By Tony Attwood
We spent £138m according to the Guardian’s calculator of such things, while receiving £44.6m excluding the undisclosed amounts for Daley Campbell, Amaechi and Jenkinson. The Iwobi figure they give is £28m – others are quoting quite a lot more, but I’ll stay with this so that I have taken all the data from the same place. That gives us an income of around £47m or £48m at most.
Taking £48m that means the nett expenditure was £90m or just about double of the higher estimate from Arsenal Supporters Trust and their hangers’ on.
FoLo is making the point we can still pick up any of the players who are out of contract and don’t have a club, under the transfer window rules, but I am not sure we would want to buy any more. Besides the “25” rules have to be kept, including the non-home grown rules – but I will leave that list for others to do later.
And just to give the comparative figures from the other members of last season’s top 6 for the nett profit or loss it was…
- Chelsea: £78.9m profit (Hazard the big sale)
- Liverpool: £28.1m profit (Danny Ings the source of most of the income).
- Manchester City £78.2m loss with Danilo being the only major source of income.
- Manchester United £70m loss with Maguire and Wan-Bissaka coming in, Lukaku going.
- Tottenham £64m loss with Ndombele being the big expense.
So at £90.4m Arsenal had a nett spend of more than any other of the top six teams. Villa has a nett spend of more – £146.3m, but then they are trying to build a team to stay in the Premier League, having just been promoted. Everton who were making a lot of noise spent £41.5m nett.
Sheffield Utd spent £44.5m and Wolverhampton £78.2m. Norwich are the only members of the promoted clubs who have not spent a fortune – £1.1m in fact. Which means they might struggle. But then if Sheffield U or Villa go back down they are going to have a lot of unloading to do or else go bankrupt. And I wonder, if Everton don’t make it into the top six (undoubtedly believing the propaganda that Arsenal are now a soft touch, with only a budget of £40m or so) they might find they have limited funds next year. (Actually I wonder if AST did Arsenal a favour by making think that Arsenal were spending nothing and would drop out of the top six?)
And this is really the point: there is ambition, but there is also what happens for next year. Arsenal were only two points away from the Champs League last season, and with Chelsea not spending money and Manchester United maybe still not having a winning manager, we stand a chance of going up at least one place just by them stepping back. With £90m of new players I think we will probably do it anyway.
The other European leagues are still open for business, and we’re still allowed to sell players to them. Possibles include Mustafi, Elneny and Nwakali. If those sales, or others, do go through we could end up having a net spend less than the the two Mancs clubs and the tots.
Point is, it’s perhaps premature to claim we’re the biggest spenders.
The 25 Squad can’t be finalised for the same reasons, but we are currently two short of the minimum 8 on home growns: Martinez, Macey, Bellerin, Holding, Cahambers and Maitland-Niles. We do have our full complement of 17 overseas players, meaning we’re currently running with a squad of 23, excluding under-21s of course.
Incoming players
Saliba £0m fee next season
Pepe £20m rest installments
David luiz £8m
Kieran Tierney £23 +£2m add ons
Martinelli £6m
Cellabos £5m loan fee
Total £62m
Out going
Iwobi £28m
Bielik £8m
Koscielny £4.5m
Ospina £3.5m
Jenkinson £2m
Asano £1m
Total £47m
Net spend £15m
How very droll, to take the Arsenal incoming players and write in a set of journalist reported installments, but then to take the Arsenal outgoing players, and imagine that while Arsenal are buying in players but only paying bits, these other clubs, who would obviously know this (if it were all true) are all paying Arsenal up front. I don’t know how these ideas come about but they do give me a big old chuckle.
Arsenal are paying £20m a year for Pepe not £72m upfront.This summer showed how bad the club was run over the last decade under Wenger and Gazidis.The signings of Pepe Tierney and Saliba were magnificent buys by Sanllehi
I wonder why Lill sold Pepe to Arsenal and not to any of the three other clubs that met there valuation of him, knowing that any of them would have paid cash, since Arsenal is the only club that structures payments for players. Could it be that they hate cash? Funny how all the players coming to Arsenal are on structured payments while the ones leaving Arsenal are paid in full. Or maybe some of our fans are just too lazy to make use of there brain, hence they believe every lie that is told in the media. Am I the only one that noticed that David Luis became the worst defender in the premier league the moment it was confirmed he was joining Arsenal?
My structured comment was not a dis at arsenal just that we didn’t spend £140m it was a pat on the back about what can be done on a limited budget everyone spoke about our so called £45m and we in total spent under that so hats off to Don Raul now we all need to look to the future away from ivan
OT: Charges in Ozil/Kolasinac incident
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/aug/10/mesut-ozil-sead-kolasinac-security-incident-charged
Hallo Untolders….
Had taken a big break from football this season. No transfer window stories. Nothing. This is first thing I’ve read anything football this season.
Next up arsenal.com to check up with our new squad.
Tony
AST never said that Arsenal’s transfer budget was circa£45 million.
What they did was estimate that there would be £44 million cash available for transfers. Even then they reached that estimate on the basis on nil income from outgoings.
There is nothing wrong with paying transfers by way of instalments but what has happened this window is that Arsenal have changed approach in that previously they only bought players if they held the balance of the fee in their cash reserves this window they have bought players with future payments not being in effect held on deposit but coming from on going income again nothing wrong with that but it is a huge departure from the clubs past approach.
Ben
“Am I the only one that noticed that David Luis became the worst defender in the premier league the moment it was confirmed he was joining Arsenal”
Very funny.
Just been listening to Souness on BT.
He just said:
“Arsenal are good up front but defence and midfield are just good to average”
On the other hand we all know how magnificent Spurs are.
Last season we finished 1 point behind Spurs. We both lost in a European final.
Not a million miles apart by any stretch of the imagination.
Given our signings. Given it’s our new managers 2nd year. It’s almost certain we will improve and we don’t have to improve much to pass Spurs.
I’m not saying we will but we could and it’s a discussion. The way the pundits talk you’d think Spurs played football from a different planet than us.
Ben
Spot on.
Conversely did you notice how Giroud suddenly became a top class player as soon as he joined Chelsea. No more ‘he’s to slow to be a top class striker’ nonsense you got every time he pulled on an Arsenal shirt.