A Game of Two Halves – Football’s Haves and Have Nots

On the first Saturday of August 2020, when the 2020-21 FA Cup competition ought to have been kicking off, the 2019-20 version lurched to a conclusion with Arsenal beating Chelsea 2-1 at an empty Wembley Stadium, absent of fans due to COVID-19.

 

Immediately after Arsenal’s victory, speculation began as to whether they would be able to retain the services of captain and winning goal scorer Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, whose current contract sees him earn £180,000 a week. At the same time rumours began about the players that Arsenal would want to sign during the transfer window with Chelsea’s Willian and Barcelona’s Ousmane Dembele among the names mentioned:  Neither would come cheap.

 

Arsenal were in the news again a few days later, when they announced 55 redundancies among the club’s non-playing staff as a cost-cutting measure. To justify this, the club cited significant reductions in income from broadcasters, and from matchday and commercial activities. But winning the FA Cup earned the club £6,795,00 in money they would not have budgeted on receiving, a sum that amounts to more than £123,000 for each of the employees they are making redundant.                 

 

Rightly, there is indignation that Arsenal continue to fork out top-dollar to their playing staff while dispensing with the services of more than fifty less generously rewarded back-room personnel. It’s true that like players at many other Premier League clubs, the majority of Arsenal’s playing squad accepted a pay cut recently - 12.5% in their case – and those sort of savings (on Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang’s salary alone it works out at £2,250 per week, and he isn’t even Arsenal’s top paid player) ought really to have staved off the need for these redundancies.

 

Arsenal are owned by billionaire Stan Kroenke, whose net worth is estimated to be in the region of £6 billion. He – and the club - could absorb the costs of those 55 employees (there’s that £6.7m FA Cup windfall for a start), by adjusting their playing budget accordingly, causing little hardship to their playing staff in the process. But they won’t, because that is a move that the top clubs make only in extremis, and we aren’t there yet.

 

Football’s finances can be mind-boggling, the difference between the haves and the have nots widening all the time. Just as Arsenal’s playing budget versus their redundancies is extreme, Manchester this week provided another startling comparison.

 

On Wednesday, Manchester City paid £40m for AFC Bournemouth defender Nathan Ake. The following day, Droylsden FC, a club located just three miles up the road from the Ethihad Stadium, announced that they had resigned from the Northern Premier League and this season’s FA Cup and FA Trophy competitions. The club made a statement in which they said, “The closing of the social club and its function rooms  since the start of the pandemic, the main income source with no indication of any restart on viable trading terms along with a loss of income from the club’s main sponsor  has left the club with no visible alternative income stream during the crisis.”

 

The transfer fee that Manchester City paid AFC Bournemouth would sustain a club like Droylsden for many, many years – decades even – illustrating that the gap between the top of the game and its lower reaches is so great that it is almost incomprehensible.

 

As I already said, as substantial as the prize money that Arsenal collected for winning the FA Cup is, it isn’t money that the club would have budgeted on receiving when the season started, and when you consider that it is less than half what they pay Mesut Orzil in a year (they pay him £350,000 per week), it becomes almost insignificant, despite the fact that it represents riches beyond compare for clubs at Droylsden’s level, the eighth tier of the English game. At that level income streams can be precarious. Most clubs rely on income from their bars and function rooms and the generosity of owners, directors and supporters, and when deprived of that income, their position becomes perilous. Gate receipts can be low, sponsorship money (if any) may be just a few thousand pounds - unlike the £64m Chevrolet pay Manchester United - and there are no lucrative TV deals. FA Cup prize money is not a given either, nor when received is it as generous as it would be for a club like Arsenal.

 

The £6m that Arsenal earned winning the FA Cup required them to win six matches. A club starting in the first round of the FA Cup last season - the Extra-Preliminary Round - and winning six matches would have earned £46,390,  a not inconsiderable sum – I know of clubs whose annual turnover is less than that – but for 2020-21, the ravages of COVID-19 mean that the prize money has halved; a club winning the first six rounds will earn just £23,194 this season.

 

To make matters worse, the first two rounds of this season’s FA Cup – the Extra-Preliminary, and Preliminary Rounds – are scheduled for 1^st September and 12^th September. With the Government not yet prepared to allow spectators at sporting events – recent trials of limited numbers of fans at cricket, horse-racing, and snooker were postponed – these games are likely to go ahead behind closed doors. For clubs of the status playing in the early rounds of the FA Cup, this will be expensive. Despite having no income from paying customers, they will still incur significant expense, as these genuine figures from one of last season’s FA Cup ties show:

• Gate receipts: £557.60
• Match officials’ expenses: £171
• Away team expenses: £336
• Other expenses: £64
• Loss: £13.40

 

That same game this season, with no gate receipts, would result in a loss of £571 for the home club. In the Extra-Preliminary Round, the winners will receive £1,125 from the competition prize fund and so a side winning at home in our example would actually be £554 ahead, but if these expenses were incurred by a team losing at home (who would receive just £375), they would be £196 out of pocket. (For the sake of this argument I am assuming that clubs will still be expected to meet away teams’ expenses this season, although that could change).

 

In a further example of the difference between the haves and have nots, the rules of the FA Cup require clubs to pay the fees of the match officials in the qualifying rounds, although The FA pay the fees in the competition proper. This means that while AFC Liverpool of the North West Counties League would have to stump up for the ref’s expenses in a home FA Cup tie played behind closed doors with no income, their Premier League neighbours, Liverpool and Everton – who would likely receive TV income even if no gate receipts - would not. Does that sound fair to you?

 

On top of these costs, clubs have players’ wages (even if modest), plus rent, rates, utility bills, and sundry other expenses to cover from little or even no income.

 

I have little sympathy with Arsenal pleading poverty and trying to justify 55 redundancies that using their FA Cup prize money could avoid, instead I’ll save my sympathy for 500-odd non-League clubs who will embark on their 2020-21 FA Cup campaigns in September, and will pay handsomely for the privilege.