the Big Four teams in England’s Premier League it looked like Arsenal were the ones that were most vulnerable. They had lost Thierry Henry, Jose Antonio Reyes and Freddie Ljungberg. They barely registered a blip on the transfer market. They were coming off a below par year by their recent standards and their main competitors were all being powered by deep pocketed foreigners.
What a difference a couple of months make. Arsenal are on top of the Premier League table and today it was announced that they are, in fact, the richest club in England thanks to the revenue generated at their new North London digs.
Revenue at the Gunners surged 46 percent to 200.8 million pounds in fiscal 2007 after the move to the Emirates Stadium from Highbury, which had 21,500 fewer seats. Real Madrid, the world’s biggest soccer team by revenue, had sales of 351 million euros ($495 million), or 244.7 million pounds, in the year to June 30.
Arsenal’s sales are about 19 million pounds below the 315 million euros Barcelona reported Aug. 13 for the year through June, making the London team the third-biggest in the world on that measure.
That wealth, combined with Arsene Wenger’s frugality during the summer transfer window, means that the Arsenal boss has somewhere in the neighborhood of $142 million to spend on new players.
Not that Arsenal were ever truly in trouble, but this is still a remarkable turn of events. A few months ago if you were to be told that a team in London would be on top of both the table and the money table at this point in the season while another team in London would have lost its manager and would be on the verge on imploding, you probably would have pegged Arsenal to be the club in turmoil, right?
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Comments
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I was definitely in the large pool of people expecting Arsenal to roll over and die this season. I thought that without Henry and Ljungberg (and with no obviously qualified replacements), they’d be deader than dead by Thanksgiving. I’m glad to be wrong – I hate two-horse races (despite being an SPL fan) and I hope to see at least a four-way title race well into the new year.
Posted from
United States
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Arsenal fans can only hope that Alisher Usmanov doesn’t put his oar in and fuck everything up.
Posted from
United States -
Chris is spot on but becuase Arsene is shocking when it comes to spending big money compared to his brilliance at bringing in people for next to nothing that turn into legends he should just slap all that $142m on Messi.
PLEASE. PLEASE. Messi is gonna be better than
Maradona and he and Cesc are best mates.Posted from
United Kingdom
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