Arsenal hiring the right executives is key to squad rebuild

Picture this, Arsenal fans, you are at the grocery store and are making an absolute mess of picking a few apples. You turn around and see someone carefully selecting apples from the pile, using a combination of smell, touch and look. You request that person to help you pick a few apples and that person helps you out. A simple act of kindness that leaves you with better apples than you picked.

The global football transfer market is essentially a complicated version of picking the right apples for your club. The major difference being that there are no random acts of kindness but you can hire the person who knows to identify the right players and bring them in. Arsenal need to play this right.

Arsenal have recruited well on occasion in the recent years – Alexis Sanchez at £32m was an absolute steal while Santi Cazorla at £10m was a masterstroke. However, those transfers happened before the crazy shift in transfer prices that happened around 2016-2017.

To make matters worse for Arsenal, while they may have recruited well enough, the club has got little to nothing when moving players on. Liverpool managed to get £23.5m for Rhian Brewster – a player who played a total of four times for the club and scored zilch. Arsenal, on the other hand, were struggling to agree a fee of £15m for Ainsley Maitland-Niles in the same summer. Maitland-Niles had already played a 100 times for the club and is a versatile player, covering three positions.

Arsenal hiring the right executives is key to squad rebuild

Rebuilding a club of Arsenal’s stature requires the club executives to be the best in the business. Hiring Richard Garlick as Director of Football Operations is a step in the right direction. But the club needs to be even more aggressive.

1. Luis Campos (AS Monaco and Lille OSC)

If Arsenal wanted to go back to the time when Arsene Wenger smartly recruited unknown but excellent players from obscure academies, Luis Campos is the man who reinvented that process. During his time at AS Monaco, he managed to unearth a certain Kylian Mbappe who would lead the club to the Ligue 1 title and earn €180m in transfer fees. At Monaco, Campos would also be responsible for finding players like Bernardo Silva, Anthony Martial and Yannick Carrasco. All of these players and many more would actually move for at least four times the value the were bought for.

Even a player like James Rodriguez, who was purchased for €45m from FC Porto, was sold for €80m to Real Madrid.

At Lille, he has been arguably even more effective. He would bring in players like Nicolas Pepe, Victor Osimhen at €18-22m price point and then sell them for fees north of €70m. He would also find excellent free transfers like this season’s sensation Burak Yilmaz or midfield gems like Boubakary Soumare.

The beauty of Luis Campos’ process is that he always looks for players that would fit the coach’s system. If one player goes out, Campos already has a ready replacement lined up. When Gabriel left for Arsenal, he brought in Sven Botman. When Pepe left for Arsenal, he brought in Osimhen. And when Osihmen left, he brought in Jonathan David, with Lille not missing a beat due to any of these transfers.

Luis Campos would have been a great acquisition for Arsenal. A man who would be able to find the best-fit players for Arteta’s system without breaking bank. While Arsenal are not a selling focused club like Lille, receiving £50m instead of £5m, for a player like Serge Gnabry would go a long way to reducing those revenue losses.

As of writing this article, Luis Campos is headed to Real Madrid. That ship has surely sailed. He’ll get them Kylian Mbappe, won’t he?

2. Ralf Rangnick (Red Bull Football Clubs)

The other major name that Arsenal should (and in this case, can) be targeting is Ralf Rangnick. He had entered the RB Leipzig set-up before they were even in 2.Bundesliga. However, in the eight seasons since, RB Leipzig has become one of the top clubs in Germany. RB Salzburg, the other club he concurrently served in, is one of the hottest launchpads for European talent: Erling Haaland, Naby Keita, Dayot Upamecano and Sadio Mane are some of the major names Rangnick discovered through RB Salzburg. Over at RB Leipzig, he discovered Timo Werner and Joshua Kimmich.

For a club in the sort of rut that Arsenal finds itself in, it is important that hire a guy like Rangnick the moment he becomes available. The man quite literally built a world class club from scratch in less than a decade. His network across Europe is also exemplary. However, to be able to find talented youngsters from countries like Zambia (Patson Daka) and Mali (Amadou Haidara), makes Rangnick an even more attractive option.

Ralf Rangnick has been available since August 2020 but no club seems to have moved in for him. It may be because Rangnick is looking to return to management rather than football operations. However, Arsenal could try hiring him as he is an excellent Director of Football and would even be an excellent option for management too, should Mikel Arteta find himself fired after a poor Premier League start next season.

Conclusion

Thus far Arsenal’s post Wenger transition has gone poorly. The club tried the “continental” style and then quickly abandoned it to return to a more manager focused style. The biggest issue is that Arsenal fired experienced heads like Sven Mislintat and handed the reins to the untested duo of Edu and Arteta.

The upcoming transfer window would be the first where Edu is the main man. He finds himself in a tough spot. He has to recruit top talent while the club finds itself out of Europe for the first time in 25 years and posted a loss of more than £100m. With reports swirling that Arsenal may only get pennies for solid players like Granit Xhaka, and Xhaka’s replacements costing a bomb, wouldn’t the club be better off with Rangnick or Campos over Edu?