Opinion: What is going on with Arsenal’s transfer business? | OneFootball

Are we really paying Willian 220k a week? By Konstantin Mitov

Good to see you again lovely Arsenal people! The Daily Mail come out with an article revealing that the combined sum of Willian’s base salary plus sign-on fee plus bonuses will hit a staggering 220k/week. This surely must raise a few questions about Arsenal’s transfer business.

He’s 32, his stats last year amount to 11 goals and 9 assists and although he has a good injury record, a 3 year deal with an option for a fourth at these sums is ridiculous? The only player who deserves such wages at Arsenal is Aubameyang and nobody else.

What really annoys me is Kia Joorabchian coming out with such strong words towards Arsenal. He accused Sven Mislintat and practically confirmed Willian’s arrival, but why on earth is he so confident talking about us? I am really disappointed Edu and Raul have allowed the club to be held to ransom by an agent.

It’s ridiculous to offer Willian such money and then ask Real Madrid to pay half of Ceballos’ wages and loan him out to us again. We are really struggling in the CM positions, and Dani was a player doing well for us. Our transfer business just doesn’t make sense. Just because we don’t need to pay a transfer fee for a player, doesn’t mean his wages won’t eat us alive.

And sadly this brings up Ozil, AGAIN. He came out and said, he’ll “do everything for this club”. Come on, it’s been 2 managers already who identified that he wasn’t good enough and didn’t fight enough to be in the side and he was frozen out. There are no conspiracies around someone wanting to force him out. He’s not good enough and if he stays it’d be really damaging for us.

If he stays, the moment we don’t do well, questions will be asked about why didn’t we spend that money elsewhere or why didn’t we give youth a chance and so on and so on. Even the odd opinion that Ozil was right will pop-up which really disgusts me.

One huge problem around Arsenal has been that too often things off the pitch have impacted us. Whether it was the board hiding, our bad transfers, the unwillingness to spend money, protests against the owner and against the manager, now the sacking of 55 staff members, these things have eventually hit us.

If you look at Liverpool, their only focus is what happens on the pitch. Everyone is focused on football and there are rarely any distractions and you can see the results. Our wages are incredibly high for a team who finished 8th. The problem is this kind of money give you a massive problem if the player doesn’t perform to the standards demanded by such wages.

It’s impossible to move them on and they don’t want to leave and they lose their passion for football. I don’t want to judge Willian early, but it looks to me like Kia played Arsenal again like he did with Cedric. This is why the Coutinho rumours won’t die, although there is no way on earth we are paying another player such huge wages, unless there is a massive clear-out.

We’ll see what happens, but we are playing a risky game here. Unless we go back to Champions League football soon, and it’s a mighty difficult task, the amount of money being thrown around on wages for such long periods might come back to bite us. I’m not saying we may end up like Leeds, but you are never too big to fail, and we should be very careful with our transfer business, because we’ve done it wrong for a long while now and it doesn’t look like we’ve learned our lesson.

Konstantin