Accounts for the year ending May 31, 2014 were published on Friday by Arsenal and revealed that the annual wage bill had increased to £166.4 million, while revenues exceeded £300 million for the first time in the club’s history. This summer’s transfer activity, however, is not included in the accounts and the net increase to the wage bill following the arrivals of Alexis Sanchez, Danny Welbeck, Mathieu Debuchy, David Ospina and Calum Chambers is around £15 million. That would put the wage bill for this current 2014-15 season at over £180 million. This will fluctuate slightly depending on performance-related elements of the contracts.
Chelsea’s most recently disclosed wage bill was £176 million, for the year ending 2012-13, but the
Telegraph can reveal that this figure has stayed virtually static over the past two years amid the departures of older, higher-profile players like Frank Lampard, Ashley Cole and Fernando Torres.
It all means that the financial figures relating to this current season – 2014-15 – are expected to show that Arsenal are now actually only third behind
Manchester United and
Manchester City in the
Premier Leaguefor spending in salaries. The results are a further indication of a subtle but definite changing in the Premier League landscape as Uefa’s financial fair-play regulations take hold. In the first full season after the takeover at Stamford Bridge by Roman Abramovich, Deloitte estimated Chelsea's wage bill of £115 million in 2003/04 as “almost certainly the highest in world football”.