Arsenal has a history of being a little bit lighter on the payscale than most EPL teams, but that hasn’t stopped them attracting talent and being one of the league’s top teams. Well, this may be stop that. Club chairman Peter Hill-Wood has been shouting from the rooftops that the economic sky is falling, so players shouldn’t ask for salaries like in previous years because poor clubs like his won’t be able to afford it. When asked to comment on the statement, Chelsea owner Roman Abromovich just started wadding up 100 Euro marks and throwing them at the reporter.

“People need to be waking up to the realities of the world and that the days of easy money have come to a pretty sudden end,” Hill-Wood said Tuesday. “There is an awful lot of talk about big transfers and major demands of players but you will find throughout the UK and Europe that money is not quite as easy to obtain as it used to be.

Yeah, it is. Don’t you just jack up the price of tickets and make corporate suits pay for them? See, problem solved.

“A lot of people don’t seem to realize that in the long run you must run a football club on a sensible commercial basis,” Hill-Wood said. “A lot of the figures bandied around at the moment don’t make commercial sense to us. That is what disappoints me, that people are prepared to do what can be construed as very silly things.”

Oh you mean silly things like charge $9 for a beer, or $25 for parking? We understand your predicament, Hill-Wood, but if you’re not passing on the exorbitant fees fans pay at the stadium to the players to field a competitive team, where is that cash going? The water bill? Start lowering your prices, then you could maybe make statement like that.

Arsenal chairman warns footballers to wake up [Fox Sports]
Image [komchadluek.net]