Arsenal Revenue Gap: Consider it plugged. £21million sound good?

So, it’s many fans favourite time of the year next week, that time we all become very excited about how well we are run as a club. As Arsenal prepare to announce not so record profits, it’s time to ponder the what the ramifications of keeping our star players last summer will be.

Whichever way you look at it, Arsenal fans are paying the most on average for their tickets out of any club in Europe. We’re smack bang in the middle of one the richest Cities in the world and we’re paying a premium to support out club. I guess it’s to be expected. Big Corporates like Barclay’s, Goldman Sachs and Nike have seats at our ground, we’re revered as one of the most exciting clubs in the world and our salt beef bagels are amongst the best, you’d think that would be enough, right?

Well, the AISA e-mail went out yesterday and they reckon the club are refusing to deny that there could be a season ticket price increase in the offing. The AST have confirmed that our profits will be down this year because we’ve refused to sell a marquee player, so basically, something has to give if we’re to generate enough profit to fund lavish £8million players every summer.

So, I’ve been doing some digging around to get some fair numbers I can punch into a snazzy spread sheet. In 2006 United put their season ticket prices up by an average of 12.3%. I think that’s a fair figure to start at considering they too are servicing a monster debt. Difference with them is their debt is mostly serviced through ridiculous commercial deals. Our smaller debt is serviced by piss poor deals by the same standards.

Anyway, here is how it would look (I accidentally put 12.6% in the box, if you think I can be assed to change all the figures below because of that you’d be mistaken).

Price Hike Season tickets

So Arsenal could increase their revenue by£12.76million with a 12.3% increase in our ticket prices. On average, that would hit the average fan by £7.86 a game, or £212.76 across the season. Coupled with the increase in VAT, the eye watering prices we’re paying at the pump and the hike in train fares… well, it doesn’t look pretty.

So what else could we do to raise a little revenue?

Well, how about those poncing away fans who come over and sing loud songs at our expense? They seem to be getting away with things scot-free. Just remember here, I’m using standard baseline costs I’ve found online to give you a flavour, but here is the deal on away fans.

Away day revenue

So, in a dream world where under-privelaged clubs sold out their allocations, above is how the ticketing revenue streams would look. We take about £7.5million from other clubs fans. However, delve a little deeper and it seems those buggers are paying far less than we do on average. Surely we’re not giving mates rates to people wealthy enough to travel the country drinking copious amounts of beer and spending huge sums on doing something they can more than afford?

Their average ticket price is roughly £46 compared to the home fans average of £62.

Is that not on or is that not on?

My proposal? Let’s claw some back from the people who come to our ground once a year. I mean, seriously, we’re a great team to watch even if we’re dishing out a spanking. So why not up the price of their tickets to take the pain away from the home fans? You know, like how we should levy foreign truck drivers for using our roads?

Away fans price hike

So a little 36% increase on away ticket prices gives Arsenal an additional revenue of £2,658,000 a year. That’s looking very good to me. That almost has Diaby’s salary covered, just about £10k a week short of it in fact.

If you think that’s where I’m going to stop, you’d be so damn wrong.

Here is my next great idea possibly stolen from a German club and maybe a little bit from the London Underground Oyster card system.

Apparently, so I’ve heard anyway from a trusted source, Bayern Munich operate a cashless system for away fans. If you want to buy beer, you have to pay the money upfront and you’re sent a beer card. You stick £30 on it and you’re good for the game. Apparently the cards are valid for 2- 3 years, then the money is absorbed by the club.

This generates a lot of additional revenue because there isn’t a dedicated following to all the away games and one would suspect most card go in the bin or get lost over that period. A similar thing happens with Oyster Cards on the London Transport system. There was £30million in unused ticket credit as of 2010 for the calendar year previous.

Arsenal should do that same for away fans to our ground. I know Micros have the capabilities and they do all our tilling systems. So below are the crude numbers. Imagining that away fans are heavy drinkers, and even the tightest fan will end up buying at least 3 drinks during an away game, here is the maths.

Beer Revenue

So right there, through drinks, we’ve raised potentially another £2.5 million taking our total additional away fan revenue to £5million. Pretty impressive. If we knocked that off the home fans ticket, that would reduce our season ticket rise from 12.6% to about 7.5% which would cost us about an extra £126.25 a season.

Far more palatable.

Could be a possibility. People pay £54 to see Chelsea play and we are much more of a pull.

However, I have an even better idea than that. Why don’t we bring back terracing? Here are my assumptions…

• We could rip out the seats and triple the away fan intake and price accordingly.
• I’ve lowered the drink spend to £7.50 per heard opposed to the £15 per head in the previous example
• I’ve lowered our away ticket price to £36

Beer + Terracing = Good times

So all of those factors combined give us an additional revenue for £21million, doubling the opportunity you’d get from the maximum season ticket price increase the fans would allow.

Now, before the finance nerds jump on my back and batter me with their pocket Casio’s, understand that the point here isn’t that my numbers are anywhere near bang on, the point is that Arsenal have many top minds working behind the scenes and I feel going for the obvious revenue generator… sticking it to loyal customer… is a little bland considering the salaries they’re all raking in.

If there was no such thing as a sell out for the away fans, we could easily increase the amount of people through the gate. It would get the atmosphere rocking at the Grove and it’d show that we’re visionaries in the world of football. Remember, terracing alone has never been the cause of tragedies, just how they’re managed.

Anyway, some food for thought! How would you improve revenue at the club?

Let me know what you think in the comments section!

P.S. The AST have another round of questioning for a meeting they have coming up, if you’ve got any financial question or just questions in general you’d like asked to Ivan Gazidis, drop them in the comments with a twitter style hashtag #Questions and we’ll see if we can get them answered. I’m hoping to get some info on that £100million we have sitting in the old cash reserves this week, so stay tuned! Oh, and here is that Andrey video under a different guise.

P.P.S. You might have heard about the tragic earthquake that has struck Christchurch over in New Zealand. The death toll currently stands at 65, with many more feared to be trapped. if you’ve got some spare cash, please send it there way via the Red Cross Donations site. Thanks to Ralphy for sending over the information!

Follow us on twitter @LeGrove

Follow us on Facebook

Subscribe to our daily e-mail