Arsenal job cuts just days after Mikel Arteta’s £80m deal is simply indefensible

The contrasts couldn’t be worse, and run right through Arsenal . Above all, though, there are the headline numbers. A mere five days after Mikel Arteta signed one of the most lucrative managerial contracts in football, a £20m per year deal amid all manner of pageantry , the club staged a call to announce plans to cut at least 60 jobs. People on everyday wages are now fearing for their jobs and mortgages, as the show just goes on. Arteta is now the highest-paid manager in the Premier League (Getty) Many staff members had feared this for some time, especially since the expensive consultancy firm Boston Consultancy Group [BCG] had been brought to examine the business earlier this year, but that seemed to jar with how – in the words of multiple sources – the football side has been “more and more indulged”. Many have been struck by the sheer size of Arteta’s staff. The football department, which represents well over half of the club's outgoings, isn’t to be touched in this round of redundancies. The manager has total control there, anyway. Arsenal had even planned for a blockbuster move for Real Madrid forward Vinicius Jr in the summer, and one of the lines at the time was that the wages could be made up on image rights alone. Now, the image of the club is sullied, as employees under threat of losing wages that would barely pay for two days of some Arsenal stars. “You’re concentrating on the 10 per cent of the club, where most of the people are on everyday wages,” as one insider says. This is always one of the most galling things when any major club plans such cuts, as was the case with Arsenal themselves back in 2020 . Or, as one source put it, you’d spend years trying to make up the money that went out on contracts for Fabio Vieira, Reiss Neilson and so many others. “Players were on £100,000 a week to be crash test dummies in training”, a source said. That might be football, sure, but the point is it doesn’t need to impinge on staff lives. That’s where it’s, once again, indefensible. It’s even worse when the last accounts showed a club-record revenue of £691m. Arsenal are expected to reach £800m next. As another insider says, “this wasn’t necessary and cuts more muscle than fat, potentially bringing more cost than benefit”. So much for success on the pitch translating into health off it, as has been seen at comparable models like Liverpool . The celebratory mood from May’s long-awaited title is so quickly undercut by gloom about this. Yet another contrast comes in Arteta on Tuesday describing former executive Ken Friar as “the soul of this football club”. And here are an executive class apparently ripping that soul out. That aspect is something that shouldn’t be overlooked in such stories, even if it should be secondary to concerns over people’s livelihoods. It can affect the football, too. Arteta constantly talks about the ‘culture’ at Arsenal but people on everyday wages are now fearing for their jobs (Getty) Arteta talks about club “culture” probably more than any manager, and he has worked hard to build up that identity again, but these kinds of decisions directly corrode that. Even players are conscious of it, as they should be. Arsenal only have to ask counterparts at Manchester United . Those close to Sir Jim Ratcliffe say there was eventually some regret at the cuts they made, because it didn’t really achieve anything other than dismal headlines and a worse mood . “It just created resentment,” said one source. It affected the sense of unity that is actually crucial to sport, as well as the sense of community that these social institutions are supposed to stand for. They all talk a good game in that sense. Most of them, under modern ownerships, often behave rather differently. It is the crucial intangible that these kinds of hierarchies miss when striving for “efficiency”, as the BCG consultancy was intended to achieve. Manchester United have cut hundreds of jobs under Sir Jim Ratcliffe, citing cost-saving measures (PA Archive) And this is where the entire story is so integral to wider themes, from the Independent Football Regulator publishing a “State of the Game” review that is specifically intended to protect clubs’ community roles, to a debate about ownership that has been sharpened by the Manchester City crisis. Much of this comes down to classic American corporatism, the ownership type that represents the other major force imposing itself on football in parallel to Gulf state wealth. You can repeat all of the known lines about such leaderships only ever being interested in growth, when that is not what a football club exists for. That’s a basic truth always worth repeating. A football club – even the biggest in the world – only exist to play football for the local community they represent. They don’t actually need to do anything more to be sustainable, which a club with an immense global fanbase can obviously be. And that in a game awash with money due to that unique global popularity. The business element is only something that has been bolted on over the past 30 years, as old rules on directors – that Friar lived through – were bypassed by stock market flotation and the rise of the Premier League . Numerous insiders still say this is all even more acute with Kroenke Sports and Entertainment. Stan Kroenke , the patriarch whose main background is real estate, has always been obsessed with margins. (Reuters) Those on the American side of their sports empire state this has often been centred on numbers, and especially staff. Moves like this are an inevitable consequence, and feel all the worse when they so jar with Arsenal’s self image of “doing things the right way”. Other sources put it in the context of considerable change at executive level over the past year, which has created new pressures. Kroenke likes low margins, and here are the margins being made lower, even if they are infinitesimal. CEO Richard Garlick has been a corporate face of late, doing a series of media appearances and conferences to talk about how the club was transformed over the past half-decade. Only last week, at Leaders at Stamford Bridge, he was talking about how this is only a beginning and the club now needed to show "confidence". Well, what's this? This round of redundancies is something the old traditional Arsenal would not have considered. And that forms quite a contrast: between the image and the reality; between the football side and the wider club; between the moods and – most of all – between what modern Premier League clubs should be and what they are. Arsenal still have the chance to row back, and do what's right by the club, rather than low margins.