By Yo Takatsuki Business reporter, BBC World Service

The Emirates Stadium, the brand new home of Arsenal Football Club, is a testament to the financial success and muscle of sports organizations in the 21st Century.

Arsenal's new Emirates Stadium cost $750m to build

Built at a cost of �375m ($750m), it is a world away from the club's old ground Highbury less than a mile away in North London. Long gone are Highbury's famous marble halls; instead, there is now glass and steel.

The stadium opened in the summer of 2006, promising fans the best environment in which to cheer on players such as Thierry Henry and Cesc Fabregas.

However, the biggest transformation has been in the way the Emirates can entertain corporate guests.

Some 9,000 of the 60,000 seats inside the stadium are intended for premium customers, who are wined and dined as they enjoy the game. The 150 boxes offer fabulous views of the action and - despite costing about �100,000 a year - they were quickly snapped up by businesses keen to impress its clients.

Steve Brice, the head of hospitality at Arsenal, believes that is good value for money.

"From an investment perspective it's about making sure you can get clients to attend your events," Mr Brice said during a tour of the ground.

"I think the one great thing, when talking to box holders, is that the Arsenal invitation is always accepted. The opportunity to come to Emirates Stadium this year, for many of these businesses, has meant that doing one or two deals have secured the finances of the box."

Money game

The move from Highbury, where the corporate facilities were strictly limited, to the Emirates was essential in Arsenal's bid to keep up financially with rivals such as Chelsea and Manchester United.

Corporate boxes ring the Emirates stadium

The club borrowed �250m from banks and other financial institutions to construct the stadium, and Mr Brice confirms that the revenue stream from corporate guests was crucial in securing the loans.

"The $80m of revenue which is generated from the hospitality space here is key to the financial success of the club," Mr Brice said.

"It's important what happens on the pitch - that has an impact on our revenues. As long as we ensure that we've got a full stadium then we can ensure the team has the revenues to perform."

Stateside woes

Across the Atlantic, the past decade or so has seen a massive boom in stadium construction, with new grounds being built in San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago and many other cities.

Some US stadiums have had difficulties filling corporate boxes

For each of these, the business model was similar to Arsenal's: to lock in bulk regular revenue by catering to large numbers of VIPs.

But many grounds have found the demand for corporate boxes has tapered off, and they are either ripping out the boxes or transforming them into areas for normal fans.

According to Jack Plunkett, chief executive of US sports business analysts Plunkett Research, many team owners - not to mention their architects - had no specific idea of the exact level of demand for this type of facility,

"There was clearly a little over-exuberance about stadium boxes where the team owners may not have been able to get a really exacting idea of how many suites a stadium could support," Mr Plunkett says.

"They optimistically built more than they should have in some markets. We're looking at stadiums now with as many as 100, 120 of these suites. The banks underwriting the debts for new stadiums certainly will be taking a harder look at revenue projection based on sky boxes."

At Seattle's Safeco Field, home to the Mariners baseball franchise, workers demolished eight boxes recently. Similar work has also happened in Detroit, Tampa Bay and Toronto.

Enron fallout

At the root of the shift in demand is a change is in the way corporate America approaches entertainment, thanks to circumstances that could never have been forecast when when many of these stadiums were being designed in the 1990s.

Enron's collapse had a huge impact on American business culture

Companies are now far more reluctant to spend vast sums of money entertaining guests - a direct fall-out, Mr Plunkett says, from corporate scandals such as that which embroiled Enron, the energy company which collapsed in 2001 as a result of fraud.

"There's been a great emphasis on the last five, six years in corporate America in improving ethics, so it is much more difficult for sales groups in companies to lavish very expensive gifts or perks on their customers," Mr Plunkett said.

"That is because there is just a lot of corporate scandals in general. That made government regulators and company boards take a look at how do we tighten up, how do we improve operations, how do we improve auditing and how do we have better control."

Long-term success

The wave of corporate scandals across the US has affected almost every company in America, and sports organisations are by no means immune.

Many have had to adapt their business plans to cope with the downturn in corporate entertainment.

But despite the changing market, sports organisations are still relying more and more on revenues from corporate clients, alongside traditional sources of money such as broadcasting rights and merchandise.

Cricket venues in the Caribbean are hoping to cash in on corporates

Across the world - in the Far East, Europe, the Caribbean as well as India and South Africa - new stadiums are relying on this model, since where there is demand the potential profit margins are huge.

But although in the early days the novelty value can make success relatively easy to achieve, the challenge is to retain interest over the longer term.

Cavendish Hospitality has been in the business of entertaining guests at sports events for more than 20 years. Its chairman, Jim Bignal, has seen the ups and downs in the industry, and believes that the key to success is adapting to an ever changing environment.

"It does tend to dip during economic downturns, but not to the extent that the market disappears," he said.