by Lewis Ambrose

The move to Emirates Stadium saw Arsenal buying young players for little money before developing them and, almost invariably, selling them for a large profit.

The players were looking for bigger things and weren’t patient enough to see that through with Arsène Wenger and his vision.

Nowadays the club is in a stronger position financially. Bigger stars can be signed for larger amounts. They can be paid more with bigger contracts and their high aims can be met by a club that can sign even bigger stars to compliment them. Arsenal don’t need to sell again.

Better

But there is one club that stands even ahead of Arsenal in the field of developing players before selling for monstrous amounts of money.

Jackson Martinez has completed a move from Porto to Atlético Madrid for a fee of £25M, and is the NINTH Porto player to be sold for over £20M.

Fellow striker Radamel Falcao also joined Atlético from the Portuguese giants, with Pepe and Danilo joinin city rivals Real Madrid. English clubs have spent big on Ricardo Carvalho, Eliaquim Mangala and Anderson, while Hulk and James Rodriguez went to totally juxtaposing locations in Monaco and St. Petersburg.

The point, however, is that Porto sell a lot of players for a lot of money.

Next up, Arsenal have managed to sell Marc Overmars, Cesc Fabregas, Emmanuel Adebayor, Samir Nasri and Robin van Persie for fees exceeding £25M.

Also with five players are Barcelona, Chelsea, Real Madrid and Lazio.

If Arsenal have sold their quality players at a premium, is that good business? It’s clear that all big clubs sell big players sooner or later but we don’t tend to let them go for cheap.

People have branded Arsenal as a feeder club in recent years but, in truth, every big club sells5 at some point. Porto are more of a feeder club than Arsenal will ever be.