- It really doesn’t matter if other clubs try to copy Arsenal’s approach
- How Arsenal evolved an approach to challenge ManC’s eternal stay at the top
By Tony Attwood
Arsenal, being a plc, is obliged by English law to produce detailed accounts each year, and very helpfully the excellent Swiss Ramble blog summarises the data for us in a financial overview. The full set of analyses is available to subscribers to the service and you can subscribe and get more information from the link published just above.
What I want to do in this article is highlight a few points and draw my own conclusions, and I want to start with the most obvious – Match Day Income. The comparative figures here and throughout are based on the changes over 10 years, from 2016 to 2025.
Now for the first three of the last ten years Arsenal made a profit but then had seven years of loss, coinciding with Emery’s reign and then Arteta’s recovery programme. What’s more, at the height of this loss making spell we had the COVID pandemic, at which time obviously player salaries and other expenses continued bu there was little income from crowds. In fact the income from math days dropped to a total of £3.8m, from a high two years before of almost £100m. Of course the club recovered, but those losses had to be met, and obviously have affected Arsenal, as they affected all clubs except ManC.
So in the pandemic year the losses were enormous and the club has been seeking to reduce these ever since, and although in the last set of figures the club has still been losing money the trend suggests that the next figures will show the club as being back in profit.
Now the question is asked sometimes: why can’t the club make money? And the answer is that the salaries of top players are rising year by year, and transfer fees are rising year by year. It seems self evident that if Arsenal want to win the league, as we all want them to do, they have to spend more and more.
However it is not all bad news because the although the club has lost money for each of the last seven seasons, the loss in the last set of account was £1.3m, the smallest loss since the profit declared in 2018. In short the losses have been declining year by year. And during the years in which the losses have been made those losses have been covered by the owners.
But we should note that these trials and tribulations both of handling Covid and recovering from the disaster of Emery’s reign left the club at its worse point with a debt of over £600,000,000, which is not easily wiped off the balance sheet.
Now at the same time Arsenal have made a number of people redundant, and at least one of the supporters’ clubs has raised protests about this, as they have done about the rising prices of everything Arsenal sells. But what they have not done (as far as I can see) is produced an analysis of where and how Arsenal could have avoided this. If they have produced such data I’d be glad to see a report.
Nevertheless over these ten years the match day income has risen by 17%. But inflation has risen by 33.5% over those ten years, so the money taken by Arsenal at match days has in no way kept in touch with inflation – in fact it has been running at half the rate.
Now of course some people do like to argue that the club has been fiddling the books, and that the losses are not real, or that the owners are taking money out of the club. Personally as a someone who challenged the VAT inspectors over their analysis of my company’s reports three times while I ran a plc, I think I I know a bit about company finances and just how detailed the financial analysis of auditors can be. And for what it is worth, I think any suggestion that Arsenal’s owners are fiddling the books is absolute and utter nonsense.
Arsenal last made a profit before taxation in 2018, and I expect that the 2026 accounts will show a profit for the first time. since then. And because of the way matters have been structured I suspect that as long as we don’t have any more pandemics or employ any maniac managers of the Tottenham Ho type, the club is now financially secure.
In fact I am not expecting a vast splurge in terms of buying players in the next window; rather I am taking it that Arsenal’s return to profit and Arsenal’s winning of the title last season are linked. Meanwhile I think we may watch with much amusement the massive losses that other clubs are making as they try to chase Arsenal
Arsenal make the bulk of their money from broadcasting and commercial activities and that of course includes European games. The success the club has had in this regard, is what is driving Arsenal’s financial success, which in turn makes money available for Arsenal to buy more players. Arsenal lose money on player trading naturally because the club is chasing the best players, but the constant improvement in the youth development programme can only help.
I anticipate a profit for the club in the next set of financial results, and expect this to continue thereafter as the club returns to profit for the club for the first time in eight years, which can only be for the good of the club and further enhance its success on the pitch.
