Like every other citizen of the Gooner Republic I’m eagerly awaiting Sunday’s walk down Wembley Way to our first final in more than four seasons since we lost to FC Barcelona in the 2006 Champions League Final in the Stade de France in Paris.
As I said in my wish list to Santa I’m hoping that the first of many such walks over the coming months. Being a greedy fat bastard I’d like at least four more please – the FA Cup Semi-Finals and Final, the Champions League Final and the Community Shield at the start of next season. We’ll see about all that.
With our injury curse continuing I’d counsel all Gooners who are lucky enough like me to have a ticket for Sunday to take their boots. You might just get a game. We just don’t get any respite from the queue outside the treatment room, do we? That old Albert King blues song “Born Under A Bad Sign” comes to mind:
Born under a bad sign
I’ve been down since I began to crawl
If it wasn’t for bad luck, real bad luck
I wouldn’t have no luck at all
Fàbregas the King has blogged more eloquently than I could manage on Sunday’s game so I shall leave it there and move on to the Arsenal Holdings plc interim six half year accounts covering the period 1 June-30 November 2010 which are due to be published next week. As a member of the Arsenal Supporters’ Trust (AST) an interesting e-newsletter popped into my inbox overnight.
Insightful and informative as ever AST anticipates that we’ll record a small overall loss for this six month period. Defying the rest of the economy here and elsewhere around the world football pay bills continue to rise. This will show in the accounts. We can expect a substantial rise in the pay bill, almost all of which will be related to increased salaries and signing bonuses as we re-sign players on improved terms. Many players have sought improved terms to compensate for the increase in the top rate of PAYE income tax for earnings above £150,000 a year, along with increases in employees’ National Insurance Contributions. Employers’ NICs will also increase in April which will further up our costs as a club, although this won’t show up until the year end accounts to 31 May 2011 which will be presented to the shareholders’ AGM in October.
AST continues to press the club to ensure that we get the best value for money out of what is after all one of the highest football wage bills in the world. We also continue to suffer from significantly lower commercial income, especially from sponsorship than Chelsea and Manchester United. This will be difficult to address until the Nike and Emirates shirt deals expire in 2014 and the Emirates stadium naming rights deal in 2022. I have blogged before about negotiating strategy and tactics for increasing this income source as quickly as possible in advance of these deals expiring.
German clubs have proved far more adept at raising commercial revenue than we have here in England & Wales. We need to look at what we can learn from them. We also know that the board took the strategic financial decision to take up-front cash from the current Emirates and Nike deals to help fund the new ground. The only equity investment in the new ground was from ITV plc to whom we sold a 9.9% stake in the club’s shares at a massively inflated price than that then prevailing. I said at the time that this could turn out to be a Trojan Horse into the club’s traditional ownership base and so it turned out to be, with ITV selling to Stan Kroenke and David Dein selling out to Alisher Usmanov.
That’s all water under the bridge now. We are where we are. I want to see the supporters’ stake in Arsenal increase as rapidly as possible. I also want to see the influence of AST continue to grow. That’s the way forward for us, for the supporters collectively to assume an increasing role in the custodianship model of ownership that has served us so well over the generations via the Bracewell-Smith and Hill-Wood families.
There are many cynics around who doubt UEFA’s bona fides when it comes to enforcing their new financial fair play regulations, especially in the light of the UEFA decision on ticket prices for this season’s Champions League Final at Wembley which range from £80 to £300, plus a larcenous, inexcusable £26 booking fee which increases to £36 for those booking from outside Europe. The £80 tickets will only be available to the supporters of the two competing clubs, so the cheapest tickets on general sale via a random draw on the UEFA website will be £150 plus the £26 booking fee. It seems that UEFA is just as prepared to ruthlessly exploit supporter loyalty as everybody else in football.
In this particular case the FA shouldn’t be allowed off the hook. The association hosting the Champions League Final has a big say in ticket pricing. In this case the FA is not only the host association but the venue owner via Wembley National Stadium Ltd, its wholly owned subsidiary company. The FA has been trying to distance itself from the wildly unpopular ticket price decision since it was announced. They shouldn’t be allowed off the hook.
That said I don’t think the game has a rational alternative to backing UEFA’s new regulations to the hilt and pressing them very hard to make clubs comply and booting them out of European competitions if they don’t. We can all by cynical about what they’ll do when the crunch comes. I think we all need to back them and demand that they do the right thing with clubs not in compliance and revoke their UEFA licence.
The only alternative to clubs standing on their own two feet financially is an increasingly desperate search for more ego-driven billionaires looking for a new train-set or trophy asset. With recent events in North Africa and the Arabian Gulf I’d be very nervous if I was a Manchester City fan. They’ve already dodged the bullet once with Thaksin Shinawatra. I said at the time that the bloke should never have been allowed anywhere near one of our major football clubs. He was and is bent as a nine bob note having robbed his own people blind, aside from being a major and serial infringer of the Thai people’s human rights.
Disgracefully the Premier League declared him a “fit and proper person”. He was the very definition of completely unfit and completely improper. Who is to say that the same political explosions we’ve seen in recent weeks won’t occur in Russia, bringing down the oligarchs? I doubt that it will happen but if you’d have told most people in the mid 1980s that by the end of the decade the Berlin Wall would have disappeared and communist rule would have collapsed, first in eastern Europe, then in the former Soviet Union, they would have thought you were on drugs. And that opinion would have been despite the evidence of the rise of Solidarity in Poland and the subsequent collapse of the communist government there.
According to the American magazine Forbes there are only just over one thousand billionaires (measured in US Dollars) on the whole planet. Half of them are in North America. They didn’t become billionaires by giving away money. There are institutional investors with very deep pockets but they invest with a view to making a profit, albeit sometimes over the very long term. I firmly believe we at Arsenal are yet again ahead of the pack on the cutting edge of football innovation by insisting on only spending the money we earn.
Don’t panic if the figures announced next week show a small loss. In some ways that’s a good sign. We could have made a big profit if we’d have sold Cesc Fàbregas to Barcelona. I know which I’d prefer. Whilst we can’t make continual losses we do want to hang on to our best players. Continuity in a club’s playing and football management staff brings trophies. That’s a fact.
We should be pushing the board to maximise commercial income but not panicking as David Dein did and starting the search for our own sugar daddy to lavish money on us. I’m proud enough to want to stand our own two feet.
Let’s hope we’re all celebrating come the final whistle at Wembley on Sunday.
Keep the faith!
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