City gave Luton a bit of a hammering last night and whilst at first my instant reaction was ‘oh no’ I think the reality is that we need their schedule to be as packed as possible. The more games they have loaded in to their schedule the better and this will mean that they have to find more time to play more games and that may force more rotation.

Of course the down side is that they have recent history with them, having won the treble last year, but that in itself is a bloody hard thing to do and the fact it’s only really been done twice in my lifetime makes me think that 90% of the time the more games teams get fixture congestion, the more difficult it becomes for them. Liverpool have the same challenge and tonight they play Southampton in the FA Cup before again playing Forest at 3pm on Saturday. I suspect they’ll still win both games but as long as those legs continue to get tired then you never know, there might be an opportunity for fatigue to creep in and slip ups to happen.

The Arsenal news yesterday that was doing the rounds was around FFP and the £52million loss that the club announced for their 2023 accounts. That’s no small amount of change and it really does serve to highlight why Arsenal were so careful about January. The club couldn’t go and spunk another £50 – £75million on players when they knew that this was about to be released in February and with both Forest and Everton facing the impending points deduction application to their tally (Everton have had theirs reduced to six points but I’m not sure if they have a second charge hanging over them), we saw the impact on all teams in this January transfer window just gone, as most clubs tightened their belts. But the most important point to note from the announcement yesterday was the confirmation from the club that they are continuing to be compliant with FFP.

Ironically enough the rules around FFP are that you are allowed to make a £105million loss over a three-year period, so just the fee equivalent for a certain Mr Rice, wouldn’t you know!

But in reality the club will be very mindful of needing to turn that around for next year and of course continued involvement in the Champions League will certainly help that. In terms of the three year period I’m not an expert, but the good folks at the AST have some clever accountants who are pretty accurate and in August of last year they published their best guess of the three year rolling period. The COVID year was £127million loss, the year to May 2022 was £45million loss, then this announcement is £52million. That would seem like Arsenal are in sticky position but when you think that this includes the COVID era in which football clubs were given a little more leeway, it suggests that perhaps Arsenal are in an okayish shape, but it does make you realise that a lot of this is probably predicated on that Champions League money.

Again though, at this juncture I’d point out that I am far away from being any kind of football money expert, so you’re better getting the detail from the likes of Kieran at Swiss Ramble over here.

That Champions League money feels like it was quite essential though. Arsenal will have that to add to the coffers and suggest that Arsenal will have received at least £23.75million (I did a conversion online from Euro’s to pounds) just from their four wins and a draw in the group stage, followed by the £13.37million that you get just for being in the competition. This website here spells it out but it looks like Arsenal will have received around at least £54million regardless of what happens with the Porto result. So should Arsenal qualify for that, there will be another £9million coming our way, as this website highlights with the prize money. So straight away you can see the difference between Champions League and Europa League; Liverpool’s prize money breakdown looks like it’s closer to £11million at this stage. That’s a big drop and you can see why the step in to the Champions League and then continued involvement in the competition is so important. Arsenal’s money men will have been very happy with the team last season.

So whilst Arsenal had to keep their January powder dry, so to speak, you’d expect that should we confirm another season in the group stages of the competition next year, there will be more money to be spent and a club that is a lot more comfortable about having no issues with FFP.

As fans we don’t look at the balance sheet very much – well most of the people I call Arsenal friends don’t, but when you start to see things like what has happened in the Premier League with Forest and Everton, you realise that these details matter. Arsenal’s success and continued involvement at the top table will enable us to dig deeper in to the transfer market this summer and that, in turn, with further strengthen the squad. Just look at the Declan Rice move. I know we amortise the value of the player over the lifetime of the contract, but I would be surprised if Arsenal would have been able to afford Declan Rice, had we not have gotten Champions Legaue. There’s an argument that the player might not have wanted to come as strongly had we have failed in that target too, but the numbers wouldn’t have looked like they were working out anyway, I suspect. What’s also a bit of a mindbender is that if you think about the timeline of how things progressed with us starting to talk to Rice just over a year ago, Arsenal must have been pretty confident in January that top four was in the bag, otherwise, why would you even bother trying to talk to Rice and his representatives? We need this team to be successful because we all want to see a great Arsenal side winning trophies, but the bank balance also needs a successful Arsenal too.

I think that’ll be me done for today, as I’ve got a fair bit of work on, but I’ll be back tomorrow with the usual musings. You have yourself a good one.