That means they have to come up with £900m all told. And that is real money that has to be found. Now once they have done that they can indeed then start taking money out of the club – but they really have to have access to the £900m first.

And that is what makes the takeover unlikely. Usmanov and Kronke are basically stopping each other making a takeover, and that’s fine by me.

If Arsenal was brought for £300m and the new owner re mortgaged the club to pay his purchase loan of that would leave Arsenal £600m in debt. No club is immune to these pirate purchasers. The only thing that has stopped it happening to Arsenal is that it was to much in debt to make it viable. Man U and L Pool were debt free and have the biggest world wide fan base of all PL clubs and by quite a margin.

The other is Villa’s owner being mentioned in the same breath as Man U’s. They are completely the opposite of each other. Villa have not been re mortgaged and Randy Lerner has wealth and more importantly morals that far exceed the Glazers or the Gillets for that matter.

Good luck for the season, reckon you are closer to the title than a few experts realize.

When most of our strikers were injured or not fully fit earlier this season, the only headline during that time was “Arsenal lack squad depth’ but even then we played with Arshavin at centre with Nasri and Eboue on the flanks. I couldnt find a single article which was positive. The same was the case when we had most of our defence injured during the final stages of last season.

But when Chelsea lose their 3 strikers due to ACN & injuries, the headlines say “Chelsea boss Ancelotti puts faith in young duo.”. I mean where’s the “lack of squad depth” type of articles? I couldnt even find either ‘lack’ or ‘depth’ in the above article from BBC. Same is the case with ManU.

My younger brother is a fan of ManU and he also just care about the trophies won. He used to make fun of Arsenal for not spending and for not winning any trophy for 4 seasons until I showed him some of the articles on this blog along with couple from the ManU supporter trust website. He now doesnt make fun of Arsenal and accepts that Arsenal’s Board and Arsene Wenger have done a great job with Arsenal in the last few years. I’m happy that he finally realized!!!

On another note, have you guys read about the news that We are discussing the sponsorship deals with Emirates.. But the funny part is the reason mentioned in the articles. They say its because we want to increase our transfer budget.. I just couldnt stop laughing..

A few weeks ago, I was telling a flatmate who supports Man IOU that his club had massive debts, which is why the 80 mil from Ronlado’s sale didn’t go into any new purchases. I laid it all out for him, using your freely available information. His jaw dropped, and I could see the uncertainty in his eyes.

At Arsenal, we are not worried whether we’ll have a team in 10 years. We’re no worried about some insane debt load threatening to crush us. For years, I’ve had to endure jibes about Arsenal being insolvent, with some even saying it was Emirates who built the stadium for us! Now, I see Arsenal on a very sound financial footing and Liverpool slowly sliding towards the abyss. Part of me wants to feel sorry for them, but as my father always says, “As you make your bed…”

There is an angle I’m wondering about. Big banks weren’t allowed to fail as their collapse would have signaled Armageddon for the entire capitalist system. Is it possible that “big” football clubs could lobby for a similar sort of bailout by the government?

I understand what you say about other blogs. This week I visited another blog and after reading the article I had to go the arsenal.com and check the league table because I was thinking that the FA had taken all our points away and that we would go down. For Christ’s sake, if we win our game in hand we are second only 3 points away from first place. And still so negative… So depressing

Well except from that i have to say, good article as usual

What your point is about the youth cup team last year I agree with you Marc. I have seen the games live on my PC and I must say Arsenal was miles ahead of Liverpool. If we can get from that team some 4 or 5 players coming trough would be great.

i) At what point does the PL have so many rich owners pumping in huge amounts of money that new money just doesn’t make a real difference?

ii) As I’m sure you are aware Liverpool got to the final of the FA Youth Cup last summer and were comprehensively beaten by Arsenal. Where does this leave ManU, Chelsea, the Spud’s etc? All clubs with ambition and debt, or at least a considerable planned debt in the case of the Spud’s?

I am a regular reader of your blog and throughly enjoy the positive opinion you have of AFC.

The one thing I often wonder about is whether once Kroenke, Usmanov or another billionaire obtains ownership of AFC will we be any different to Man City, L’pool, Man Utd?

I would be interested to know if it would be possible to set AFC up as a cooperative similar to Barcelona or Bayern Munich?

I know we would have the fun and games of elections but at least the majority would select the people in power every few years.

I also know about the AST but they are minor equity holders in AFC and I am not aware of any proactive approach on their part to disturb the status quo as it exists currently.

Based on your depth of knowledge of AFC, finance, business law that you display in your articles could you write an article as to whether it would be possible for cooperative ownership of AFC, the costs, the legal angle etc? With the thousands of season ticket holders and the huge number on the waiting list I would imagine we could raise a very large amount of funding to buy out the existing share holders (of course we would need their support!).

VERY pleasing, and rather strange, to see F365 pointing out the anti-Arsenal newspaper agenda:

http://www.football365.com/story/0,17033,8652_5794374,00.html

Genius. They must have thought it was Christmas time…

Oh. It is.

I am a season ticket holder – and I live about 90 miles north of the Ems. About 10 miles to the west of me is my mate Ian who is also a season ticket holder. Ian’s uncle lives in Brighton and is a season ticket holder. If I go by train to London for a match the train from Kettering in Northamptonshire is packed with Arsenal supporters – many with season tickets.

I also spend some time in Cardiff with my partner, who is a season ticket holder living about 130 miles from the stadium.

My point in all this is that on the night of the Hull match it was bitterly cold, and Northamptonshire along with much of the country was frozen. I couldn’t get my car out of my village, and the same was true across all sorts of parts of the midlands, East Anglia and the south east.

True, people living in London could use public transport but there were two other factors…

First it was stunningly cold, and although maybe when one is in one’s 30s that doesn’t matter much, it really begins to bite into you when you are 60 plus and when you think the game is on TV….

Second, there was no guarantee that one might get back after the game. Trains were already being cancelled or running very late in my region by mid afternoon. Only idiots and people contracted to write a little piece in the Observer would go out in such conditions.

The fact is that this “season ticket holders are absent in protest” story started up in the first season we were at the Ems. But even after the hand out of season tickets last season to replace those that were given up, there were still 40,000 people on the season ticket waiting list.

I can verify the waiting list, because during my divorce in 1999 I was forced to hand back my season ticket as I had no money to pay the mortgage. In August 2001 I went on to the season ticket waiting list, and used my silver membership to keep watching the team from time to time.

I got my season ticket back in August 2009 – eight years later. That time was reduced from 10 years because we did have the enlargement of the season ticket base during that time, with the move from Highbury to the Ems.

So from all the evidence I have, even if people do decide that with Arsenal as the top scorers in the league they don’t want to go any more, there is another group, equal in number to all the season ticket holders put together, who are quite anxious to take up their places.

One other little factor – on the season ticket waiting list you don’t specify where you want to sit – and when a ticket comes up you are just given the choice of about five locations. There really are not many tickets going…

It is true that Arsenal have budgeted for an average crowd of 50,000 and not being in the Champs League every year – but that was part of the plan for the new stadium. Liverpool have no such budget, because until the takeover they were debt free and doing ok and would have been able to withstand any temporary downturn. It was the takeover, the failure to sell the club on, and the decision of RBS to ask for their money back, that has thrown everything out of line for Liverpool.

What’s more, part of my argument in the article is that there was a real disbelief at Liverpool that anything could go wrong.

It can’t happen to Arsenal in the same way since the debt is a controlled mortgage with known fixed rate repayments.

Sorry, a longish reply, but I felt it was important to set the record straight.

Tony

PS I also suggested at the end that there is more about Liverpool on the “Making the Arsenal” site. Sorry I should say that piece will go up as we approach the 100th anniversary of the two Liverpool matches after Xmas.