SportsThoughtsSpurs Spooky Profits... Devil Paying Them Off? (LINK)
In the future, I wonder if any teams will be able to compete with the London clubs financially. Arsenal are now officially the richest team in England. It doesn't seem to matter how many shirts Manchester United sell in Asia... Arsenal can charge so much more to regular punters and corporate types alike at their 60,000 stadium, than even ManU can't keep up.
Meanwhile some Chelsea fans spend £70 to go to the game. No, not into a prawn-sandwich enclosure, £70 for a regular seat.
And then there's Tottenham... always renowned as a moneybags club. They have the second-highest average ticket price in the league (behind Arsenal). Can you imagine how much they could charge if they were actually any good?
Spurs have just posted profits of £26m. Now, I'm not so naive to think that all that money that went on Darren Bent last summer went in one big cheque for £16.5m. But still... this is a club that spends an ABSOLUTE BLOODY FORTUNE on players every year. They never win a damn thing. They get about ten bob for competing in the UEFA Cup. They only have 38-odd thousand paying punters every week. You can't even get a good sandwich there.
So where the hell is the money coming from?
This is a real Mulder and Scully job, this.
Okay: here's my theory-
Arsenal President Peter Hills Woods and Arsene Wenger are actually latter-day mages/shamens/witches, and they conjured Patrick Viera, Cesc Fabregas, Robin Van Persie, Thierry Henry and a dozen more players out of a massive cauldron, while reciting spells and throwing things like newt's teeth and crow's feet, and all that.
Alan Sugar/Daniel Levy are on to their secret, and so Hills-Woods has instructed his Dark Lord (Trevor Brooking) to pay them off to keep their mouths shut.
Thus Spurs get around £20m in black envelopes from Sir Trevor every year, while Wenger continues to use his magic to pull unheard-of but class players out of his a**e at the start of every season.
