“We can't be in a situation where we're allowing players to walk out of the door for free,” was the declaration from Arsenal's managing director Vinai Venkatesham in May 2019.
The comments came in response to Aaron Ramsey joining Juventus on a free transfer that summer, a season after the Gunners had got themselves into a similar mess with the contracts of Mesut Ozil and Alexis Sanchez. A brave new dawn was promised.
"That means we have to start making the difficult decisions when they have two years left on their contracts,” Venkatesham added. “We're either going to renew those contracts or we're going to be selling them.”
Sensible words. The first chance to put them into action came in the summer of 2019, when Ozil, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, Henrikh Mkhitaryan, Shkodran Mustafi and Sokratis Papastathopoulos all entered the final two years of their deals. This was the point in a player’s contract when Arsenal wanted to be decisive and ensure they weren’t left scrambling in the months and years ahead.
However, a third option, alongside renew or sell, soon found itself on the table - delay.
No decision was reached on the contracts of those five players that summer, as the various cans were kicked down the road. Eventually they reached a dead end. Mkhitaryan had his deal terminated by mutual consent in August, with Ozil, Mustafi and Sokratis reaching similar agreements in early 2021. Arsenal’s strategy for moving players on was just paying them to leave.
The issue in those situations was one of recruitment as much as it was one of a failure to manage contracts. The decision to swap Sanchez for Mkhitaryan, a desperate move to try and salvage something as the Chilean’s deal ticked down, was a disastrous one, while the offers were never likely to come flooding in for error-prone defenders on hefty wages.
The Covid-19 pandemic has, of course, not helped Arsenal. They, like other clubs, have been hit hard financially and that has forced decisions around contracts to be accelerated. There was a time when paying someone off would seem unthinkable, but when it can ease some of the losses from the past 18 months it does make more sense.
Arsenal took a gamble that experience would bring a quick return to the top four - the outcome was not Champions League football, but a string of undesirable financial commitments. Mikel Arteta hopes the recent termination of Sead Kolasinac’s contract helps the Gunners move on from those decisions.
“The contract situation we had with some of the players were putting the club in a really difficult position, because the longer we leave them with months to finish their deals and with players that were not playing a lot of minutes, obviously the situation is not ideal,” Arteta said.
Last summer’s transfer business continued the shift in the age profile of signings as Arsenal put their faith in youth. With that comes a greater margin of error - the likes of Nuno Tavares and Albert Sambi Lokonga will retain, and likely increase, their transfer values, even if they don’t go on to have long-term futures at the Emirates.
The strategy laid out by Venkatesham regarding those already at the club is still not being put into action though, and technical director Edu can no longer blame the recruitment made before he arrived. The fact that Calum Chambers, who would have been out of contract in the summer, has left on a free this month shows the club are continuing to put themselves in difficult positions.
Receiving no fee for the likes of Kolasinac, or even David Luiz and Willian, is unsurprising, but to lose a versatile, 27-year-old English defender, regardless of his lack of first-team minutes recently, on a free transfer points simply to mismanagement. If Arsenal had no interest in renewing Chambers’ deal, more had to be done over the last two summers to move him on.
Nor is the situation a one-off. Ainsley Maitland-Niles has left on loan to Roma, another example of a player who with decisive action in previous windows should have been sold permanently for a fee. Like Chambers, the damage had already been done going into the transfer window. His departure last month brought no significant financial gain and leaves an already stretched squad even shorter on numbers.
Alexandre Lacazette, Eddie Nketiah and Mohamed Elneny will all be out of contract at the end of the season. The problems up front have been exacerbated by Aubameyang’s exile, and he has now been added to the list of big-money signings leaving for free.
The outcome is that, as it stands, Arsenal will have to replace all three of their first-team strikers in the next six months without receiving a penny in transfer fees. Nketiah has scored five Premier League goals in his Arsenal career - he is not so fundamental to the club that letting his contract run down over the last couple of years has been a necessary evil.
With so much exciting talent in the squad, there will likely come a point in the seasons ahead when someone does not want to renew his contract and a tough decision has to be made. Arsenal cannot just gamble on an extension being agreed in the final few months of a player’s deal - they must be more ruthless when it comes to selling.
In an ideal world, they would have likely kept Alex Iwobi, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Joe Willock at the time of their departures, yet receiving fees of nearly £100million combined for the trio now looks extremely good business.
That is not to say the Gunners should be looking to sell the likes of Bukayo Saka or Gabriel Martinelli, but for those who aren’t some of the first names on the team sheet, Arsenal must improve at sensing the opportunity to cash in. It is far too comfortable being a squad player at the club.
In recent seasons, Mamadou Sakho, Dominic Solanke, Danny Ward and Rhian Brewster have left Liverpool for a total of almost £75m in transfer fees.
Arsenal’s improved recruitment, away from misplaced attempts at instant fixes, has put the club on a much brighter path - that progress will be in vain if outgoings continue to come only in the form of free transfers and mutual terminations.
