Arsenal is regarded as one of the top clubs in the world, with the Gunners consistently competing across various competitions. In recent seasons, the club has also demonstrated its financial strength by investing heavily in new signings.
Mikel Arteta’s side believes it has the resources and appeal to attract some of the finest talents in the game. However, a key question remains about how effectively Arsenal performs when it comes to player sales.
Arsenal’s Selling Record Raises Questions
While Declan Rice became Arsenal’s most expensive acquisition after joining for over £100 million, overtaking Nicolas Pepe, the club’s record sale tells a different story. As reported by The Sun, Arsenal’s highest fee received for a player remains the £35 million Liverpool paid for Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain in 2017.
Prior to that, the record stood at £30 million from Nicolas Anelka’s transfer to Real Madrid in 1999. Despite the passing years and rising transfer fees across world football, Arsenal have not surpassed that figure.
A Reflection of Strategy or Missed Opportunity?
This statistic could be interpreted in different ways. While some may see it as a sign of poor negotiating or undervaluing talent, others might argue it reflects Arsenal’s reluctance to sell key players. The club has prioritised building a strong and stable squad, often choosing to retain core talent rather than cash in.
This approach suggests that Arsenal’s low revenue from sales may not necessarily be a weakness. It could, instead, indicate a strategy focused on long-term squad stability over short-term financial gain.
Arsenal remains one of the biggest clubs globally, but their limited earnings from outgoing transfers highlight a contrasting trend compared to their spending. Whether this balance changes in the coming seasons will depend on evolving market dynamics and the club’s broader strategic goals.
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IMHO some recent sales were very good:
Willock
Balogub
Nketiah
Smith Rowe
I guess none of these players have incresead their value after they were sold…
Most of them were overhyped. I bet some of their training stats were below expectations when Arsenal decided to sell them
Yes. The recent sales have been much better.👍
I just hope we don’t sell Zinchecko for the reported £12-£15 million that we allegedly value him at. 😬
Boy are you two above delusional.
All this assumes we really *have* been one of the biggest clubs in the world over the period that these record sales have been recorded, and that we would have been prepared to let our best players leave to opportunistic spenders like Barcelona and Madrid.
We’re getting back up to that level of late, but I wouldn’t say we’ve even been in that league over the last 10-15 years. We could potentially sell Saka or Rice, or maybe Saliba, for over 100m, but who would actually want that to happen?!
Where the problem lies is we haven’t made any profit in the region of 5 to 10m on any players we bought in the last 10years if any those players didn’t go for free.
But we’ve done well enough on players that have come through our academy.
I think we got above value for Alex Iwobi from Everton in a deal that started at £28 million and eventually became around £35 million with add ons.
And the £35 million we got from Liverpool for The Ox.
I think that Arsenal and Man United are the worst when it comes to player sales. Liverpool, chelsea and Man City are good.
Surprisingly enough, over the last 10 seasons, Liverpool don’t even rank in the top 20 clubs in Europe for value of player sales though!
Arsenal isn’t, traditionally, a “good” selling club as the article shows. They make some reasonable sales, more often of “home grown” players, but they lose money particularly when it comes to selling players they’ve paid fees for originally (the record being Pepe).
That general lack of income from sales does have an effect. For the last accounts (2023-24), while revenues were at a record level, the club still made an overall loss. A better sales record would probably have changed that.
Bertie, I did read the other day about the loss in the accounts for 2023-2024 was £18m.
HD. Yes, that about it. Not a great amount in the scheme of things I guess (and Arsenal rarely makes a profit anyway) but perhaps with a better selling record it could have resulted in a surplus in that “record” year.
Last season we had Palmeiras offer +30 million for Jesus and we turned it down. I think theres evidence of Palmeiras director talk about it. Our 2nd highest paid player, that was a huge mistake at the time and still is.
Thing is not being able to sell but case of not knowing when to sell.
That’s not a now problem, that always been a problem
Even the great AW held on to players to long and didn’t maximise the potential sell.
We even had a policy if you hit 30 then it was 1 year deals and they would go on a free or for peanuts.
Sad to say and never ever wanted them to leave but we never got the full amounts they were worth on Vieira, henry and rvp,
The clubs fault or managers fault on how we conduct our transfers
The bottom line is, we are poor at buying and selling. Our recent record of success (or to be realistic failure) in the league indicates a massive flaw in our strategy. City, Chelsea and Liverpool have all benifitted from selling at least one player for close to or over 100 mil. And all have won leagues and CL recently. We haven’t. There is a problem with the way we do business.
You have a point but Spurs have had a couple of major sales (Bale & Kane) and still haven’t won the league with the benefits a fortune can bring.
City and Chelsea in particular were able to spend an absolute fortune during a different period in EPL history but City didn’t get a fee for KDB. Kyle Walker was signed for £45m and has been allowed to leave. Liverpool nurtured TAA and RM paid a piddling fee. IT is the way of the footballing world.
Apart from anything else, generally a player’s value will go down over the years and for Arsenal who haven’t won the league in donkey’s years, having to spend big to even get close is par for the course and offers no guarantee of success.
Spuds wasted their money Sue, they should have used it better and they didn’t. Also Spuds for me are not league contenders, like the others were/are. They are from the group below that level.
They did Reggie
Liverpool sold Coutinho which funded VVD and Salah. A world of difference there
Clearly, it’s a two-part equation: raising money (in this case through sales) and what you spend it on. Clubs can be successful in the first but fail in the second like Sp*rs. Although we shouldn’t forget that, amazingly, they remain a well-run club financially despite their many poor transfer investments.
On the whole both Chelsea and City are pretty good sellers (no club is anywhere near perfect though). OK, the likes of Walker cost £45m and was allowed to leave, but the likes of, say, Pepe cost £72m (back in 2019) and was allowed to leave for nothing with Arsenal paying his wages while he was out on loan! There’s business and there’s business.
I think it’s far too easy to rubbish those who haven’t been as successful as Liverpool in their transfer strategies. It is fiendishly difficult which is why there are only a handful of teams that stand out. It is also worth noting that even the most successful teams get it wrong at times.
I’d like to add that it’s some of the mid range teams that rely on selling their best assets in order to balance their books. Brighton spring to mind as a club that have carefully researched incoming players and sell well. White cost Arsenal £50m as a close to home example.
For me it’s clear to see that we’re not particularly good when it comes to selling. Hence the reason that clubs see this and are only willing to take our players on loan in a lot of cases, and on the odd occasion there’ll be an option to buy. Overall our transfer business leaves a lot to be desired.
And when it comes to us buying, other clubs know that we’re needing a striker. And so the price goes up, that’s been a problem over the years to an extent.
That last point about the selling clubs using need or desire to drive up prices is also true for other buying clubs of course. Hence the ridiculous price that BCN paid for Countinho!
On top of this, there’s always an EPL premium attached with buying players. Not something we can do all that much about unfortunately.
Post great Arsene Wenger has been a disaster in selling. In his time it was a tremendous success. It was profit after profit.
The biggest factor is what value did we get in players services before we sold or release them?
Let’s say the great Thierry Henry as an example, I would say we got no less than a billion worth of service from him.
Vieira, Bergkamp, same thing. And many many more.
Look how many players Wenger brought , won things with then made a profit on
For many years Wenger’s eye for talent was key to Arsenal’s success. It is however, rather disingenuous for people to claim Arsenal became poor at selling post-Wenger. It is these kind of reductive perspectives that lead to people pointing out significant issues with Wenger’s recruitment approach particularly in his later years at the club.
This is where you go on giving some examples of post Wenger’s success stories otherwise you just made an empty statement regardless of how fanciful you put it.
No, you need to reflect.
I will give you one thing to think about. The footballing world is quite different from the context in which Arsenal were selling many of their best players in their prime. If you don’t understand the significance of this there really is no point in having a debate.
Another empty statement. Please explain how is the football world different now? With examples if you please.
Are you saying clubs do not make profit in players sales nowadays? Please 🙄🙄🙄
Stop embarrassing yourself with ridiculous empty posts.
True, but there’s also quite a few that we made a loss on
You’re absolutely right that it’s the value that we get from players that is the most important issue here. I honestly don’t really care that much about “who sold who for the most money in 2022” or whatever. I’d much rather we have moderate sales results coming from mid-level or squad players (or promising academy players, as much as it hurts) than sell our best players to make a profit. We should aim to make our profits from league and tournament successes first and foremost.
Arsenal certainly wasn’t perfect regarding transfers under Wenger, particularly in the latter years, but he did bring trophy success overall and its shiny silverware that counts in the end.
Yeah, his early period was very successful. Then mid-reign he was forced to sell many of our most valuable players to balance the books due to the Emirates construction. His later period saw poorer sales, the record sale being Vermaelen to Barcelona for 25m, which was admittedly a lot for a defender back then. We also sold Serge Gnabry to Bremen for like 5m (not Wenger’s choice, the club’s) – it’s a mixed bag.
It’s remarkable though that he kept us in the Champions League places and winning FA Cups despite all that. Truly great manager.
Still though made a massive profit
Think about
Fabregas
Vanpersie
Adeybayore
Song
Toure
Nasri
Absolutely. The club, largely thanks to Wenger, was indisputably the best in the league in his early years at spotting cheap talent and then shipping it out later for a good profit (in many cases).
All of these sales you listed happened during the height of the Emirates construction period and debt repayment burden from 2004-2012, which I was referring to as the “mid-period” of the Wenger era. After the 2005 FA Cup win, we went through that entire mid-period without winning either the league or the FA Cup.
After Vermaelen (10m-25m) in 2013, these significant, larger profitable sales basically dropped off a cliff until 17/18. Arsenal spent 264m from 13-16, while only taking in 47m on outgoing players.
So all I’m saying is let’s not over-generalize… The club didn’t suddenly become bad at achieving investment-to-sale price ratios as soon as Wenger left, it’s been an issue at times a bit longer than that.