The Arsenal boss Ivan Gazidis has announced that the club are freezing season ticket prices for next season (although Club Members will pay an extra 2%) which will hopefully see the protests we saw last year come down to minimum.
Gazidis makes it sound like he is doing the fans a favour when he said: “We have fantastic support with all our home games selling out week after week, year after year.
“The Arsenal board, as always, works to strike a balance between the expense of coming to games for our supporters and the club’s ever-increasing costs and expenditure as it develops on and off the pitch.”
This as last week, but today the Express has revealed that Arsenal have broken the £100 million mark purely from matchdays for the first time in 2014, and total revenue was over £300 million, which is a massive increase of 23% over the previous year.
The board member cites the rising costs of players as the reasons for the neccesary increase in profit which was helped by the % extra they charged fans this season, but has player costs really increased by over a quarter?
It seems to me that our actual first team squad seems to be getting smaller every year, even though wage costs seem to increase!
This is all a bit over my head, but I was under the impression a few years ago that as the income from TV massively increased every year, then the club could actually afford to REDUCE prices. Is there anyone out there that can explain things to me a little clearer?