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Full extent of Sanllehi’s “tough job” exposed

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When Arsene Wenger left 12 months ago, we all knew the club was in a bit of a mess. The feeling was at the time that it would take Ivan Gazidis, Raul Sanllehi and Sven Milsintat 3 summer transfer windows to get the club on the right track.

Gazidis then upped and left. I would say it was a captain leaving a sinking ship, but he was more of a rate scurrying away.

12 months after Wenger’s departure and the picture of how badly the club was being run towards the end of the Gazidis / Wenger  era is now clear to all.

As always, Swiss Ramble puts the clubs financials in simple, easy to understand language, with some pretty graphs alongside it. Before reading the rest of this blog, take your time to read every single Tweet in the below thread. It will give you a greater insight into the financial situation of Arsenal. Knowledge is power.

The success of Liverpool this season highlighted just how poorly Arsenal have been run in recent years.

Arsenal and Liverpool have near identical income excluding player sales, yet Liverpool have managed to build a team that has won the Champions League and ran Man city close, whilst Arsenal built a squad capable of just 5th.

The difference between the two has nothing to do with money put in by owners. What Liverpool FSG put into the club 9 years ago was to write off the debt that the previous owners left behind.

When you look at net spend over the last 5 years, Arsenal have spent £50million more. Yet gross spend Liverpool have spent £200million more.

Liverpool have built a superior squad through:

  • Working the transfer market – buying players with sell on value, and selling high
  • Sensible salary spending

By focusing their transfer on younger players, Liverpool were able to make a profit on almost every player they sold. Over the last 5 years, they have generated £250million more in player sales than Arsenal. This enabled them to then go big on the likes of Alisson and Virgil van Dijk.

Arsenal meanwhile have spent nearly £150million on Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, Alexandre Lacazette and Mesut Ozil. We are basically writing that money off.

Look at what Arsenal have spent on Lucas Perez, Shokdran Mustafi & Granit Xhaka in recent years. Nearly £100million spent, are they really good enough? The truth is in the last 5 years Arsenal have made some very expensive acquisitions that have not worked out.

And it is not just what you buy players for, but what you sell them for.

Arsenal received just £10million for the sale of Alexis Sanchez, Aaron Ramsey, Jack Wilshere, Danny Welbeck and Wojech Szczesny. In January Liverpool sold Dominic Solanke to Bournemouth for £19million.

I estimate that had they been sold a year earlier, the 5 Arsenal players mentioned above would have generated nearly £200million in player sales.

Arsenal have performed poorly in the transfer market over the last 5 years.

The wage bill is also a problem. Perhaps Arsenal’s biggest problem.

We have a lot of money tied up in Ozil, Aubameyang and Henrikh Mkhitaryan. Nearly £750,000 a week. The 3 players take up 18% of Arsenal’s total wage bill.

Whilst Wenger’s socialist wage bill – where the highest earner would only be a certain amount more than the lowest earner – caused us problems, offering big wages to ageing players is also an issue. Especially if we are looking to sell them on.

We are unable to sell Ozil and Mkhitaryan due to their wages.

The pair earn nearly £30million a year between them. It causes us huge problems, especially as neither are exactly performing to the high levels of Mo Salah or Sadio Mane.

So where are Arsenal now?

  • We have too many ageing players on high wages who would not generate much income if sold
  • The overall quality of the squad is not good enough

And this is where it becomes very clear just how tough Sanllehi’s job is.

Sanllehi needs to:

  • Improve the quality of the squad
  • Lower the age of the squad
  • Get more out of Arsenal’s high wage bill

In simple terms, Arsenal need to buy better than what they have, whilst paying the incoming players less than those they are replacing. And we are hamstrung by not getting much money from those leaving.

Kieran Tierney coming in is an example of Sanllehi’s objective in action.

At 22-years-old, Tierney is the sort of young talent Arsenal should be targeting, and at a reported £20million + £5million in add ons, highlights that you do not need to spend £50million to sign a top young, British full back.

Tiernay is also set to agree a contract worth around £75,000 a week. Bosnian Kolasinac is currently on £115,000 a week. £40,000 more than Tierney.

In Tiernay, Arsenal are buying someone younger, cheaper and better than what they currently have. It is the type of deal Sanllehi will have to do more of this summer.

The problem that Sanllehi faces is there a lot of highly paid players that will need to be replaced by younger, cheaper options over the next 2 summers:

Arsenal players over 30

Laurent Koscielny (33)
Nacho Monreal (33)
Sokratis Papastathopoulos (31)
Henrikh Mkhitaryan (30)
Mesut Özil (30)
David Ospina (30)
Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang (30)

The above 7 players (bar perhaps Sokratis & Aubameyang) will need to be replaced over the next 12 months. That is at least 5 senior professionals out the door.

We then have the younger players, on big money, who are not really good enough.

Arsenal players who should not be at the club after 2020

Shkodran Mustafi
Carl Jenkinson
Mohamed Elneny
Emiliano Martínez
Sead Kolašinac
Calum Chambers

So Sanllehi needs to oversee the sale of 11 members over the 25-man senior squad over the next two summers. Each replaced with someone younger, cheaper and better.

Add these 11 players to Welbeck, Cech, Lichsteiner and Ramsey and you are looking at 15 players of the 2018/19 squad likely to leave the club in the 2 summers following. It is a huge turnover of playing staff.

In the summer of 2018 we also released Santi Cazorla, Per Mertersacker and Jack Wilshere.

Sanllehi recently spoke about ensuring that Arsenal do not get into another Ramsey / Sanchez / Ozil situation where you are letting players run down their contract. His opinion is that 12 months prior to their contract expiring, they either sign the deal on the table or are sold. This will generate much needed funds for Arsenal.

For the 2020/21 season, Arsenal may well only have 12 players in the first team squad who were in the 1st team squad in 2018/19

Sokratis Papastathopoulos (32)
Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang (31)
Alexandre Lacazette (29)
Bernd Leno (28)
Granit Xhaka (27)
Héctor Bellerín (25)
Rob Holding (24)
Lucas Torreira (24)
Alex Iwobi (24)
Konstantinos Mavropanos (22)
Ainsley Maitland-Niles (22)
Matteo Guendouzi (21)

To this 12 players you can add the likes of Reiss Nelson, Emile Smith Rowe, Bukayo Saka or Xavier Amaechi, Dan Ballard or Zach Medley and either Eddie Nketiah or Folarin Balogun. That would leave a 1st team squad with 17 players. Over the next 2 summers Arsenal need to buy 8 senior players.

Tiernay will be the first of these. And if Arsenal can get deals over the line for Wilfried Zaha (who I am not a fan of), William Saliba and Gabriel Martinelli this summer it will be a huge step towards addressing the quality and age of the squad.

Those 4 would take the squad for 2020/21 up to 21. Then depending on who is sold this summer (ie If Mustafi leaves, he will be replaced) we will have a further 6  big signings (or promotions from youth) to make in 2020: Ozil replacement, Mustafi replacement, back up left back, back up right back, 2x back up keepers). This would take us to a 27 man senior squad – although some will be under 21 so excluded from the 25 man register Premier League squad.

I would leave us with a squad where the majority of players are under 25, a hungrier, cheaper, more talented squad then we currently have,

Sanllehi has 2 big summers ahead of him. He needs to get it right. But it is not easy.

Keenos

Tierney IN, Kolasinac OUT: The mathematics behind the deal

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Arsenal are nearing the completion of a deal that will take Kieran Tierney from Celtic to London.
The reported deal is set to cost Arsenal £20m with a further £5m in add-ons (believed to be connected with Arsenal qualifying for the Champions League).
The deal is a fantastic one for Arsenal which will say them sign 22-year-old Tierney – who many believe to be the best British left back.
If Arsenal complete the deal for the reported price, it will be a feather in the cap for the negotiating team.
Following a first bid of £17.5m rejected, reports were that Celtic would be unwilling to do business for less than £30m. For Arsenal to get the deal done for £20m upfront is a bargain – especially in a market which has just seen Aaron Wan-Bissaka join Manchester United for £50m.
The deal begins to sound even better when you understand the mathematics behind it.
Tierney joining alongside Nacho Monreal signing a 1-year extension will surely mean the end of Saed Kolasinac. The Bosnian has interested Barcelona as back-up to Jordi Alba.
Kolasinac earns £115k a week. His yearly cost is £5.9m a year.
Tierney is expected to sign a 5-year £75k a week deal. With a £20m amortised transfer fee, he will cost £7.9m a year.
So Arsenal will be signing a better, younger full back than they currently have whilst only adding a little under £2m to our yearly expenditure.
When you take into account that Kolasinac would command a transfer fee northwards of £20m, it would leave Arsenal in a position where signing Tierney would not change how much we have to invest this summer. In fact doing a deal on both would likely raise funds for Arsenal, giving us more within our budget to be invested. 
Arsenal’s wage bill is the biggest problem at the moment
Selling Kolasinac and signing Tierney will save the club about £2m a year in wages alone. 
Add Kolasinac to the departing Petr Cech, Stephan Lichsteiner, Aaron Ramsey and Danny Welbeck, that will be nearly £22m a year wiped off the wage bill.
When you add this lowering of the wage bill to the additional money from Emirates and Adidas, a clearer picture is starting materialise on Arsenal’s finances. One that shows that we have a lot more to spend than the £40m that was miss-reported by the main stream media.
Deals for Gabriel Martinelli, William Sabilla and Wilfried Zaha are being negotiated. If these deals go through it will take Arsenal close to £100m in expenditure.
Further transfer could then be financed dependant on yeh sales of Shkodrab Mustafi, Mohamed Elneny, Henrikh Mkhitaryan and Mesut Ozil; all of whom the club are rumoured to be willing to listen to offers for.
Raul Sanllehi’s remit this summer was a simple one.
Get in control of an upwards spiralling wage bills whilst improving the quality of the squad.
Tierney for Kolasinac does just that.
Keenos
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How “frustrating” home grown rules impacting Arsenal’s transfer business

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A lot is made about buying home grown players, and the struggle teams face to recruit enough quality of “English” talent to fulfil the Premier League home grown criteria.

People often get the criteria the wrong way round, talking about how each club must register “8 home grown players”. This is not true. They could for all intents and purposes register none.

The rule is about how many “non home grown” players a team can register:

Each club is able to list up to 17 senior players that are not English or Welsh and did not spend a significant period in an English or Welsh academy.

Currently, to be classified as home grown one must be on an English (or Welsh) team for at least three years before the age of twenty-one. It does not matter if the player was born overseas, or what country they play for.

For this reason, the likes of Alex Iwobi (born in Nigeria, plays for Nigeria) and Wilfried Zaha (born in Ivory Coast, plays for Ivory Coast) are considered home grown. And rightly so.

Both came to England at 4 years old, and are very much British citizens as much as they are Nigerian or Ivorian. Both have representing England as youngsters before deciding to play for the country of their both at senior level. Regardless of what people say, I will always class both as British (interestingly when I do this on Twitter, it riles up mainly Nigerian fans who seem to not realise he can be both Nigerian and British).

You then have players such as Hector Bellerin and Cesc Fabregas.

Both signed for Arsenal from Barcelona as teenagers. Both spent 3 years in England before they were 21-years-old.

Both born in Spain, both capped by Spain, yet both are considered as home grown.

The home grown rule was bought in by Greg Dyke in an attempt to improve the English national team. In theory, to force sides to have more “English” players in the squad. But you could essentially have Zaha, Iwobi, Bellerin and Fabregas in the squad, all home grown, non of whom play for England.

You also have the Welsh criteria.

As Swansea, Cardiff and Wrexham play in England, the Premier League count you as home grown even if you were in a Welsh academy.

This means someone like Ben Davies of Tottenham is home grown, despite being born in Wales and playing for Wales.

This does not extend to Scotland, however.

Bournemouth have to register Ryan Fraser (born in Scotland, plays for Scotland) as non home grown. This has probably impacted some top teams signing him this summer.

Arsenal target Kieran Tiernay is the same.

Tiernay was born on the Isle of Man, a self-governing British Crown dependency in the Irish Sea. He moved to Scotland at a young age and came up through Celtic’s academy. Like Fraser, were he to move to England he will not be considered as home grown.

I am sure these rules impact English teams signing Scottish players. Why go for a player from North of the border  when their are better French / German / Spanish players available?

The oddest rule of them all can be seen with Eric Dier.

Dier was born in Cheltenham, England. He plays for the English national team. At the age of 7, he moved with his family to Portugal as his mother got a job with UEFA working on Euro 2004. He is not considered as home grown.

So we have Zaha, Iwobi, Fabregas, Bellerin and Dier. 1 born in England, 4 born abroad. 1 plays for England, 4 play for foreign nations. Yet it is the English born, England international who is not considered as home grown. It all feels a little backwards.

When teams play in Europe, UEFA confuse matters further.

The “Welsh Rule” which means the Premier League considers players who have come up through an academy in Wales does not apply for UEFA competitions.

So back to the aforementioned Ban Davies.

Davies spent all his time in the Swansea academy (bar a brief spell in Denmark as a pre-teen).

Since 12 years old, he has played within the English football pyramid, working his way through the Swansea junior teams before becoming a 1st team regular. The issue is that whilst Swansea play in England, they still come under the Football Association of Wales rather than the English FA. UEFA do not consider him as home grown.

This led Tottenham having to leave him out of their European squad a few years back, something which baffled Mauricio Pochettino.

The fact the UEFA do not consider players to have come through the Welsh system is confusing, as every top Welsh player would have likely have come through the Swansea or Cardiff youth system (unless they moved to England at a very young age).

It also works the other way round. If Swansea or Cardiff were to play in European competition, any English players would be considered as non home grown.

This could create a situation where Swansea are Champions of England, with a squad containing 25 English-born players, but in Europe could only register 17 of them.

Like with Scotland, I wonder how much this impacts English clubs from buying Welsh players? And how many parents would consider moving their child from Wales to an English academy at 15 to ensure that they are eligible for both countries as home grown?

In summary, it is all a bit of a mess.

When an English born, English international is not considered home grown, whilst a Nigerian born, Nigerian international is home grown, something is broken.

Would Arsenal have signed Ryan Fraser if he was home grown? And is that a key reason we are targeting Zaha?

Keenos