A summer transfer bonanza not nearly as impossible as I thought

Today Arsenal play Wolves. That reminds me of the time that Arsene Wenger reportedly held a team talk before a game very much like this one – against a tough mid-table team – drew wolves on the whiteboard and told his team to “play like wolves”. They won and after the game the players were howling like wolves in delight at the silliness of the whole thing.

I wonder what animal Wenger would draw on the board today as Arsenal play an away game, against a really tough opponent, who play excellent passing football and can mix it up with lightning quick counters?

For Mustafi – be like the Seagull! Annoy everyone with your constant squawking! Then when no one is looking, steal a french fry and fly off! In other words, just be normal.

Mustafi is the talk of the Arsesphere today because Emery gave a passionate speech defending him. It’s worth a read and ArseblogNews has the full transcript. In that interview Emery said that Zaha’s goals was his fault, not Mustafi’s:

“He is young, he is improving and Sunday he is in the big picture because of the second goal. Who is in this picture? Mustafi – but it’s not his mistake. The mistake was tactical because we need to protect him with two centre-backs against Zaha. I protect him because I believe in him. He needs to improve things tactically, decision-making, but he has good quality and needs confidence. Now, maybe he has lost a bit of confidence. my work is to help him. We need him. I am going to say to our supporters, ‘Help our players.’ But I know we need to take the criticism and be strong as players, as a coach, as a team, as a club.”

He mentions the system failing the player, not the player failing the system multiple times and my main takeaway is that the manager is protecting the player – both because he knows that he may need to use Mustafi this season and because the club has actively been trying to sell Mustafi for the better part of two years now and he needs to protect what little value he retains.

There’s a lot of talk about huge turnover this summer at Arsenal and yesterday I wasn’t so sure that would happen. But today, I’m moving closer to believing.

What I see is an old squad on huge salaries. Mustafi is actually one of those players, he is reportedly on 90k a week, or almost £5m a year. At 27 years old and two more seasons left on his contract, with a history of huge mistakes, and very few discernible qualities, it’s going to be very difficult to move him.

A move to another Premier League club is one option, though finding that chump is going to be difficult. A move to China is an option – though the player may balk at such a move and the Chinese super league supposedly put caps on foreign players. And any move to a German club would basically require Arsenal to buy out his contract, or at least a huge chunk of it.

I’m not saying it’s impossible, but the club spent the better part of the last two years actively trying to sell him and finding no buyers. Even at cut rate prices, he’s a hard sell.

I have seen several supposedly connected reporters saying that the club is looking at moving a number of the big wages out in the summer. Logically, there’s a sense to that. Mkhi, Ozil, Auba, and Lacazette are getting older and rapidly losing value. Meanwhile, Ozil’s wages could fund three Mustafis! Of course, we all hope that they wouldn’t ever buy any more Mustafis but the point is that his wages are so gigantic that clearing them off the books makes room for buying new, younger players, promoting players, giving pay rises to players who have done well, and the like. I’m not saying that the club SHOULD sell all of those guys, just that there’s a logic to it.

That said, we don’t really need to move that many of the top earners. According to the web site capology, Arsenal have the following players out of contract in a few weeks: Cech, Ramsey, Lich, Welbeck, and Monreal and Sokratis. I’m not sure about Sokratis but if that’s all true, that’s already £27m per year in salary coming off the books (22m without Papa). How much more savings do we really need? Especially when we are paying key players like Guendouzi (40k), Holding (25k), Iwobi (50k), Maitland-Niles (35k), and Torreira (75k) relatively small salaries.

If we just let Cech, Ramsey, Lich, Welbs, and Monreal go and then somehow got someone to take Mkhitaryan’s 10m per annum (he’s got two more years after this). That drops Arsenal’s annual salary down from £127m to £97m. I don’t know how much more we really need to save. So, it looks like just moving one of the top earners off the books and then letting the contracts of the others expire will give Arsenal over £30m to spend on young player’s salaries. And with the average salary of young players around £45k a week or £2.3m a year. Replacing those six players with 6 younger players on an average of £2.3m a year pushes the total club salary to £111m a year, a savings of £16m per year.

What I’m getting at here is that it looks like just regular attrition, plus one or two big transfers out, puts Arsenal in a really good position to rebuild the squad. And maybe – if we somehow make the Champions League – we might see Arsenal have the transfer funds (which is the real final hurdle) to make that happen.

Back to Mustafi. Looking at other clubs and their salaries, it looks like a mid-sized club in Italy might be a fit for Mustafi. Inter and AC Milan both have a number of players earning around £100k. That would make him one of the top earners but not the top earner. And Serie A seems like a good fit for him. And selling him along with all of the other salary savings would get us down to “just” £92m per year. That seems like a lot of room to bring in young, smaller wager-earners.

So, I guess what I’m saying is that there’s a chance.

Qq

30 comments

  1. So, I guess what I’m saying is that there’s a chance
    ———-

    Let’s hope so….., but somehow that sentence sounds more like the one Jim Carey’s character from “dumb and dumber “ uttered when he was told the chances of him and that girl dating were like one in a million.

  2. He seems to be tailormade for Inter. AC Milan I doubt, they’re still in financial trouble and the new ownership is in negotations with UEFA regarding investments and culpability for their finances. Germany is a non-starter, he’s virtually unknown there, his wages would have to be supplemented by at least 50% besides that Bayern and Dortmund are well stocked in that position asnd they’re the only two that could pay that much.

  3. Guendozi began his Arsenal career on 40K or was he given a pay rise after his performances?

    Either way, seems like a huge sum for a kid from Ligue 2 – who has no doubt been amazing – but is still a newcomer to the league. Compare this to the way Spurs (I hate to do this) pay their players, and it seems even weirder. Especially how bloated wages have been a constant problem for us when players’ form drops off a permanent cliff.

    Not saying it’ll happen to Guendozi, in fact, he may even be one of those who follows through on all that promise and potential, but purely from a business standpoint, couldn’t we have gotten him for less? (Unless there were other suitors we had to outbid and such).

  4. Inter wanted Mustafi on loan with an option to buy a few years ago but the timing was bad because we’d just let Gabriel go back to Valencia (where he’s doing very well btw). But I doubt Inter would come back for him.

    One thing to consider in your musings on salary shedding – isn’t there an FA restriction on overall wages/salary increases paid year on year? I thought that last year when the Ozil and Sanchez negotiations were ongoing I had read that we were restricted to a 7m increase in the total wage bill and that if we signed both we would need to shed salary or risk violating those rules. I also read that some of City’s reluctance to finally sign Sanchez came from their need to re-sign DeBruyne to a big deal as well and that adding Sanchez would push them into sales territory.

    If that “cap” is still in place then do we want to lower the wage bill that significantly in a single summer? It gives us less flexibility going forward. So even though as you point out, we stand to lose a lot of salary this summer with departures I think the club will be looking to hold the line on salaries and perhaps offer returning players (Reiss-Nelson, Smith-Rowe, Nketiah, Guendouzi) some bumps, probably see if they can extend Koscielny etc. Mustafi may not be seen as a salary worth shedding vs. Ozil or Mhkyi who are on salaries wildly beyond their overall worth to the team.

    Just a thought.

    1. Who was it who turned his head out of the way? I expected us to lose today, but not this badly.

  5. Cowardly, sloppy, lazy, careless, and mustafi isn’t even on the field! The last three halves of arsenal football have been bloody unbearable to watch. Let’s hope that that summer transfer spree happens, because I really don’t want some of these players here next year.

    1. I slept, bro. Mid afternoon where I was, but i was bone tired . Match not on TV, and when I checked halftime score on Arseblog Live, sleep came more quickly. I’ll watch extended highlights when I can.

      Result not surprising. I had us losing to Wolves, but beating Everton and Palace.

      Wolves re order against the top 6 is astounding.

  6. I feel sorry for all fellow Arsenal fans.
    We can now forget about winning the 4th Trophy. We can stay in 6th come the end of
    the season and another season in Europa League.
    I could not bear watching the second half with Arsenal conceding 2 goals in 10 min
    before the break.
    Very very sad indeed.
    Valencia must be very happy watching us with a defence like this.

  7. Giving up six entirely preventable goals to Crystal Palace and Wolves. Our defense is as bad as it’s ever been. We’ve changed coaches and brought in a new center back–why do we keep gifting teams absurd goals?

  8. I thought we would beat Palace and Brighton, predicted a loss to Wolves, Everton and Watford (wrong about that one) and draws against Leicester and Burnley… I said 8 points from our last 7 games. I’m not even sure about that now. All our apples are in one basket now, the Europa League.

    1. I can’t see this team getting past Valencia I’m afraid.

      I think its better we rebuild without having CL football and getting tonked 10-2 in the 2nd round after scraping through the group stages having 1 point after 3 games.

  9. Well, my Pax and talk of United having regrets over hiring OGS are relaxing at least. Schadenfreude also one hell of a drug.

  10. Please never say Iwobi is a “KEY PLAYER” ever again. He is the epitome of everything arsenal have become we need to sell him and give his place to Nelson and Nkethia. Hes had too many chances now and all i see is a player with no passion intelligence and fives the ball away endlessly needs to go

  11. Emery once went an entire season at Sevilla without winning an away game.
    Did the players know this?
    I begin to wonder if Emery is the right manager for Arsenal.

  12. The Crystal Palace loss is looking very costly now. Today’s line-up was an improvement but Wolves away was always going to be difficult. I doubt that we can get past Valencia in this form and I fear it’s coming down to a fight for 5th against ManU. Looks like Europa League football for yet another season.

  13. Season finished. No way this team is capable of 4th and/or Europa League.

    I’m not bothering to watch the rest of our games, but I’ll certainly be here to talk about the things I didn’t need to see to know they occurred. This squad is garbage, and good for Emery for taking them to … fifth? A remarkable achievement given the quality of the players.

  14. Oh Arsenal, you took away most of the highs and made the lows really frequent.

    You are like the once beloved eldest daughter of a rich man who won’t have anything to do with you since you married the wrong man. I speak of Kroenke of course.

  15. I wasn’t even angry about the game yesterday. All I could do to stay up was to try to find the humour in it and just go with what’s happening.

    It’s not the loss, but the way we played. Although I must say we started well. But we have a problem making the most of the periods when we’re on top. We’re no longer an attacking team as such. When the fall came, it came quickly.

    But…we’re only a point off 4th place. Even managed to get a goal back in the second half to preserve goal difference haha.

    If we can keep the confidence levels up, we could still get top 4. Not sure how we’ll do with Valencia. Their coach should have been on our shortlist last season, but it was early for him. I haven’t been following La Liga so don’t know how they’ve been playing this season. Surely we’re not going out twice in succession at the semi-final stage to Spanish sides. We’ll find a way.

    I meant to win, but I just realised it could be read both ways. And that’s probably true so I’ll let it be.

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