David Conn: Viera may be staying, but Arsenal could have done with the money

So, Patrick Vieira is finally staying - a satisfying moment for Arsenal, who maintained all along they wanted to keep him. As the months pass, though, the club's directors may think wistfully about £25m and wonder, after all, if they could have done with selling.

So, Patrick Vieira is finally staying - a satisfying moment for Arsenal, who maintained all along they wanted to keep him. As the months pass, though, the club's directors may think wistfully about £25m and wonder, after all, if they could have done with selling.

Insisting they do not need the money has been brave talk from the Premier League champions. They are starting another season at their old Highbury home determined to compete with the towering resources of the Premiership's only realistic other challengers, Manchester United and Chelsea, while also paying for the new 60,000-seat stadium taking shape down the road in Ashburton Grove, a financial vice guaranteed to keep the manufacturers of paracetamol in business.

While Chelsea are bankrolled by Siberia's oil fields and United are cash rich, Arsenal last year declared debts of £60m, then borrowed another £260m from a flotilla of banks to finance Ashburton Grove.

The club has committed over £102m cash towards the stadium project, and a further £45m to it from their sponsorship deal with Nike. Their trading arm is borrowing £42m from the Royal Bank of Scotland and the club has taken out another £37m loan from Barclays. However, Arsenal maintain the figures stack up, and say even now that money for Arsène Wenger's expensive football team is being kept separate from the stadium headaches.

"The money from the football side," a spokesperson said, "is ring-fenced." It will be interesting to keep an eye on how impenetrable that fence turns out to be. In this unrestrainedly commercial era, when the amount of money spent on players is assumed to pay for success, Arsenal's triumphs on the field under Wenger have been a remarkably accomplished, wily balancing act, in the face of United's commercial might and Chelsea's unholy Russian fortunes.

Arsenal have walked the tightrope not, as at other clubs, through share issues or investments from their directors, but with brilliant management by Wenger, boosted by a couple of brazen debenture, or bond, schemes which have had fans paying out.

The first, in 1991 to finance the rebuilding of the North Bank, provoked a storm of protest, while the other, last year, raised £10m with barely a murmur from 2,000 people spending £5,000 each just for the right to buy a season ticket at oversubscribed Highbury, then at Ashburton Grove. Wenger has been inspired in the transfer market, waking up early to world-class players, then selling them at their market peak: Nicolas Anelka went to Real Madrid for £22m, Emmanuel Petit and Marc Overmars to Barcelona for £29m. Vieira, too, was not going cheaply.

Arsenal, however, know they cannot maintain their status through endless managerial miracles, while constantly earning less money from Highbury's 38,500 capacity than United at 67,700 seater Old Trafford. United's turnover was £173m last year compared to Arsenal's £103m, and on matchdays, United made £70.6m from punters and prawn sandwiches, Arsenal well under half that, £28m.

Chelsea are a freak, living off Russian oil due to the outrageous privatisations of the Yeltsin era, but they are a worry, too.

The overwhelming importance of stadium size to a club's success is the natural consequence of the abolition in 1983 of the near century-old tradition of the home side sharing 20 per cent of gate receipts with the away club, a system designed to keep clubs roughly competitive. As ticket prices have increased along with corporate entertainment, the amount earned and kept by clubs from their own matches has soared, with United, quietly and unobtrusively slapping more tiers onto Old Trafford, way out of Arsenal and Liverpool's reach.

Hence Ashburton Grove, and Liverpool proposing a 60,000-seater new stadium on Stanley Park, said to be costing £90m, although they have not announced how they will finance it, now we know it will not be from Lottery players in Thailand.

Arsenal's conservative estimates are that they will make around £1.5m more per match at Ashburton Grove than they do at Highbury, the 21,500 more paying customers including 7,000 "club" seats with pre-match trimmings. There will be 150 executive boxes, compared to 48 now, which are sold for £50,000 a season - a £5m increase at today's prices if they sell out.

Those who said Arsenal would not secure funding for the project were proved wrong in February, when an odd-looking group including the German HSH Nordbank and Luxembourg-based Espirito Santo Investment, led by the Royal Bank of Scotland, agreed to lend Arsenal £260m over 14 years. Interest is understood to have been fixed mostly at seven per cent, which adds up to £18.2m a year, a hefty £255m altogether.

It is not entirely clear where the club's further £102m cash investment is coming from. ITV are due to pay Arsenal £30m for five per cent of the shares, a deal agreed by Granada back in September 2000 when media companies still believed football clubs promised pay-per-view and internet windfalls. The cost is six times the current market valuation of Arsenal shares, but unlike their ITV Digital contract with the Football League, ITV is tied into this deal and expected to pay up early next year.

Other than that one-off boost, the cash is presumed to have come from general income and player sales, which makes it difficult to understand how the mountain of money required to maintain a championship-winning football team can be wholly unplundered by the demands of Ashburton Grove.

Last August Arsenal secured a £55m sponsorship deal with Nike over seven years; all but £10m of it is being shoved straight into Ashburton Grove.

The banking arrangements mean that Arsenal do not start repaying the loans until they occupy the new stadium, planned for the 2006-07 season. Until then, the interest "rolls up" at £18.2m every year, then it will have to be repaid, along with the whole £260m capital - £515m altogether - in 12 years. So, Arsenal will be repaying on average £43m a year to the banks, while expecting to make only £37m-£45m extra from the stadium, depending on the number of games. They will be paying out for a long time before they benefit from Ashburton Grove on anything like a scale to put them close to United.

They expect to make additional profits from property development around the site, once they have forced out the remaining businesses on the Ashburton Grove industrial estate with Compulsory Purchase Orders, and built flats, there and at Highbury. However, the protesting businesses' campaign is not over yet. A fortnight ago several issued High Court challenges to the Government's decision to allow the CPOs despite a report from the Government's own planning inspector, who lambasted the stadium scheme for delivering "disappointingly low" benefits to the local area, and said the CPOs should not be granted.

The case represents more uncertainty and will delay that part of the project, although Arsenal say it is not hugely significant to the scheme financially.

In the meantime, United will plough on. They have expanded Old Trafford without borrowing any money, rebuilding the Stretford End with the fruits of their 1991 flotation, and paying for further expansions with cash and a share issue, which was gobbled up in seconds in the City. Danny Fiszman, the Arsenal shareholder most personally involved with Ashburton Grove, and managing director Keith Edelman, do not have that luxury. Edelman said after the bank deals were announced that Arsenal had taken "a calculated gamble" - Highbury had become too small for them and Ashburton Grove is a long-term punt to a sounder future.

Fiszman and Edelman will be all too aware of the recent news from Old Trafford, where United have completed a feasibility study and are expected shortly to apply for planning permission for a further stadium expansion, closing up the corners at the two ends of the North Stand. This will transform Old Trafford into a bowl on three sides - no doubt making the ground more attractive to US-based investors - and take United's capacity to 75,000, with vast areas for yet more corporate scoffing. Again, United will not borrow a penny; they are expecting to complete the project over two years, starting in March, paying the whole £45m in cash.

So, Arsenal will be sweating to repay their vast loans on Ashburton Grove, while needing to keep Wenger and Vieira happy, and pay for a team good enough to fill the stadium, but still find themselves 15,000 seats short of United.

How long before even the new stadium feels too small? Or to put it another way, in modern English football, where money determines success and two clubs have so much more at their disposal than the rest, where is it all going to end?