Arsenal got this one badly wrong.
Arsenal look to have spent as much as £24million on signing David Luiz for just one season, according to latest reports.
As it looks increasingly like Luiz might just spend one season on our books, some have taken a look at how expensive this deal actually was for us, with all the various costs broken down.
The other day, Arseblog estimated it might well be over £20m, and now Amy Lawrence of the Athletic has done the maths and put it at £24m.
While the Brazilian’s transfer fee was pretty low at just £8m, we had to pay a further £6m to ‘intermediaries’ to help push through the deal, and then spend a whopping £10m on his wages for the year, according to the Athletic’s numbers.
That seems pretty staggering for an ageing player who hasn’t contributed a great deal, and it really shows how desperate we must have got if we really couldn’t find anyone in the world who would have been a bit cheaper and probably a lot more reliable in the long-term.
The Luiz saga shows once again that Arsenal still have a lot to do in terms of getting their recruitment right. There have been some positive changes in recent times, but this will surely go down as one we got badly wrong.