War Chest

Here are some figures to help understand the size of our war chest:

TV revenue this year was £57mil, however the new TV deal has nearly doubled in size, so we'll assume next year's TV revenue is £100m

Plus we have the new commercial deals of around £30m

Looking at Arsenal's accounts last year, if you remove all profit from player trading it looks like we make annual profits of about £15m profit (that takes into account the £15m in paying off debts)

Finally, if we want to stay within FFP limits (which we do!), we are now entering the 3 season monitoring period where we cannot lose more than £30m, i.e. £10m per year.

So as a very rough calculation, and assuming that offloading our deadwood will cover the wages of any new players, I would say we have:

£43m (tv) + £30m (commercial) + £10m (ffp max) + £15m (yearly profit) = £98million

Knowing our board they will not spend all of this, but I would be surprised if they did not invest at least £50m into the squad, especially as this is money the club simply didn't have last year.

I expect it will be a busy summer transfer market, with even more inflated prices. All premier league teams will have the extra £40m or so of TV money, and they are nowhere near as prudish as our board can be!

Hopefully some of our rivals will take this new money as an opportunity to get back on track with FFP... but I doubt it. Come on Wenger, spend big and buy back the love of all our fans!