For Arsenal, victory in the Europa League final in Baku – Uefa’s widely condemned choice of venue – carries the greater significance of qualification for next season’s Champions League than for Chelsea, who finished third in the Premier League and are thus qualified. Although the margin was fine for Unai Emery in his first season as manager, finishing fifth by a point behind Spurs, defeat in the final would mean a third consecutive failure to qualify for Arsenal, a continuing blow to football status and financial heft.
Cash consequences of missing out on the Champions League can be exaggerated, informed by a vague perception that Uefa’s euros mark the divide between the Premier League’s richest clubs and the rest. Arsenal themselves stated in their 2017-18 annual accounts that they sustained a £35m drop last season in “football revenue” – all its earnings, essentially, except a £15m profit made from Islington property development still being reaped 12 years after the Emirates Stadium opened in 2006.
“The decrease [was] mainly attributable to the club’s participating in the Uefa Europa League rather than the more lucrative Uefa Champions League,” their report noted.
That £35m would be huge money, of course, to most clubs in Europe, but illustrates that failing to qualify for the Champions League delivers a smaller proportionate hit to a top club’s earnings than is often perceived. Arsenal’s absence from the competition in Arsène Wenger’s final season cost the club only 8% of its total £423m football revenues the previous year, 2016-17, the last in which they played in the Champions League.
For a club such as Leicester without Arsenal’s rich-list earnings from sponsorships and matchdays at the Emirates, their one-off participation in the Champions League after the miracle 2016 Premier League title win provided a relatively much greater bonanza: £70m – 30% of all Leicester’s 2016-17 earnings.
Within Uefa, the idea that the money from its competition is financially decisive to Premier League inequalities has been a source of some frustration, as the English top flight’s distribution of TV money which favours the highest‑finishing clubs, their exponentially more lucrative sponsorship deals and bigger stadiums, account for much more of the difference. And the Europa League itself is a handy consolation prize; by making it to the semi‑final last season, when they lost to Atlético Madrid, Arsenal earned €38m (£34m) directly from Uefa.
The system is weighted towards English clubs by the “market pool” element, which pays more according to how much Uefa was paid for a country’s TV rights. Arsenal made €29m from the market pool, more than double the next highest earning club, Marseille, who were paid €11.7m, €23m altogether, despite reaching the final.
Arsenal last season made roughly the same money overall from matchdays at the Emirates Stadium, and the significant drops from failing to qualify were in TV income, £18.5m, and £10m in commercial revenues, which suggests their sponsors have to pay more for the greater exposure delivered by Champions League participation.
But if the financial cost of missing out on qualifying in 2017 and 2018, after 16 years of consecutive participation under Wenger, was not devastating, it does represent a major threat to Arsenal’s status, of course, if they are seen to be making a habit of it.
The football penalties are obvious, including a difficulty to attract the top echelon of players, and financially the Premier League hierarchy is changing. For most of those 16 years, Manchester City’s Abu Dhabi regime had not yet exponentially elevated its earnings; Liverpool’s revival relegated Arsenal from third- to fifth-highest-earning Premier League club last season, and Spurs’ new stadium is finally open and parked up the road from Arsenal’s north London turf.
All of which adds up to there being more than just football success invested in Arsenal trying to win the Europa League on Wednesday and come home from oil-rich, repressive Azerbaijan with the trophy.