iSport | For the Fans, by the Fans

Much has been said about Arsenal's current plight. The manager has been criticized for not spending money. A look through the club's financial documents tells us a different story. In 2010-11 Arsenal spent £109.6 million on wages and salaries. This puts them amongst the top pay masters in football.

A look around the Premier League reveals only 4 other clubs who pay over £100 million in wages. They are the Manchester Clubs, Chelsea and Liverpool. Even Tottenham pay less than £80 million in wages!! So where does this money actually get spent? The table below lists the average amounts spent by clubs around Europe on their first team players.

As we can see, Arsenal stands in 10th place, paying an average of £57,000 per week to their first team players. If you multiply the first team squad by the weekly wage, you get a figure of approximately £80 million for Arsenal. This is approx 73% of the club's wage bill. So where does the rest of the money go? Arsenal FC has one of the largest squads in Europe. Currently the club has 96 players on their books. They are divided as under:

Even if you assume that Arsenal pay no percentage of the wages for the players they loan out, that still leaves 83 players on the bill. First year reserves are players with professional contracts and should not be confused with Academy players. Amongst them are players like Jon Toral and Kristoffer Olsson who cost Arsenal £308,000 each last summer.

This means even the reserves are on decent wages. It should be noted that even £1000 a week salary amounts to £52,000 per annum which is above average in any other industry. The Arsenal reserve players probably command an average salary of £5000 per week which is a quarter of a million per annum.

While the first team and ladies squad sizes are reasonable, the number of reserves is simply baffling. Manchester United have a total of 22 reserve players on their list. Tottenham have 24. The question one must ask the Arsenal management is whether those many reserve players are required. Most of the reserves have gone through two years training with the club. Surely the training staff must be able to decide whether the players are good enough for Arsenal?

There is no way that even half those players will ever play for the first team so why not drop them now and reduce your wage bill? The same applies to players like Pedro Botelho and Carlos Vela who have been at the club for 5 and 6 years respectively. If the players cannot break into the first team for that long, then what makes the management believe they will come good in the future?

Arsenal have been spending the appropriate amount on wages. Their fault lies in the distribution of those wages. Players like Van Persie are rare. Such is the market that they can command any price and the clubs must give in. The difference between the group stages of Champions League and Europa League is at least £25 million. Van Persie's pay rise would amount to £2.5 million. What makes more financial sense?

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