The Gunners are on their way towards yet another expensive transfer window.
So far this summer the club’s transfer business includes four new signings at a cost of £87.4m and three player sales at £12.8m, one leaving for free, at a total loss of £74.6m.
As we’ll see in the analysis below, this story has been remarkably repetitive over the last decade.
It’s a story of ambition and incompetence.
Huge losses
The graphs ahead show that Arsenal have become a buying club with substantial losses from their transfer deals.
In the last ten years the Gunners have netted a total loss of £629.7m from transfers at first team level. Only twice have they profited – meagerly – from player sales in a season (12/13 and 17/18).
It seems during Arsène Wenger’s final years Arsenal’s transfer policy was to spend big every other year, but that changed to every year immediately after his exit in 2018.
The void of the French legend was filled with a new manager and a new recruitment team at the club. Enter Unai Emery, Raul Sanllehi and Sven Mislintat. 18 months later and a failed rebuild, Arsenal had to start over again.
Enter Mikel Arteta and Edu, and the Gunners' most ambitious transfer project began.
After a disappointing 8th league finish, the new management – from January 2020 till today – spent £320.9m on 17 new players (2 free transfers) and sold 14 players for £55m (10 free transfers).
An important reason for the sizeable deficit is of course missing out on fees for players such as Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, Alexandre Lacazette, Mesut Özil, Shkrodran Mustafi, Henrikh Mkhitaryan and Calum Chambers, who all left for £0.
This is why Arsenal are leaking money.
It also shows ambition.
In a sense of now or never Arsenal have kept their foot on the pedal.
A complete rebuild was deemed necessary reviewing a mess of a squad and a decade of instability with three different managers with different ideas, winning four FA Cups but failing to qualify for the Champions League six years running.
Recruitment is partly why the Gunners have fallen out but also key to get back into the elite echelons. That, however, comes at a cost.
27 of 63 left for free
Over the last decade Arsenal have signed 52 players and sold 63 from their first team.
A silver lining is the club's superb youth academy which has supplied the first team with regular first-teamers such as Bukayo Saka, Emile Smith Rowe, Ainsley Maitland-Niles, Eddie Nketiah, Hector Bellerin, Alex Iwobi, Jack Wilshere, Wojciech Szczesny and Kieran Gibbs.
Arsenal are getting this right.
But the club have lost money on transfers is every position in the last ten years.
Unsurprisingly, the central positions have cost the most. Özil, Thomas Partey and Granit Xhaka were marquee signings Arsenal have yet to receive a fee for. The disparity between fees spent and received on strikers is a result of Lacazette and Aubameyang’s free transfers.
Poor planning and player logistics is a consequence of replacing managers and their philosophies. Because of that, Arsenal put themselves in difficult situations with expiring player contracts time after time.
In all 27 of the 63 first team players who left the Gunners over the last ten years did so for free. Almost half!
Conversely, only six of the 52 player Arsenal recruited in that period was as a free transfer.
Buy big and sell low, for free a lot of times actually.
Arteta and co’s ruthless rebuild has certainly intensified this predicament, but so has the COVID-19 crisis and English football being the only league still capable of dishing out huge fees for players. Selling a player they signed for, say £72m three years ago, is no easy task.
Free transfers, however, have been common at Arsenal over the last decade.
A final attempt?
Spending more money than most is how clubs reach the top. But without sufficient income from player sales, it won’t last.
The Arsenal owners have trusted Arteta and co to elevate the club to compete for the biggest trophies and backed them financially like they’ve never done before. Hundreds of millions of pounds later they’ll expect results. That time is now.