Arsenal: Danny Welbeck, Petr Cech just the start

Arsenal announced the departures of Danny Welbeck and Petr Cech as their deals expired this week. Their exits are just the start as Unai Emery looks to reduce the wage bill over the coming weeks.

This week, Arsenal officially announced the summer exits of a series of players. The two most high-profile names on the list were Danny Welbeck and Petr Cech, the pair leaving with their contracts expiring and the latter retiring from professional football altogether.

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Welbeck and Cech have seen their respective roles at the club reduce over the past year. Although not always through any fault of their own, their standing in the squad has declined, Cech resigned to a back-up role with last summer’s signing of Bernd Leno, Welbeck used as a rotational piece across the frontline.

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The problem, then, lied with what they were being paid: both were valued more by their wages than they were with their production, and that is never a clever way to build a squad. Cech’s contract was around £100-a-week. For a starting goalkeeper with his experience and know-how, that is not a bad contract. When he moved into the back-up role, however, it suddenly becomes an inefficient way of spending.

Similarly, Welbeck is rumoured to be paid £70,000-a-week, though it could be as much as £90,000-a-week. When he was signed, he was expected to compete with Olivier Giroud for the starting centre-forward position. By the time he left, he was a third-choice striker predominantly used as cover for the wide positions. Again, inefficient spending.

As the Unai Emery rebuild continues this summer, one of the main priorities of the club is to reduce the heavily inflated wage bill. The new deals that were agreed with Henrikh Mkhitaryan, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Mesut Ozil in January 2018 added approximately £650,000-a-week to the wage bill, just at a time when the revenue was in decline having not qualified for the Champions League.

The wage bill is a major issue. There are obvious factors that account for this, Ozil and Mkhitaryan chief among them. But Arsenal are also wasting a lot of money on unused squad players, very much like Welbeck and Cech.

Mohamed Elneny, Shkodran Mustafi, Carl Jenkinson, Stephan Lichtsteiner and Nacho Monreal all earned north of £40,000-a-week. Like Cech and Welbeck, their contracts were heavily overpriced and it severely impacted the club’s ability to sign other players for big wages, as Emery himself ceded last January.

Restructuring the wage bill is one of Emery’s most important tasks this summer. Letting Welbeck and Cech walk out the door is the start, but that is all it is. There are plenty of other under-utilised squad players who should also be shown the way out this summer.