Arsenal: Eden Hazard sale shows Unai Emery’s losing battle

Eden Hazard will move to Real Madrid for potentially as much as £150 million this summer. The sale shows the losing battle Unai Emery is fighting at Arsenal.

The Premier League is more competitive than ever. Not only are the two best teams in Europe from last season leading the way, but there are four perfectly decent teams competing for two more top-four spots and Champions League berths. It is very difficult to do well in the Premier League.

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Arsenal, sadly, are very quickly — and very painfully — discovering that. The Gunners have slipped out of the top four over the past three years and now very much find themselves behind the eight ball in comparison to their rivals. You could make a very fair argument that they are in the worse position of the top six to make a serious run at a title in the coming years.

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Unai Emery, then, in succeeding from Arsene Wenger last summer, has taken on one of the toughest jobs in world football: competing with better teams that have more money to spend than you, having already started with a disadvantage because of an inefficiently and horribly mismanaged squad. The former Paris Saint-Germain head coach is fighting a losing battle, as his rather successful but ultimately unfulfilled first season proved.

And if you want any further evidence that Emery is swimming against a substantial swell, you need only look to the biggest transfer of this summer’s market thus far — and what will likely be the biggest transfer by the time the window closes in August. On Friday, it was announced that Eden Hazard would move from Chelsea to Real Madrid for a fee potentially reaching £150 million. That is silly money.

Now, you may be wondering how a direct rival losing their absolute best player shows that Emery’s task is so monumental one. Surely it helps him, right? Well, it does, in a way, but it also helps illustrate the resource disparity between Arsenal and the rest of the top six.

Chelsea may not be bankrolled by Roman Abramovic anymore, but they have a whole slew of assets that they can offload for big money to reinvest in the squad, Hazard and their loan army chief among them. Spurs, too, have plenty of high-priced players that they can sell to fund other moves. The two Manchester clubs have owners willing to pile money into the club. Liverpool’s squad is already well set and will not be scared to spend should it come to it.

Arsenal, on the other hand, not only have ground to make up on all of their rivals bar United, and even then United may have more talent on paper, but they have a distant owner who will not spend and very few assets to raise their own funds. There are some players that can be sold, of course, but the club would do tremendously well to raise even half of the Hazard fee without selling one of their centre-forwards.

All this paints a rather bleak picture. And it is within these constraints that Emery is trying to paint a masterpiece. He doesn’t really have a chance, does he?