- By Tony Attwood
Where do Arsenal stand when it comes to money in relation to other clubs? Is being in Europe that big a deal?
What we can say straight off is that the sort of rows and bitter arguments that clubs like Crystal Palace and Nottingham Forest are engaged in, in terms of whether the club owners and directors have an unacceptable involvement in a rival club, don’t seem to affect Arsenal.
And that is good to know at a moment that Nottingham Forest appear to be in “correspondence” (or is that a flaming row?) with Uefa arguing that Crystal Palace should not be in the Europa League next season because they are part of a multi-club group which includes Palace and Olympiakos.
But despite the dangers, multi-club ownership seems to be a growing fashion for the mega-wealthy despite raising problems if two clubs owned or at least within the sphere of influence of the same director, turn up in the same competition. So for example Nottingham Forest have to keep an eye on the progress of Olympiakos if both teams qualify for Europe as both for a while had the same owner in Evangelos Marinakis.
Of course what happens when there is any suspicion of dual influence is that all the clubs that didn’t qualify, and those clubs where someone has stepped down before, make a big fuss, and everyone else starts thinking just how many teams need to be disqualified for them to claim a position in whatever competition is in question.
Normally what owners have to do is put money in a “blind trust” and promise to be good, and this time it didn’t matter too much since Forest didn’t beat Chelsea and so they miss out on the Champions League and so can’t play Olympiakos. At which point the owner closes down the blind trust, retakes control, and off we go once more.
And “off we go” is about right, because of course all the multi-billionaires who own multiple clubs know this sort of thing can happen, so they have everything prepared. Thus when the problem arises the blind trust is there, the decisions are made already, and life continues as normal with Uefa once again pretending they have everything in hand, and the media lap up the whole pretence.
The point, which the media so dutifully ignore, is that running a business is all about making decisions for the future, including quite a few “what if” decisions. Such as “what if there is another pandemic and football grounds are closed again,” and so forth. Those who become quite good at this sort of game that they become mega-rich. They don’t get caught out.
But equally, they do like to make life difficult for each other, for the general rule of the mega-rich is “trust no one”. Thus Forest have been making their point to Uefa that a certain John Textor owns some of Crystal Palace and some of Lyon, and they might, maybe, perhaps, just play each other in the Europa. Mind you, we should note that Lyon themselves are under investigation because their own finances are in a bit of a state, and the last time I had a peak they seemed to owe about half a billion pounds.
Now this type of debt worries the footballing authorities since a lot of this dosh will be owed to other football clubs, who are reliant on being paid in order for them to pay the money they owe to other football clubs, who in turn need the money to pay…. well you can see where this goes.
So is this all just shadow-boxing? Well, maybe not, in the sense that if you get to the Champions League final that can earn your club about half a billion euros from Europe across the season, so just competing throughout the year is worthwhile for the hand-me-downs that those knocked out earlier will get.
And in this regard, Arsenal are now doing ok. In the last Champions League series, the estimates are that a tiny number of clubs earned over 100 million euros from the Champs League alone, with Arsenal right up the top alongside Barcelona in this regard. The others were Real Madrid and Borussia Dortmund.
But the difference between this and the Europa League is striking. The Tiny Totts are thought to have earned €41m, and of course, some of that is now going to pay off the Ange character who was sacked as his reward for doing what he said he would do: winning something in season two.
But perhaps the owners of the Totts realise that victory in the Europa League was worth less than 30% of PSG’s Champions League triumph and they still have utter moiuntains of debt. In fact, no fewer than 28 clubs in the Champions League earned more than the tots (although the Super Cup will have helped a bit).
It was even worse for Conference League winners Chelsea, as they were only ranked 44th in income from Europe. To further place this into perspective, they earned around €1m less than the worst performer in the Champions League, namely Slovan Bratislava. I wonder if they noticed?
