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There was a time in the past that theater was all the rage.  Fame and fortune went hand-in-hand with a starring role on the stage.  The stars traveled the world and dined with kings and queens.

Of course, this rarely happens anymore.  Centuries of tradition have been swept aside by the irrepressible march of technology.  First came movies, and later television.  Talkies.  Technicolor.  Panavision.  Widescreen.  Anamorphic Widescreen (my widescreen is wider than yours).  Stereo.  Dolby Digital.  5.1 surround sound.  7.1 surround sound (my surround sound is surroundier than your).  HDTV.  3D “3ality Digital”.

Why all the investment in this technology?  In a word, scale.  A movie can be shown hundreds of times in thousands of places - all without Leonardo or Angelina turning up in person.  Television is the same in Topeka, Kansas as it is in New York or Los Angles - and increasingly the same in London or Melbourne.

And with scale comes money - the incremental cost of showing the movie in one more location - or a TV show in another city -  is pretty negligible.  More income with almost no increase in cost - the foundation of all business models.

Football stadiums are theaters.  Granted, you need a place to play the game. And you need a place to put all the fans, because the fans are an integral part of the game.  Germany v Spain in front of a handful of disinterested blokes walking their dogs would just not be the same.

But - and this is critical to appreciate - there’s only so much money you can make from people paying to watch the game in person.  There are only so many games a season you can play.  And only so many people you can fit into a stadium.

There’s a massive cost involved in going from 40,000 seats to 60,000.  You might have to throw your old stadium away and build a brand new one.  It’s also a fixed cost that is never going to go away, as the cost of decreasing the size is just a large.

Trying to have the best stadium is like trying to have the best theater.

So if you heard of a football club sinking, let’s say, £430 million ($800 million) in a new stadium, what would your reaction be?  And what if that ‘investment’ came at the price of hobbling the progress of the football club’s ability to succeed on the pitch?

That’s exactly what Arsenal have done - and Arsene Wenger admitted as much this weekend:

“We manage at Arsenal to maintain all our football ambitions - national and European - while having to free up - for 17 more years - an annual surplus of £24million to pay for our stadium.

“The club’s strategy is to favour the policy of youngsters ahead of stars and to count on the collective quality of our game.”

That would be actually be a pretty smart strategy if the £24million could be banked every year instead of going to pay the creditors.  It’s like saying you’re going to save money by stopping smoking, going out less, and giving up Starbucks - all good moves but if the money you save is going to pay off a credit card debt, then you messed up somewhere in the past.

Another thing to bear in the mind is the opportunity cost of the £430 million that was spent on the stadium.  Instead of racking up a pretty incredible debt, maybe it have been invested in something more akin to HDTV and 3ality Digital.