Arsenal: How much money has been wasted?

Arsenal are a notoriously poorly selling club. So I went back and investigated: Just how much money has been wasted by poor sales? The answer was staggering.

It is not a secret. Arsenal are very poor in the transfer market. From buying players for overly-inflated prices to their mishandling of contracts, they have repeatedly been exploited by other clubs in the buying and selling of the some of the elite players in world football.

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It is a key reason why they have fallen out of the top four. It is a key reason why Arsene Wenger was ultimately asked to resign at the end of the season. The personnel was not good enough, and that was due to the club’s mismanagement in the transfer market.

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So, I wanted to see just how much money Arsenal may have wasted over the past few seasons. I did not look at the players that they have bought and simply considered the sales that were made and the difference between the fee that they received and their potential market value. I am working off the ideal scenario, as if the player was sold for their biggest possible price under a long-term contract. I have done this because that is precisely what Liverpool have done with players like Phillipe Coutinho, Luis Suarez and now Dominic Solanke.

Here is a nice little spreadsheet to present my findings. The presumed price is the best possible price that I believe Arsenal could have gotten for a certain player at that age at that time, assuming that the squad had been managed properly.

The big number is the one at the bottom. £269,500,000. That is the estimated amount of money that Arsenal have missed out on in the past four years because of their inability to successfully navigate the market, to properly manage their players’ contracts, and to negotiate well.

Obviously, that is an idealised number. Even greatest negotiator in the world would not be able to secure these prices for every single one of these players. But even if you were to round it down to a conservative £150-200 million, that is still a substantial amount of cash that the club could then reinvest in the squad. And that only spans a period of four years and does not include the likes of Robin van Persie and Aaron Ramsey, both of whom will have departed on the cheap by the end of this season.

As Unai Emery, Raul Sanllehi, Sven Mislintat begin to rebuild the team, there is obviously a focus on buying the right players that fit into the system correctly. But there also needs to be a focus on selling well. There are players in the current squad that Emery will not want. It is therefore imperative that they are sold for the highest possible price to fund investments in other positions.

Selling well is vital for any football club that is trying to compete with teams that have bigger budgets. That is what Arsenal are attempting to do, but so far, they have completely and utterly failed. Let’s hope that Mislintat, Sanllehi and Emery can do a better job than the regime before them.