Simon Kuper has a long and (as one would expect) very interesting article about Arsenal in the Financial Times yesterday. He argues that austerity is in Arsenal’s culture. Once known as the Bank of England club, it has been run cautiously for decades. That has been reinforced by Wenger”s typically French suspicion of rootless international capital.
He quotes Billy Beane of the Oaklands A’s baseball team who said, ‘When I think of Wenger, I think of Warren Buffett. Wenger runs his football club like he is going to own it for 100 years.’
Simon Kuper has a long and (as one would expect) very interesting article about Arsenal in the Financial Times yesterday. He argues that austerity is in Arsenal’s culture. Once known as the Bank of England club, it has been run cautiously for decades. That has been reinforced by Wenger”s typically French suspicion of rootless international capital.
He quotes Billy Beane of the Oaklands A’s baseball team who said, ‘When I think of Wenger, I think of Warren Buffett. Wenger runs his football club like he is going to own it for 100 years.’
Kuper rehearses some well known but still significant facts. Arsenal’s ticket prices are the highest in English, and probably global, football, with this year’s cheapest season ticket costing £985. Consequently, Arsenal now earn £3.3m per home match, almost double the amount at Spurs.
Since 2007 the club has made total profits of £195m, of which £178m have come from selling players. Interest on the club’s debt have dropped to a manageable £13.5m with a net debt of £98.9m, The burden of the move to the Emirates is lifting.
Arsenal’s wage costs have risen sharply in recent years and reached 61 per cent of turnover. But the Premier League’s average wages-to-turnover ratio is 70 per cent. Chelsea, Manchester City and Manchester United pay higher wages than Arsenal.
Football economics guru Stefan Szymanski suggests that Arsenal were waiting for the moment when prices collapsed and they could snap up greater players on the cheap. But that moment never came. Football clubs rack up unpayable debts and live. No English club has folded for good since Wigan Borough in 1931.
Somewhat to my surprise, Arsenal chief executive Ivan Gazidis is quoted as saying that financial fair play was never part of Arsenal’s strategy. Perhaps they have never said explictity that it is, but many football analysts believe it is part of their calculations.
Financial fair play does seem to be limiting clubs’ spending slightly. Spending on transfers by Premier League clubs dropped 23 per cent from 2011 to 2102. But, as Kuper says, it is unlikely that FFP will transform football.