How Rafael Benítez and Sir Alex Ferguson must wish their clubs had Arsenal's lenders. The Liverpool manager is entitled to only £1.5m from the £15m he is expected to raise this January and with the debt-and-interest burden ever growing at Old Trafford, Manchester United are never likely to release to Ferguson much of the £80m raised with Cristiano Ronaldo's departure.

In contrast Arsène Wenger is in a position of relative luxury, since the terms of his club's loans demand he spends the bulk of the money he raises in transfers. All transfer revenues are held in a special account created during negotiations with lenders over the refinancing of the club's £260m stadium loan and a minimum of 70% of this must either be retained or spent on transfers and contract renewals. Although the account's millions are at Wenger's disposal, the banks do hold a charge over it as security on the stadium.

The Arsenal Supporters Trust, whose analysts uncovered the existence of the account, estimates that Wenger's judicious transfer-market operations have generated huge sums. "The club itself confirms that 'all proceeds from player sale transactions are made available to manager'," it says.

And so Wenger, unusually, commands more cash during this transfer window than almost any other manager.

Cash point for Pompey

Portsmouth might not be in the financial mess they are today – under a transfer embargo and less than four weeks from a possible winding-up – had the Hong Kong businessman Balram Chainrai not loaned the club about £17m in October. Loaning such a vast sum to an organisation that has no fixed assets, no significant income and enormous debts was a bold move. Interesting, then, that when you examine Chainrai's links some interesting names crop up. Such as Arkadi Gaydamak, father of Portsmouth's former owner Sacha, who still owns all the club's former real-estate assets. Chainrai and his associate Levi Kushnir were, on 21 September, awarded $27m (£17m, as it happens) by the Israeli courts, from Gaydamak Sr's frozen accounts after winning a case over a disputed share deal. So, after months spent on the litigation, they chose to sink the hard-won funds straight in to Pompey. Curiouser and curiouser.

Golden potatoes

UK Athletics received a hot potato when it took possession of gold medals from the International Association of Athletics Federations for Great Britain's 4x400m relay team, who were second at the world championships in 1997. The IAAF took the decision to hand over the medals after the victorious US team's Antonio Pettigrew admitted he had injected human growth hormone and EPO. But rather than hand the medals straight over to the athletes, UK Athletics will first discuss what to do with them at a board meeting this month. UKA would not say, but perhaps it has crossed its mind that three years after that race, Mark Richardson, who anchored the British team, tested positive for the banned substance nandrolone.

Mountain to climb

England's wicketkeeping coach, Bruce French, says he and his protege Matt Prior will attempt to scale Ben Nevis on their return from South Africa. Prior, pictured, is a brave man. For though French is an accomplished climber, he was also once England's most accident-prone cricketer. Would you climb Britain's highest peak with a man whose Test career was variously disrupted when bitten by a dog, severely concussed by a Richard Hadlee bouncer and hit by a car on the way to hospital after a spectator's errant throw had struck him on the head?