Mr Wenger is worth between £100m and £400m to Arsenal « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. Supporting the Lord Wenger; coach of the decade

By Tony Attwood

Arsenal are the only leading club in the Premier League to make money from buying and selling players during the years of foreign ownership (which we take to mean since Roman Abramovich at Chelsea).

Since 2003/04, Arsenal have received £21 million more than they have spent, and this is a figure that will get higher next year because of sales this year – unless Arsenal spend a mega fortune on players in the next transfer window.

Meanwhile Chelsea and Manchester City have each spent well over £400 million and their spending looks likely to continue.

Again over the same period, Tottenham, Liverpool, and Manchester United have all spent around £100 million.

The extraordinary thing is that despite all this extra money the distance between the clubs has not got to the proportions of the distance between Ranges/Celtic and the rest in Scotland.   Nor that of Spain – although the dominance of the top 2 is being challenged by the clubs newly acquired by overseas interests – although curiously it is Levante at the moment who are separating Bankrupt Barca and Real Mad.  Last season for example, Chelsea, with all their spending, still managed to have a collapse of monumental proportions, after (according to the pundits) having the league sown up by October.

During the period in question (2003 to 2011) Arsenal has stayed in the top 4 throughout, while Liverpool and Tottenham have not.

This doesn’t mean that the money in question has no impact – of course it does, but rather that to a large degree managerial ability is also worth a lot.  And from this we could perhaps work out just how much money Mr Wenger has been worth to Arsenal.  Certainly at least £100m since overall we have at the very least kept up with Tottenham and Liverpool, and that’s the amount they have spent.

Since we’ve also won the league three times, one might say the figure is somewhere between £100m and £400m.

Of course there gets to a point where the spending by a manager of more modest ability will overtake our income plus the value of Mr Wenger – but where ever that amount is, the amount is enormous.

Quite how we find another manager worth between £100m and £400m when Mr Wenger retires or is forced out by the dual forces of the media and the Anti-Arsenal Arsenal, I have no idea.

Now however we have new game, as Liverpool, utterly desperate to try and get back into the top four after being pushed out of the Champions and Europa Leagues, and watching the $1bn court case against them begin its journey, are proposing that the clubs should each negotiate their own TV deal.

The current TV money is £2.1bn for UK rights, and 50% goes to the clubs as an equal part, plus 25% according to where a club ends up in the league, and 25% “appearance money” for each live game.  Manchester U got the most last season with £42.4m last season, Blackpool got £21.2m.  Everyone gets an equal share of overseas rights – £17.9m each last year.

Of course this is about to change because of the lunatic court case run by the league to stop a pub landlady showing matches relayed from a Greek satellite TV system.  Now everyone can watch anyway.  In a poll in the Guardian 75% said they would get such a system.

In a new system, four clubs would dominate: Liverpool, Arsenal and Manchester United, with (to a lesser degree depending on league position) Chelsea.

Of course a simplistic answer to my thesis here would be “how can Mr Wenger be worth this when he can buy…” and then you fill in the name of any player you don’t like.   But of course every club has some bad buys, and that isn’t the point.  The point is that rather than take us £100m or more in debt in order to have had our long run in the Champions League, we have had Mr Wenger.  Seems like a good deal to me.

Who knows where any of this goes – the answer is no one.  But, what we can be sure is that it will be hard to find anyone who is worth as much equivalent in the transfer market as Mr Wenger.

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