I love the irony of this: Man City fan crying over ticket prices at Emirates.

Nevermind that it is their club (and Chelsea to some extent) that inflates player wages and transfer prices for all clubs in football, not just in EPL.
They paid 170K a week to Adebayor, 200k to Nasri, offered 300k to Van Persie. Walcott has been stalling on new contract for 18 months as he wants more money (I don't buy his "I want to be a striker" BS).

Arsenal wages:
2007 £89.7m
2008 £101.3m
2009 £104m
2010 £110.7m
2011 £124.4m
2012 £143.4m

How are other teams (not just Arsenal) to keep their players? We have to pay them more or they'll go away. We don't have a sugar daddy who will pour his millions into the club, we have to earn money in a traditional way, e.g. ticket sales.

It is their club that is ruining the football for everybody but they decide to boycott the Arsenal.
Sh1t for brains doesn't quite describe it...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/footba ... senal.html

It's actually not just City fans, although they've managed to catch the news. There's been a protest building about prices at Premier League football matches for a while. When Arsenal moved to the Emirates a few years ago, their season ticket prices jumped massively and have barely slowed down since. Manchester United have been similarly been raising their prices by well above inflation for a few years and this season is the first one post WWII that there isn't a waiting list for season tickets in their ground.

We're not quite there yet but it is genuinely reaching a point where football match prices will reach a peak and then any extra increase will start to suppress demand in a big way.

There is also the point that football tickets in the North have always traditionally been cheaper than those in the the south but I'm not sure what the effect of that may be overall.


There's no arguing that wages in top flight football are unrealistic. But the bare fact is it's not the prices in the ground that's financing them, it's international television rights. The last Deloitte survey suggested that in 2011 on average less than a third of a premiership club's income was generated through the turnstiles. 2/3 of it is TV and shirt sales. So it's actually all the fans in the far east who are causing the inflation in wages. In any case, it started well before the Arabs bought out city TBH. Chelsea started it, others followed and Arsenal were already well on the way by that point.


You don't, that's the real world. Henry, Hleb, Fabregas, Song, Van Persie... all left to get paid more and none of them went to City or Chelsea. You think if City didn't exist none of that would have happened? It's always been that way but previously Arsenal were higher up the food chain so it happened to them less often. Back in the 90's, Arsenal offered Bolton's manager more money to manage them (Bruce Rioch, in case you don't know). He took the money. I don't remember any Arsenal fans complaining about the system being unbalanced then. It's not the only example - how much did Arsenal pay for Walcott in the first place? You think it's not fair you can't match the wages offered by another club for a player you need to keep to do well? Welcome to how the Southampton fans felt.

Football is broken but there's nothing new happening here. You've just noticed it because you're now one of the ones with your face pressed against the glass, not sitting inside at the table. There are 70-something clubs in Britain who have been seeing this happen to them for decades.


Actually Arsenal do have a sugar daddy and were in fact the original club financed by aristocrats. Most of the people on their board up until the last few years had double barrelled second names. There was always money available. Then they sold out to Stan Kroenke, who has a estimated worth of $4billion. The fact is though Arsenal's sugar daddy doesn't feel like putting his money into the club, not when he thinks he can get away with charging people £65 for a ticket and as long as they get 4th or better each year.
Arsenal are run as a business. which is in one sense very admirable. However the fact is football is not a business in any realistic sense. if it was, half the clubs would have ceased to exist years ago.


Arsenal get to choose what their own ticket prices are. They charge £65 because they think people will pay it. If people won't... well they'll just sell those tickets to someone who will, or put their prices down again. City have next to nothing to do with this process.

Unless I'm missing the joke, you forgot the s in the thread title. And there should definitely be a joke about Arsenal and arms, we've got standards to maintain...

£62 a week to feed your football addiction is clearly a habit that needs to be compared to heroin.

Ironically, I kind of think £62 a week is more or less what a footballer should be paid.

I said City and Chelsea. Nobody else in England is doing it. And before you say MANU, the manage to balance their books more or less.


Adebayor, Nasri, Clichy, K. Toure all went from Arsenal to city.
Fabregas took a paycut to move to Barcelona by the way. Henry didn't go for the money.

I am not complaing about our players leaving, I am saying that City distort wages so some of our players leave (even directly to City) and those who stay ask for more money. And City's spending has been out of control, you can't deny that.


You are missing a point (again). Arsenal run a sustainable business, we don't make losses. City's losses run in hundreds of milions...


So what is your point?


Again, missing the point. I am not complaining about the prices, I accept them. City fans should be the last people on the planet to complain about Arsenal's ticket prices as it is THEIR club who is ruining the football at the moment.

In the Irish league that probably isn't far off, if you're getting paid at all

I am not a football fanatic but do understand that many do and for them I feel sorry that they are being ripped off so much. Personally like watching NFL but the ticket prices for the London games are crazy. While I appreciate the games last several hours with all the breaks it still looks expensive no matter how you look at it.

Actually, no. It's happening all over, just the scale is different. QPR are doing it at a lower rung of the ladder. Leicester tried it in the Championship for while, though it didn't work for them. Crawley are doing it in the conference, they pay wages that are a multiple of what any club in the same division as them can. Barnet are paying Edgar Davids more than the entire wage bill of similar sized clubs.

There are examples of teams using superior resources gained through non-football income to take a shortcut all over the country and all of them will be inflating the wage bills of the clubs trying to compete with them. it's just that Manchester City are the most obvious example because they're at the top of the tree.


They balance their books only by the kind of creative accounting that would make a merchant bank blush. It depends very much on how far they progress in the Champions League (they failed at the group stage and made a loss, they then got to the final and made a profit) and how the various pieces of credit used to finance the leveraged buyout are rearranged. I wouldn't use them as anything like an example of a well run club, off the field at least.


So some of your ex players went to city, some of them didn't. I still don't see how this particularly supports the premise that City alone are somehow solely ruining football. Chelsea, Barca, Real, Bayern Munich, Juventus, Inter Milan, PSG, FC Anzhi Makhachkala... All these clubs pay their best players far more than their rivals can, mostly through the largesse of backers rather than football income. Samuel Eto is paid twenty million euros a year to play in a backwater country whose population are largely utterly impoverished, because the club he plays for is owned by a billionaire robber baron who views football as a vanity project. Christiano Ronaldo earns 12 million & Lionel Messi 10 when the Spanish economy is on the brink of collapse. None of these players play for city, nor actually have any of them ever played for city. Nor are any of them paid what they are simply because city pay well, because I'm damn sure City don't pay anyone 20 million euros a year and, realistically, Barca don't need to pay Messi 10 million a year just to keep him from city. Why do Barca pay Messi a fortune? Because Messi playing for them earns Barca a fortune and Messi's agent knows this, so he bargains for a share of it on the basis that there are an entire cabal of clubs who would happily pay him that much. This would still be absolutely true if Manchester City were scratching around in the third division as they used to be. The finances of football were heading down the pan pretty much as soon as the premier league was formed and accelerated by the Bosman ruling. Both happened many years before City were bought out and you can point to specific examples of the effects of those changes. Steve McManaman running down his contract at Liverpool to go to Real. Or, oh, Sol Campbell leaving Spurs to go to Arsenal because you pretty much doubled his wages overnight. You don't think that contributed to player wage inflation at all then? You don't think Spurs felt they had to pay their star players more (and those players agents weren't asking for more) after that happened?


A very interesting question. It is certainly disproportionate to the overall economy and (IMO) immoral but is irrational or 'Out of Control'? I'm not sure I'd actually use that phrase. Teams like Blackburn, whose total player wages at one point were 120% of their income with no backing to speak of, were out of control. City can at least afford the bill, or at least their backers can. Spending what you have isn't 'out of control', even if arguably you shouldn't have it.

If we were to separate Manchester City from the Mansour family, yes, their spending would be out of control. I'd agree with that. But the Mansour family aren't separate from city. So the argument isn't valid.


Again, I'm not sure I'd use that exact phrase. What will happen if you finish 5th for a couple of seasons? Will Arsenal be on such an even keel if several million in TV revenue and the money from a couple of Champions league campaigns disappear? Pretty much any football club depends on results to earn income and results are not always predictable. Therefore no football club (IMO) can truly be called 'sustainable'. Arsenal are among the best and most prudently managed clubs in the league, I'd certainly agree on that.


CIty's losses are currently functionally irrelevant, since their finances are effectively unlimited. One number on the balance sheet is negative but the final number never is. That will change if the Arabs pull out without first putting the club in a more self-financing state (which has happened elsewhere - See FC Malaga) but there is absolutely no sign of that happening any time soon. People said the same about Abramovic when he arrived at Chelsea, that the club would die when he got bored in a couple of years and pulled out. Hasn't happened yet and it's been quite a few years.


You appeared to be claiming Arsenal don't have wealthy owners, I suggested they do. You suggested Arsenal can't pay the wages the likes of city do. The fact is they could, if they wanted to. Kroenke has the money to compete in the same way as Abramovic and Mansour and the rest. He chooses not to. He chooses to run the club in a more self-financing way. This is entirely admirable. However a consequence of that choice is that there are a group of clubs around the world who will always be able to pay more which the best players will always gravitate to. In the same way that Arsenal are a member of a group slightly lower down that players from smaller clubs than them will gravitate to. This is the way football has been for years.


See above. Football is ruining itself all over Europe (and elsewhere, although that would take even longer to go into), City are merely one example and actually not the worst. And even if their owners were 'ruining football', how does that give anyone else a right to take it out on their supporters, who only have normal jobs with normal pay cheques and normal bills? Why are the supporters guilty for the sins of the people who if anything took the club away from them? 'THEIR Club'? It's Mansour's club. He owns it, lock stock and barrel. He paid for it. The supporters had no say in that and have no say in the running of it, any more than you had a say when Kroenke came in, or I had a say when my club was sold to a toilet roll magnate. How is emptying the wallets of average joe city supporters going to make football a less lunaticly febrile place?

Jon

Oh FFS Jon!
When it comes your posts, I have two options: Read them or do something else with my day. Guess which one I am going to choose...

I think we should put a salary cap on each club and unless they adhere to it they get kicked out of the FA.

Lets say £4.26 m per year. like the premiership rugby clubs.
http://www.premiershiprugby.com/premiership/structure/index.php#.UO65v6w9-So

Please yourself.

Well they will find a way around it. I do think that a cap on debts so stopping asset stripping by the Glasier's or similar becomes impossible. Then a cap on the share of wages as a percentage of ticket sales.

IIRC I was mooted at one point and the players union said they would take it to court as a restraint of freedom of employment. Plus it would need to be implemented at least Europe wide or you'd just see a mass migration and it wouldn't actually solve the problem.

I'm sure the clubs would implement it if they thought they could get away with it - they'd much rather keep the money themselves than hand it to the players. It appears that wage caps are one of those things that you can get away with already having but you can't bring in.

I agree about the Europe wide aspect. Though also why not make it mandatory that all wages deals include reductions in wages if relegated. It can bankrupt teams if they are relegated and players wages do not fall, especially with reduced TV rights etc.