Will Edu ever be good at selling?
Exploring Arsenal's paltry outgoings during The Project
Somewhere around the end of any transfer window, you’re bound to see a post about it: Arsenal have not gotten big transfer fees in recent years. They didn’t for Torreira, Guendouzi or Leno, they passed up chances to sell Lacazette and Bellerin, and the song goes on.
This thinking seems to be built on a core belief that Edu Gaspar, technical director since 2019, and recently promoted to sporting director, is simply bad at selling. He can’t get a fee and can’t move a player the club doesn’t want.
So when buzz starts to build about a player like Folarin Balogun, tearing it up in France on loan but not an easy player to fit into Arsenal’s current squad, the Edu selling doubts pop up again. He’s sure to move this £50m player for £10m, it goes, because of how terrible he is at negotiating a sale.
It’s only made worse by the fact that he can’t land his top targets, something Scott dug into yesterday.
But is there actually any validity to this argument? Would someone else be doing a better job? Let’s dig in.
Clearing deadwood
When Arsenal leadership declared the “win-now” iteration of their project dead in December 2020, their squad-building strategy shifted pretty dramatically. A great deal of investment would be needed to rebuild around high-upside, younger footballers, but not before such sporting luminaries as Sead Kolašinac, Mesut Özil, Héctor Bellerín, Willian, Shkodran Mustafi and Sokratis, between them about six of the 11 highest earners at the club, could be shifted.
The natural move would be to sell them, then. But why was that so difficult?
The simple answer: Money. Arsenal’s transfer business from about 2017 to 2020 was, in a word, poor. Deals were done based on which agent represented a player, and many were poorly scouted and hastily signed. Often, due to age and experience level, players like Kolašinac were put on deals worth £100,000 or more. (That’s actually how much Sead was making)
Those wages are representative of an expectation that these players should be good at Arsenal, maybe even more, and they obviously weren’t. Suffice it to say, of the list above, most were probably closer to “bad” by the end of their stints in London, meaning they weren’t even good enough to start for a side that was basically fighting for seventh and about to miss out on European football. And the majority were nearing 30.
If you’re not good enough for Arsenal, there’s only one direction to go: Down.
But here’s the problem: Most clubs below Arsenal in terms of prestige have nowhere near Arsenal’s money.
In the recently-published 2023 Deloitte Money League, Arsenal ranked 10th worldwide in annual revenues, ahead of Juventus, and one place behind Tottenham Hotspur. A simple way to view this would be that Arsenal are the 10th-richest club in the world.
£100,000 per week isn’t cheap for Arsenal, but it’s not expensive, either. However, it is for other clubs. Look at it this way: In the German Bundesliga, 28 players make that amount or more per week. 15 of them play for Bayern Munich (richer than Arsenal), 6 play for Borussia Dortmund (3 spots below Arsenal) and 6 of the remaining 7 play for Champions League mainstays RB Leipzig and Bayer Leverkusen, and they’re the best (or most tenured) players at those clubs.
Only one other player, SC Freiburg’s Matthias Ginter, hits the £100,000 per week mark. So how (or why) would any club take on those wages for a player like Sead Kolašinac, who at this point was aging and not the guy he was when he left Germany? It’s an important question.
With a couple of exceptions (we’ll get into them), these players were simply unwanted at Arsenal, and for good reason. So with the buyer pool small (or nonexistent), Edu did what ownership allowed him to do: He terminated, or negotiated mutual consent terminations, to the contracts of Kolašinac, Mustafi, Sokratis, Bellerín, Özil and Willian, one of (if not the) largest wage clearings in modern-day football. The results was a significantly pared-down wage bill that would allow Arsenal’s big summer 2020.
Yeah, but…what about the sales?
Edu didn’t banish every player for free. He did sell some as well, most recently Mattéo Guendouzi, Lucas Torreira, Bernd Leno, Konstantinos Mavropanos, and a couple others we’ll get into below.
Arsenal fans spent much of 2022 looking at that list and thinking that the young midfield duo, German keeper and Dinos should be fetching far more than they ended up getting - so far about €23 million between them.
I won’t spend much time defending the decision to give Stuttgart a €3m option to keep Dinos if they avoided relegation. The CB/RB had a great 2021-2022 campaign, helping his club stay up and earning some BvB links along the way (the move didn’t happen). But ultimately that deal would’ve likely topped out somewhere around £12-17 million if done at market pricing, so it’s not the biggest miss.
Now, the others. Guendouzi and Torreira were sold for what amounted to €17 million to Marseille and Galatasaray, respectively. What happened? Mikel Arteta.
Any time a sporting organization brings in a leader who wants to establish a new, more accountability-based culture, there are casualties. Guendouzi was one of the primary ones at Arsenal (Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang being the other). He misbehaved behind the scenes, and finally misbehaved on the pitch. Arsenal (Arteta) quickly decided to move on.
Guendouzi is a better player than €11 million, but he didn’t help Arsenal’s case at all during his loan season at Hertha BSC. He ran afoul of that coach, played less than effectively, and continued to reduce his value with an assist from COVID-19.
When Marseille came knocking with an offer that included that €11m clause almost sure to be exercised, it was understandable why Arsenal would take it. In fact, the club made a profit on the player, even if it wasn’t the ideal result. Any arguments based on his value being higher while at Arsenal are irrelevant, because Arsenal weren’t looking to sell him. Important players at big clubs are inherently of a high value.
Torreira followed a similar trajectory. He had a good loan at Fiorentina, but il Viola decided not to make permanent that move. When Arsenal went to the market with the diminutive DM, there simply weren’t suitors for him. His decision to skip preseason (and visit a theme park instead) didn’t help. The Turkish giant Galatasaray’s €6 million almost felt like charity when it came in.
And then there’s Bernd. With Aaron Ramsdale’s signing making the German surplus to requirements, it was only natural that he’d want to move somewhere he could start and attempt to win a World Cup place with his home country. But Bernd had another hangup - he wanted to stay in London.
There was naturally little/no interest from Chelsea or Tottenham, and on his £90k weekly wage, Leno was unlikely to go down a level. That left Fulham, Brentford, Crystal Palace and West Ham as options, and only Fulham had a real need in goal.
The result was the deal above, which is now almost certain to bag £6 million by the end of this season. Leno is Fulham’s top earner and one of just three players who makes more than £70,000 per week. Maybe not an exciting deal, but a situation where the club decided to help the player get what he wants.
It’s not all bad
The other thing that Edu sales truthers fail to acknowledge: He’s made some good sales, too!
We’re quick to forget that Joe Willock to Newcastle was a £25m deal, then the pre-Saudi club’s second-highest fee ever. Not bad for a player whose main accomplishment was scoring goals in seven straight games, after being largely average in his other Premier League appearances. And it’s not a deal that Arsenal regret today.
The other is Emiliano Martínez, a breakout star at the end of the ‘19-’20 campaign who wanted a chance to start. Emi had been with Arsenal for more than half a decade, but hadn’t factored in the senior team until then, at the age of 26. The resulting £15 million fee from Aston Villa was a top-20 deal ever for a keeper, and again for one who’d made less than 10 starts for Arsenal. That’s not bad business.
That gives Edu two €15m sales in a three-year period. In the post-Coutinho era, Liverpool have made five sales of that size (in five seasons). In the same three years, Tottenham have also made just two. There’s simply not the dramatic gap that’s been advertised by some online.
Looking forward
As Arsenal prepare for future outgoings, there’s good news: Most of their high-wage deadwood is gone.
Nicolas Pépé is probably the last high-earning, low-performing piece that Arsenal will need to sell. His £120,000 weekly wage will prove tough to move, particularly with his performance at Nice being unimpressive (he had to lower his salary for the year to even get that move). If the player won’t agree to a smaller contract at his new club, Arsenal may have to compromise and accept a low fee (or agree to pay some of his wages).
Ainsley Maitland Niles will be another expected to move, with a year left on his deal, but his performances at Roma and Southampton should be more than enough to convince fans that he’s simply not worth much of a fee right now.
The rest of the players on the potential docket — Nuno Tavares, Kieran Tierney, Folarin Balogun to name three — are all of a similar situation in that Arsenal don’t need to sell them. And they’re all still pre-prime players who aren’t paid like veterans. Arsenal, particularly in Tierney’s case, may not negotiate particularly harshly in order to get the player a move he wants, but it wouldn’t be for a pittance.
If there’s one area you’d like to see Arsenal improve upon in terms of outgoings, it’s Mikel Arteta’s “ruthless” mantra. In a few cases toward the end of the Emery era or beginning of Arteta’s reign, Arsenal players were linked with good-sized sales. Alexandre Lacazette to Atlético de Madrid, AMN to Wolves, etc.
In some of those cases, those players were still key to the club when the offers came in. In others (AMN), Arteta was still trying to figure out what exactly he had on his hands. In the future, I’d like to see Edu and Arteta act more opportunistically, particularly in cases where the desired player isn’t a prominent figure in the lineup (Tierney probably being the best example as of today).
With the first XI more settled (and much better) than it was in 2020, Edu should get some chances to add some feathers in his selling cap, particularly as young talents emerge from the academy but may fall a bit short of Arsenal standards.
Despite the online chatter, whether Edu is a good seller is actually going to be determined more by the next couple of years than it has been by the last three.
Good to see the comparison with other clubs on the number of biggish sales. One of the intriguing aspects for Edu and Arteta will be if they decide to sell a crown jewel of a player to reinvest and refresh. Off the top of my head, Arsenal have never done it and most of the sales have been of distressed assets or forced due to contract pressures. It’s a high risk strategy but it’s a good indicator that the self-scouting is working effectively if the really important players are retained but the big ‘names’ are let go.