Arsenal’s Champions League exit this week compounded their financial disappointments, as the club revealed that it made a £2.6m loss after tax in the six months to November 2010. Arsenal Holdings plc saw its profits drop £30m from the previous year. The club attributed the change to a reduction in earnings from both transfers and property sales at the redeveloped former stadium Highbury.
Club chairman Peter Hill-Wood, said: “This is a robust performance in the current climate and is where we expected to be at this stage of the financial year and this stage in our longer term development plans for the club”
Arsenal was ranked fifth in Deloitte’s 2011 Football Money League, based on its 2009/10 earnings. Manchester United was the only British football club sitting higher in the financial table.
In the same period in 2009, Arsenal sold Emmanuel Adebayor and Kolo Touré for a combined fee believed to be nearly £30m, contributing to a six-monthly profit of £29.2m.
The profit from flats sold at Highbury also fell to £3.3m, from £11.3m the previous year.
Dr Rory Miller, an academic at Liverpool University’s Football Industry Group specialising in business and finance, said: “You always get these sort of fluctuations. Arsenal is not supposed to be making a profit, it is supposed to be breaking even.
“Even for those under private ownership, the automatic assumption is that any surplus that the football club makes is going to be ploughed back into the club. The general feeling in the industry is that Arsenal is a model for how a not-for-profit football club should be run.”
Miller said that there would be better alternatives for Arsene Wenger than to sell captain Cesc Fabregas, who would almost certainly command a fee in excess of £30m. “There’s a number of 23- and 24-year-olds who have not made it in terms of persistently being in the first team, but who are each worth several millions more than Arsenal paid for them,” he said. “Players like Diaby or Denilson – they would book a profit on them.”
Biggest clubs in the world according to revenue in millions of £:
1. Real Madrid 371.1
2. FC Barcelona 336.8
3. Manchester United 296.0
4. Bayern Munich 273.3
5. Arsenal 231.9
(Source: Deloitte Football Money League 2011)
