Arsenal Manager Arsène Wenger said that the Premier League's surging TV revenue "has allowed even smaller clubs to attract best players from Europe and made England's top flight more competitive," according to Shravanth Vijayakumar of REUTERS. He said that a new domestic broadcast deal, a 70% increase on the existing one, "comes into effect next season and the richest clubs, with their incredible financial might, will no longer be able to cherry-pick the best players." Wenger: "What is for sure is that the Premier League has so much financial power that the lower teams who spent a bit less, they can still buy the best players in Valencia, in Lyon, and that makes the league much more competitive. ... (Smaller teams) can say no because they speculate on the inflation that will happen. They think that the money comes in so next year, it can double." Wenger, who sold a number of his best players to pay off the debt incurred from the club's shift to the Emirates Stadium in '06, "still remembered the pain" but said that the club is "in a much better position to ward off raids from richer clubs" (REUTERS, 12/21).
