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Arsenal FC: Building a new stadium can send you down, warns Wenger
Arsene Wenger has defended his frugal modus operandum at Arsenal, while pointing out that his club's financial situation is far healthier than those of others that have also built new stadiums in recent years.
"If I went to Real Madrid tomorrow," the Arsenal manager said in a joint inrterview with 'The Times' and 'Daily Mail' newspapers, "I would spend at all costs, but what I think is more important is to look at what you have at your own club and analyse how you can be successful. Arsenal will be more successful by building a new stadium, but it is not easy to build a new stadium and remain where you are. Look at all the clubs who have built new stadiums and where they are now: Derby County, Leicester City, Coventry City, Southampton. They all went down."
Indeed, Wenger's point holds firm. Middlesbrough, Bolton Wanderers, Millwall, and Sunderland all suffered relegation - most of them from the Premier League - shortly after having built a new stadium.
The debt incurred from such building projects clearly has immediate effects on a club's financial ability in the transfer market.
Arsenal's debt is currently just over UK£400 million. Most of that is mortgage on the 60,000 seater Emirates Stadium the club built and moved into in 2006. Since then, Wenger has had to defend himself against a constant barrage of accusations that Arsenal have become a selling club; depending on making money in the transfer market to pay the bills.
Despite Wenger's continual insistence that he has money to spend should he want to, Arsenal have once again made a handsome profit in the transfer market this summer - selling Emmanuel Adebayor and Kolo Toure to Manchester City for a combined Uk£41 million, while bringing in only Belgian defender Thomas Vermaelen from Ajax for UK£10 million.
"I accept that what I say is in contradiction with our football world because the money looks as if it has gone higher and higher since I have been in the job," added Wenger. "You compare the average wage ten years ago with today and it has gone up. But we live in a competitive world and that is why I say some of what happens now is financial doping. At Arsenal, we live with the money we produce.
"Other clubs have artificial income, from owners. They do not live with the money from the game. We have gates, merchandising, sponsorship, television money, but nothing beyond that. What I fight for is to live within the resources we produce and to pay the players according to our real potential, considering the size of the club. That, to me, is normal."
Arsenal's recent pre-season friendly tournament, the Emirates Cup, is believed to have made the club around US$6.5 million.
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