The 9,000 premium seats in the middle tier of the three-tiered stadium, Kinnear explains, now generate the same amount of revenue as did all 38,000 seats at Highbury put together. Matchday revenues “were UK£30 million at Highbury,” says Kinnear. “They’re UK£90 million here.”

He adds: “The 51,000 seats we have on top of those 9,000 are just a bonus. Similarly, at Highbury, we had a shop which we almost had to close on busy match days because it couldn’t handle the demand. We’ve now got a store which is like a small Tesco store. There’s another one on the other side, at Finsbury Park [an area just north of Arsenal], and that can really handle the volume. Same with non-match day activities: Highbury wasn’t suited for non-match day activities. Here, every single day there are two or three conferences going on every day in our large conferencing suites. Conferencing and banqueting is a big business here.”

The figures are already impressive – Arsenal made UK£20 million more than their London rivals Chelsea in matchday revenues in 2008, and just UK£7 million less than league champions Manchester United. Thanks to the new stadium, the club takes annual revenues of over UK£200 million with 45 per cent of those attributable to matchday takings at the new 60,355-seater stadium. “The focus was firmly on delivering for us,” Kinnear recounts proudly, “and it was delivered on time and on budget and the beautiful thing about the stadium is that there was no element of architectural folly or ego in it. Everything was about delivering revenue. So there was no spectacular arch or box kitchens with Welsh slate tile on the floor and that kind of stuff. It was all about monetisation.”

What impressed the most, however, was the speed and efficiency with which the project was undertaken. Planning permission was sought in November 2000 and granted by May 2002; a UK£100 million sponsorship package with Emirates was in place by the beginning of October 2004; and the stadium was officially open for business on 22nd July 2006. It put the shambolic seven-year project that was the UK£800 million construction of England’s national stadium, the 90,000-seater Wembley, to shame.

The Emirates stadium project was a triumph, Kinnear posits, because of the proactive nature of the Arsenal board. “The success of the build and the commercialisation of the stadium was done on the fact that there were effectively five people all sitting next to each other who could make decisions almost instantaneously,” Kinnear says. “I think other stadia projects have struggled because they’ve been bogged down in politics and different interest groups.”

Arsenal have settled in the new stadium now, although Kinnear reveals that the club is working with supporter groups on issues like naming different sections of the ground to better accommodate fans. The challenge going forward, at every level of the club, is very much an international one.

Of primary concern for the team itself is competing in the Champions League, which is worth some UK£20 million a year to the club. Having qualified for Europe’s premier club competition for eleven successive years, the club has come to rely on the financial support that competition has to offer. Kinnear insists, however, that the club does not take it for granted and contingency plans are in place should the team slip out of the top four positions in the Premier League that offer Champions League soccer. In an echo of ‘the Arsenal way’ mantra that permeates all levels of the club, Kinnear says, “What you’d expect from Arsenal is prudent accounting, so budgets are prepared so that if we weren’t to qualify there is a level of insulation so that it’s not the end of the world. But, clearly, if you don’t qualify for two or three seasons the impact is, you know, a little harder.”

Kinnear is embarking on what promises to be an exciting time for Arsenal as a business, and he is in no doubt as to where his energies will lie in the near future. “Focus for the marketing and commercial team is on owning a relationship with the fans,” he says. “So we’ve invested a lot of time in trying to perfect our fan communication. Football clubs are at a distinct advantage because they should know everybody who interacts with them. So Tesco or Coke just don’t have an idea about who’s buying their product; we have the records of everyone who’s interacting with us and we’ve invested a lot of time in trying to create a best-in-class CRM system, which is really the foundation of all our communication with the fans.

"Increasingly, and this is the way the job is changing, it’s about international development. Arsenal, depending on the survey you read, has 40 million supporters worldwide and at the moment, if you strip TV out of that, 90 per cent of our revenue comes from 10 per cent of those people, or even less. And I think that’s one of the things where people talk about the size of their supporter base, and often that is about taking that relationship from being just about an awareness of the brand to actually being a more involved relationship where there’s a level of affinity there.”