Just published in our history series
By Tony Attwood
The issue of building a new football stadium for an existing club, or indeed of upgrading an existing stadium so it can take in more supporters, is packed with both difficulties and dangers.
Put at its most simple, a club like Arsenal might be selling out each and every game now, but it is not difficult to imagine any club not financed by an oil state slipping back into a period where the challenge is to get out of mid-table rather than to win a bit of silverware.
Indeed, even with Arsenal, the media are regularly happy to point out that Arsenal have just had five seasons without winning any of the major trophies and winning through having endless amounts of oil money still hasn’t been banned.
In the previous seven years, Arsenal won four major trophies, but then again in the eight seasons from 2005/6 to 2012/13 the club won nothing.
So Arsenal, quite reasonably, consider it is worth looking into ways of increasing the revenue for each match through increasing the number of seats in the ground, not just because the club hasn’t won the League for a while, but also because the current run of five seasons without a trophy has done nothing to delete the number of people on the season ticket waiting list. Indeed, reports suggest the waiting list grew year by year through the trio of second-place finishes in the League table.
In fact, the thought is in fact that a club doesn’t have to do a Mancheseter City and win trophies season after season to fill the ground, even when the average seat prices are the highest in English football. Regular appearances in the top four, signs of progress, exciting signings, and occasional trophies are enough to keep the ground full and the merchandise sales rolling in.
Better still, attendances at the women’s matches have been encouraging. Over 56,500 turned up for the match against Chelsea last November, and over 46,000 for the game last month against Tottenham. Women’s attendances are expected to grow further.
And this is being achieved with Arsenal 11 points behind Manchester City, whose team is, of course, under scrutiny in the same way that the men’s team is.
But the fact is that the cost of running a top club is increasing all the time, so the club does need to expand its source of income. Indeed, as Tottenham have so conveniently shown us of late, simply having a full stadium is not by itself enough to turn in a profit. Especially if the wages bill keeps on going up and up.
In fact, the money spent on salaries at Tottenahm goes up even while their league position keeps going down. For between 2023/24 and 2024/25, their salaries went up £34m, and their losses overall went up by £39m. And I know that might not seem like much when we consider the cost of a single player these days, but Tottenham now have debts from both the development of the new stadium, player purchases, and compensation paid to managers after they are sacked.
And yes I know that we often get emails saying that Tottenham through some bit of financial wizadry is not having to manage or pay the stadium debt, and for all I know that could be right, but if it is right, then as and when the ground finally does start making money out of holding football, American football and other sorts of entertainments, the club won’t get those profits either.
There are, in fact, lots of clubs that are in a financial mess – indeed, as we have seen just recently, even West Ham, who were given their ground by the state, has concerns.
So while expanding Arsenal’s ground even further is a consideration, it has to be handled with caution, especially as the simple fact still stands out: that Arsenal will continue to find it hard to chase down ManC year after year unless the ManC free-reign spending is finally brought under control by the League. Remember, they were charged in February 2023, and we still don’t have an answer.
Of course, Arsenal are nothing like Tottenham, Manchester City or even Leicester (just docked another six points for not obeying financial rules, and now likely to drop into League One), but we can’t be sure the League will always deal with the ways in which clubs like that operate financially. ManC still run free, while most clubs lose money, meaning more clubs are seeking ways of getting around some of the financial rules, as it seems ManC have been able to do.
But, although we should never forget the ability of football clubs to engage in what we might be excused for calling “imaginative accounting practices,” we should also note that while in 2022/23 Arsenal spent 50% of its income on wages, Leicester City spent 116% of their income on wages. Some crimes are just so bleedin’ obvious!
Arsenal might do well to remember that although they play by the rules, as of course they should, and as we all want them to do, not everyone else does the same.
