Many away fans call the Emirates Stadium a ‘library’, referring to the ‘lack’ of atmosphere in the crowd but the Emirates is, in fact, better than old Highbury.
For starters, the players on the pitch can determine the atmosphere of the crowd in a lot of circumstances.
Back in the days of Highbury, Arsenal won Premier league and FA Cup doubles and the club’s faithful witnessed some of the best players in the world, which will get the crowd going, maybe unlike now where the quality has dropped somewhat.
The stands at Highbury were a lot closer to the pitch so that may make it sound louder.
Secondly, Highbury was in much need of regeneration and more capacity was needed as Arsenal fans were finding it near impossible to get tickets to matches and, as a result, Arsenal were missing out on a lot of revenue and therefore couldn’t compete with the newly improved Chelsea as Roman Abramovich pumped his billions into them.
Corporate hospitality is where a lot of the money is to be made on match days in modern day football clubs and the facilities at Highbury were way below par. Unlike the Emirates, where they have state of the art hospitality sweets.
Thanks to this improved revenue, Arsenal have managed to sign high calibre players like Mesut Ozil for a reported £42.5m and Alexis Sanchez for a reported £35m.
In the Invincibles era, Arsenal never spent more than £11m on a player (Thierry Henry) and including free transfers in Sol Campbell and Jens Lehmann, and the wage bill has more than doubled since then.
Arsenal have become a financial powerhouse since there move to the stadium and can now compete with the top clubs in the world for players.
Lastly, the £390m stadium is a one of the best in Europe and will be recognised as one of the top stadiums in the world for many seasons to come.
