Last night there was an Arsenal Supporters’ Trust meeting with Ivan Gazidis. Around 70 Arsenal fans turned up. Some interesting points were revealed, and we will summarise as many as possible in this article.

Firstly, the Arsenal Fanshare scheme has over 2000 members. In under one year, nearly £1 million of shares have been invested in by these members. However, unless more shares are made available, the scheme may have to stop taking money from its members for the time being. Usmanov’s Red and White has agreed to sell Arsenal Fanshare the same amount of shares as Kroenke Sports Enterprise are willing to sell. So far, KSE has sold no shares to Arsenal Fanshare.

Another scheme has raised some money for the club – whereby people can engrave their names in a brick outside the Armoury. It has raised somewhere in the region of £2 million, which is thought to be the cost of a new state-of-the-art building in the London Colney training ground.

In terms of finances, Arsenal has around £50 million in the transfer kitty, after making a £15 million profit in the most recent transfer window. The money will be spent wisely on the players that Wenger really wants. It will not be wasted on players that are bought simply to make the fans happy.

Normally there is a strong correlation between wage expenditure and league position. Last season, both Spurs and Liverpool under-performed because their final position was below their position in the wage table. Arsenal over-performed as we finished 4th despite being 5th in the wage table.

However, we have an issue with our wage structure. By keeping all the players’ wages quite close, our fringe players earn more than they should and our star players earn less than they should. This could be why we keep losing top players to teams that can play more. For example, Diaby earns £60k/week, whereas Modric earns £48k/week. That’s why Modric wants to go to Chelsea. And that’s also why we struggled to sell Denilson and Bendtner – no one would take their high wages and the players didn’t want pay cuts.

Another problem is the commercial income revenue. Arsenal’s is in the region of £40m, whereas Man Utd’s is at around £100m. In terms of stadium debt, the club has to pay £5m/year for the next 25 years. On the plus side, there is no property debt. The reason that we can’t just wipe out all the stadium debt is because there would be a financial penalty – something like £20 million.

We have signed three new partnerships – Carlsberg, Indesit and Betsson. Carlsberg is a brewing company, Indesit is a leading appliance manufacturer and Betsson is an online betting company.

Onto the transfer news. Wenger was happy with his transfer dealings in June for Gervinho, Oxlade-Chamberlain, Jenkinson, Campbell and having a work permit granted for Miyaichi. This implies that the deadline day signings were not necessarily a major part of Wenger’s long term plans.

Mikel Arteta will cost Arsenal £25 million. He has no resale value. He didn’t take a pay cut from Everton, because he is staying at Arsenal for an extra year. Overall, he is earning more money at Arsenal than he would have on Merseyside.

The club are watching 60-70 players at once. Wenger and Gazidis are in complete control of transfers and wages. They choose who to watch, who to bid for and how much.

Arsenal got so much money for Nasri because of Mancini’s comments to the media about the player. Arsenal could have reported them to the FA for openly tapping up our winger. In addition, by holding out until August, Arsenal got an extra £10 million for Cesc Fabregas.

Players such as Hazard, M’Vila, Goetze and Cahill were not allowed to move by their clubs, it was not necessarily their choice. Cahill in particular really wanted to move to Arsenal but a transfer was blocked by Bolton.

Usmanov has bought two adjacent boxes at the Emirates and merged them into a superbox.

Our property sales are a safety net in terms of cash in case we don’t make the Champions League.

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