Arsenal: Learning contract lesson with Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, Alexandre Lacazette

According to the Daily Mail, Arsenal are already preparing new contracts for Alexandre Lacazette and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang. They are seemingly learning their lesson.

You can trace a lot of Arsenal’s recent issues to their mismanagement of their players’ contracts. Although there were some serious tactical and technical issues at the club, what has transpired over the past decade or so is little more than a slow depreciation of talent. Put simply, the squad, slowly but surely, has gotten worse, especially in comparison to the burgeoning quality of the Premier League rivals.

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And this depreciation of talent stems from an inability to retain key players, which, you guessed it, is in large part due to the contracts that were mishandled. Robin van Persie, Bacary Sagna, Gael Clichy, Samir Nasri, Alexis Sanchez, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Mesut Ozil, Aaron Ramsey and plenty of others are prime examples of how failing to manage contracts has put the club in a vice.

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Sometimes, it will not even end in a player departing, like in the case of Ozil. Or sometimes, it might not be a key player leaving who is not difficult to replace. But in both instances, the financial rewards are heavily dented because of the contract situation: Ozil held the club to ransom and was handed a £350,000-a-week contract that he has since failed to vindicate; Clichy, Sagna, Kieran Gibbs, Wojciech Szczesny and many others were sold for far less than their true market value, meaning that reinvesting in suitable replacements was challenging.

Planning the construction of a squad is critical, and having the foresight to envisage future problems that may not materialise for years is a key part of the process. But as history proves, Arsenal have not mastered this part of team building — you can sadly make an argument that they have not mastered any aspect of team building.

However, this summer, it seems as though they may be about to learn from their past mistakes. According to The Daily Mail, the Gunners are already preparing talks regarding new contracts for their brilliant centre-forward pair, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Alexandre Lacazette.

The Mail reports that the pair will be offered contracts of around £250,000-a-week, pay rises for both, and will see them extend their current deals significantly. Aubameyang’s present contract will expire in 2021, in two years’ time, and Lacazette’s the year after, in 2022. Arsenal reportedly want to tie both down to four-year deals at least, with Aubameyang likely offered a two-year extension on his current deal.

And this is the kind of contract management that should have been undertaken in previous years. As Spurs and Liverpool have illustrated in recent years, it is vital to lock down your star players for extended periods, and to do so as early as possible, not allowing any contract to run into its final two years. Once at that point, the player holds all the power and the club is scrambling, eventually either overpaying them to stay or selling them on the cheap/seeing them leave for nothing and then desperately trying to find a replacement.

In Aubameyang and Lacazette, Arsenal, seemingly, are learning their lessons. Now they just have to get the deals over the line, which without Champions League and Barcelona reportedly sniffing around, might not be all that easy.