Arsenal: The big difference between Aaron Ramsey and Danny Welbeck

Arsenal’s head of football Raul Sanllehi and marketing director Vinai Venkatesham have been speaking about the contract situations of Aaron Ramsey and Danny Welbeck. There is one big difference between the two cases, however: the market value of the player.

This week, the two men in charge of Arsenal football, Raul Sanllehi on the football side and Vinai Venkatesham on the commercial side, have been discussing the running of the football, the goals for the future, the roles of Unai Emery and the Kroenkes, and the upcoming summer transfer window.

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As a part of the interview with Arsenal.com, they discuss the ensuing departures of Aaron Ramsey and Danny Welbeck. There is a specific focus on the fact that both will leave for nothing as their contracts will expire this summer.

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You can read the full quotes here, although take them with a very hefty grain of salt as this is a self-conducted interview that is as much a PR piece as it is honest talk. There was one part of Sanllehi’s answer that perked my interest. This was it:

"“At the end of the day, the problem, the real essence of the problem, was that we had reached the last year of the contract <…> The only way to get to the end of a contract is when you are ready to release that player at the end of that contract. But if you really want to keep that player, you need to renew him before getting to the last year of the contract because you are putting yourself in a very weak position.”"

Sanllehi is rightly identifying the problem of failing to renew Ramsey’s contract and how that has contributed to the Welshman now walking out of the front door at London Colney for absolutely nothing.

Welbeck will leave under the same conditions. Arsenal will receive no fee, he is free to sign for whoever he chooses. But there is one crucial difference between the Ramsey and Welbeck situations, and it speaks to the importance of identifying the right and wrong contracts to agree to — or not agree to. Ramsey’s market value far outweighs Welbeck’s.

Let’s say that Arsenal had renewed Welbeck to a new five-year, £100,000-a-week contract last summer. That would now be viewed as a problem, a major hit on the wage budget that is being wasted because of his injury issues. The Mesut Ozil contract was a prime example of a bad contract, one that leaves the club with as much a problem as it does a solution.

There are good and bad contracts. The key phrase in Sanllehi’s response, then, is ‘if you want to keep the player…’ Signing a player to a new contract simply to save some market value leaves you with an underperforming player on an overpaid contract, as would have been the case with Welbeck. But at the same time, you want to protect your assets.

Consequently, contract management is a balancing act. You must accurately determine which players are worth protecting their value for and which are not, all while understanding that you could be stuck with an ugly contract that eats a major hole in the wage budget. It is not as easy as saying ‘we will just renew everybody’s contracts to make sure that no one leaves on a free’, because if you do that, you will be left with majorly restricting contracts.

Choosing to renew — or not to renew — takes far more guile, nous and balance than that. It is something that the Welbeck and Ramsey situations perfectly illustrate. It is also something that Arsenal are yet to master.