Arsenal intend to keep Fabregas

Fabregas (left) has been linked with joining Messi at Barcelona

Arsenal chief executive Ivan Gazidis says the club are under no financial pressure to sell captain Cesc Fabregas.

Fabregas, 23, was courted by Barcelona in the summer but Arsenal rejected two bids from the Spanish club.

“There’s no reason to think he would [leave],” Gazidis told BBC Radio 5 live’s Sportsweek.

“We have a sustainable business model. It gives us the strength to say we don’t need to sell Cesc Fabregas to raise money.”

Speaking ahead of Arsenal’s Carling Cup final against Birmingham, he added: “That’s a tremendously strong position to be in.

“Cesc is under a long-term contract. That gives us some real strength from which to operate and gave us the ability to keep him over the last summer.

“We didn’t have a financial imperative that meant we had to sell.”

Fabregas, who helped Arsenal beat Barcelona 2-1 in the first leg of their Champions League last 16 tie on 16 February, joined the Gunners from the Catalan outfit as a 16-year-old in 2003.

And, although Gazidis says the club do not want to sell the midfielder, he stopped short of guaranteeing the player will be at Arsenal at the start of next season.

“I can’t look ahead that far, the game isn’t like that that you can predict which individual players will be there,” he added.

“I certainly hope Cesc will be. He’s our captain and is a very important part of the team, but right now we’re focused on this season and not on the first day of next season.”

Arsenal have been criticised for not spending as much as some of their rivals but Gazidis insists the club will continue to operate within their means and invest and have faith in youth.

Philosophically, the objective of our club is to spend all the money we make and we reinvest everything on the playing side

It is a strategy which recently drew some criticism after the north Londoners signed teenager Jon Toral from Barcelona’s youth academy.

But asked if the club would spend £50m on a player like Chelsea have done on Fernando Torres, Gazidis replied: “The question comes back to, is it a sustainable decision against our business model?

“For us, we have embarked on a different strategy. Ours has been not to sign star players in general but to make them and that has required us to walking a slightly different path to many other clubs.

“The team that played Barcelona a couple of weeks ago was just over 23 on average. That is extraordinary as that is four years younger than the Barcelona team.

“This is a very young team that we have invested an enormous amount of emotional energy and development time with and Arsene Wenger has really worked to build something that can be really special.

“That requires extraordinary patience. That doesn’t mean we are against spending money.

“Philosophically, the objective of our club is to spend all the money we make and we reinvest everything on the playing side. We don’t pay dividends, for example.

“But how we do that has to be a bit different to other club because we don’t have a very wealthy owner into whose pockets we can dip and it needs to sustain itself over the long term.”