And on the Arsenal History website:
The game this weekend of course is against Wolverhampton Wanderers, so that question in the headline pops up.
It is generally reported that Derby County suffered relegation from the English top-flight on 29th March 2008 – the earliest that a team have ever dropped down to the second tier from the Premier League since the inaugural season back in 1992-93. Here’s what happened that season, along with a comparison of Wolverhampton today.
| Pos | Team | P | W | D | L | F | A | GD | Pts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Manchester United 1992-93 | 32 | 24 | 4 | 4 | 68 | 15 | 53 | 76 |
| 2 | Arsenal 1992-93 | 32 | 20 | 10 | 2 | 62 | 26 | 36 | 70 |
| 19 | Fulham 1992-93 | 32 | 4 | 12 | 16 | 29 | 53 | -24 | 24 |
| 20 | Derby County 1992-93 | 32 | 1 | 8 | 23 | 16 | 67 | -51 | 11 |
| 20 | Wolverhampton W Today | 15 | 0 | 2 | 13 | 8 | 33 | -25 | 2 |
It is a pretty awful record considering that although they didn’t pull up any trees last season, Wolverhampton did match Manchester United for points.
| Team | P | W | D | L | F | A | GD | Pts | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Liverpool | 38 | 25 | 9 | 4 | 86 | 41 | 45 | 84 |
| 2 | Arsenal | 38 | 20 | 14 | 4 | 69 | 34 | 35 | 74 |
| 15 | Manchester United | 38 | 11 | 9 | 18 | 44 | 54 | -10 | 42 |
| 16 | Wolverhampton Wanderers | 38 | 12 | 6 | 20 | 54 | 69 | -15 | 42 |
They let 19 players go last summer, which brought the club in £137m according to Transfermarkt, and it looks like they are now just accepting relegation, which is rather tough on those people to whom they have sold season tickets.
And indeed it must be hard to take, given that in 2019/20 they came 7th in the League and got to the quarter finals of the Europa League. A big tumble in just five years.
Meanwhile, Arsenal’s issue is obviously the same as always – to beat the opposition and score as many as possible. And it may seem hard to believe that between November 2018 and February 2021, in the matches between Wolverhampton and Arsenal, Wolverhampton won three, two games were drawn, and just one was won by Arsenal. That was 0-2 away on 4 July 2020.
Since then, however, there have been eight games between the two clubs, and all eight have been won by Arsenal. In that run, Arsenal have scored 17 and Wolverhampton just two. So we might say that this decline has been well-signposted.
Wolverhampton are currently in a run of nine successive defeats – a long way short of the record in that regard, which was 20 for Sunderland between 18 January 2003 and 10 September 2005. Although to be clear, Sunderland’s run of defeats included 15 games up to the end of the 2002/3season, at which point they went down, and the opening five matches on their Premier League season when then came back after promotion, in 2005/06.
But I mention this, because it does seem to emphasise the gap between the Champions and Premier League and the problem clubs get into when they simply run out of money to keep buying new players to keep them up.
However, although some of us older people might recall Wolverhampton being in Division Three in 1988/9 and League One as recently as 2013/14, even so, this sort of yo-yo approach is not that common.
Part of their problem is that the Wolverhampton ground holds only 32,000. Further, the club made a whacking great loss of £2022/23, and then another loss, although lower, of £14.3m in 2023/24. Now those losses might seem small when compared with the debts some clubs rack up, but debt has to be measured against the ability of the owners to pay off the debt, and if that ability or willingness is not there, then the club starts to sink.
Of course most clubs are making losses. For example, Aston Villa made an £85.4m loss in their last accounts, Everton declared a loss of £53.2m loss, and Tottenham had a £26.2m loss (and we are still not clear about who is paying for the stadium or the status of their owner with his recent criminal convictions). Chelsea did make a profit £128.4m, although there are still some who question the financial deals between them and BlueCo who have a declared multi-club ownership strategy.
Arsenal themselves made a £17.7 million loss for 2023/24, and this was despite bringing in record income of close to two-thirds of a billion pounds. What caused the loss primarily was the increase of £93m in the cost of player wages.
So yes, debts are only fine if someone can pay them off, and we have to remember that Arsenal are themselves making losses.
The problem of course, is that most clubs are in the hands of men with money, and everything is fine as long as they want to keep on dishing it out, or if the club does indeed move into profit. But even then, there can be problems. Chelsea solved their issues by selling their women’s team to a company that was owned by the same owners who owned Chelsea. That of course, was just a trick, and after that happened, the authorities changed the rules to make that illegal in the future. And although there are some other tricks that clubs like Chelsea can pull off, the number of them declines year or year as the authorities close more and more loopholes.
And when there are no more tricks to be played, the issue is, how do the clubs make money? Arsenal’s losses are coming down – they were £52.1m losses over the 2022-23, and we can only hope that in the future, the club can stay at the top of the league AND make a profit at the same time. Because if not, in the end, even the richest owner is going to think there is something else he can waste his money on.
