Debt on the books, cash in the bank

Yesterday's only real Gooner news was the quite frankly unsurprising revelation that we are roughly £100m further in the red this year, following the move to Ashburton Grove and further investment in the transformation at Highbury which has now begun. The club expects to remain in the red for 25 years.

Peter Hill-Wood made a quick statement on Arsenal.con about the move to the Emirates and how that has, remarkably, affected our finances. I almost fell off my chair.

Chief exec Mr Edelman described the club as still being "cash rich" with a reported £36m in the bank and available to Arsene. I expect him to spend about £2m on some 19-year old French centre midfielder I've never heard of and nothing else. But seriously...

Edelman goes on to use a rather nice home owner analogy, saying:

"It is like an individual buying a new bigger house into which you have put more equity - you will have a bigger mortgage, but overall be in a stronger financial position," said Edelman. "The two things are completely separate and you do not say 'you have no money to spend because you have a mortgage'. A mortgage is something you pay off every month, X amount over a number of years then you look how much cash you have in your pocket to spend. Well, we ended the year with £36m of cash in the bank, in our pocket to spend now, so we are very cash-rich, although we have got high debts, which relate effectively to the mortgage on our stadium."

Nicely put.

And there's nothing else really going on. I read an interesting article on the ANR yesterday (which was posted much earlier but was temporarily lost in the ether whilst they switched servers) regarding the takeover rumours which was linked to the executive management of the club. In the article Myles suggests that whilst a takeover might not be advantageous, a shake up of the board and management might not only be in our best interests, it might be a neccessity.

Certainly food for thought.