IT is that time of year again. Clubs announcing revenues. And it all happens with a certain sense of deja vu, particularly when it comes to Arsenal and Manchester United.

The Gunners made a profit of £24.7 million for the year ending in May 2015. Revenue is up and, buried in the accounts, is the fact they are sitting on cash reserves of £193.1m. The club say £65.6m is earmarked to pay off outstanding transfer fees. What the remaining £127.5m will be used for is anyone’s guess.

The official line is that it is there for manager Arsene Wenger to spend if he so chooses. And, of course, Wenger chooses not to. Or so he says.

And that leaves Arsenal fans nonplussed after a summer that saw Petr Cech arrive for around £12m and little else. It is true, they did spend substantially in the two previous seasons – bringing in Alexis Sanchez, Mesut Ozil and others – and, in recent years, they have stopped selling the crown jewels to rivals. But the sense that the gap with the real title contenders isn’t narrowing remains evident.

This is a fan base that hasn’t seen Arsenal involved in a title race since 2003-04, the year of the Invincibles. That is how far back you have to go and the fact that Wenger isn’t spending that money on the team – in fact, it isn’t being spent on anything, it’s just sitting there – is hugely frustrating.

Maybe the owners, led by Stan Kroenke, are just letting it accumulate, with plans to withdraw it all in one go when nobody is looking.

At Old Trafford, they prefer the steady drip. On Thursday, Manchester United announced they would start paying a dividend to shareholders for the first time since listing on the New York Stock Exchange in 2012. For the six Glazer siblings, that adds up to £2.5m each this year. That’s in addition to the £129m they earned when they sold a chunk of shares last year and the £75m they made for themselves when the club was floated.

Three years, six Glazers, some £219m gained... that’s some £36.5m each (with more to come: a document filed last week in New York allows them to sell a further 24m shares between now and 2018; right now that adds up to another £276m). And, for most of them, it’s thanks to an accident of genetics – being the offspring of the late Malcolm Glazer – and laissez-faire regulations which allowed them to acquire the club and then saddle it with debt.

Which, by the way, is down from the £525m in 2005 to £411m last year. Ordinarily you would think reducing debt by £114m over a decade would be a tremendous result. And then you realise that, according to the financial journalist David Conn, United have paid some £700m in interest and finance-related costs.

Glazer defenders – not that there are many – would say that it is a small price to pay for their enlightened ownership which has delivered record profits (despite that £700m flowing out of the club) while doubling revenue. Thing is, clubs like Arsenal and Chelsea have also doubled their turnover in that time.

What’s better? Seeing your club milked little by little or watching it accumulate cash that you know won’t be spent on your team?

Choose your poison.

THREE defeats in four Champions League games for Premier League teams served to continue the debate from last season: why can’t they win consistently in Europe?

Truth be told, it was a mixed bag. Manchester United were unlucky away to PSV Eindhoven, Arsenal’s game could have gone either way and Manchester City did enough to at least snatch a draw against Juventus.

But the facts remain. Whether it is a blip or not, we’re getting closer to the point where that fourth Champions League spot is in peril. Because of the way Uefa co-efficients work, the gap between England and Italy will likely narrow this season, regardless of results. And if Serie A clubs outperform their Premier League counterparts by the same margin as last year, there will be one less English team in the Champions League come 2017-18.

Maybe that will get some of the self-congratulatory folks who revel in the size of the TV deal, the record profits and the pile of cash they are accumulating, to take notice. Financial success follows from success on the pitch. Not the other way around.

THE sudden departure of Jerome Valcke, the second-highest ranking official at Fifa, was one of those events that raised more questions than it answered. On Thursday, a former footballer turned ticket broker, Benny Alon, held a press conference in Zurich where he accused the Fifa secretary- general of conspiring with him in a ticket-touting scam involving the 2014 World Cup. Within hours, Valcke was relieved of duty by Fifa and referred to the organisation’s Ethics Committee (no giggling in the back of the room!).

It is a weird one on many levels. First, Alon presented a bunch of “evidence” at his press conference. But those present, including reporters from the New York Times and the Guardian, said the documents he presented were “open to interpretation” and “incomplete”. Not exactly a smoking gun.

Which may explain why Valcke feels secure in telling the world, via his lawyer, that he’d been framed.

OK, stranger things have happened in Fifa World. What is odd though is why Sepp Blatter, the Fifa supremo, would wield the axe now. (And, make no mistake, that’s what happened. Nobody gets sent to the Fifa Ethics Committee without the president’s green light.)

After all, come February, there will be a new Fifa president (or so we have been led to believe) and, with him, a new secretary-general.

So why get rid of Valcke now when Blatter was willing to look the other way so many times before, including when it emerged that he had authorised a $10m payment to disgraced Concacaf boss Jack Warner which the New York investigation alleges was a bribe?