Arsenal financial results show why Champions League is crucial

Arsenal have been away from the Champions League for six years and considering their financial results, a return couldn’t come soon enough.

It’s not quite done and dusted yet, but Arsenal return from the international break in the rudest health that they’ve been in for a long time, and a return to the Champions League after six years away is starting to look on the cards. Manchester City and Liverpool have been the only teams to beat Mikel Arteta’s side since the start of December; memories of being bottom of the Premier League table at the very start of the season couldn’t be fading more rapidly.

At the time of writing, they’re three points clear of Tottenham with a game in hand. Even though the two teams still have to play each other again in the league, their fate remains very much in their own hands, and the flakiness on the pitch of both Spurs and sixth-placed Manchester United means that it’s likely that Arsenal will be able to drop further points this season and still cling onto that valuable place in European football’s elite competition.

If they are to return, the timing probably couldn’t be better. These are challenging financial times and Arsenal haven’t been able to avoid this particular whirlwind. The club released their financial figures for the 2020/21 season at the end of February and they made for grim reading. They posted post-tax losses of £107.3m, the biggest in their history, with up to £85m of these losses attributable to the pandemic. All of this came despite the club having made 55 people redundant, the sort of story that doesn’t register anywhere near the number of headlines as signing a shiny new trinket of a player.

Little is more contemptuous than billionaires crying poverty.

Arsenal making