Arsenal are the champions of England. They posted record revenues, paid around £50m to bring Noni Madueke over from Chelsea, and handed Mikel Arteta a new contract through 2030 reported to be worth £80m. Now they plan to make up to 60 members of staff redundant. Put those two facts side by side and the second one stops making sense.
The savings from 60 salaries, the people who answer phones, sell shirts and keep the building running, are a rounding error against what Arsenal just committed to one manager and one winger. You could fund every one of those jobs several times over out of the loose change of a single transfer window. Arsenal aren't staring at insolvency here. They've never had more money, and they've decided the cheapest thing to cut is the people with the least power to argue back.
Arsenal have run this exact play before. A few years ago, during the pandemic, they announced 55 redundancies while the first team remained a 'key priority.' The language changes, the logic never does. When the wind blows, the stars are protected and the staff are expendable. The club keeps discovering that the one line item it can live without is human beings on modest wages.
Running a football club is a business, and businesses control costs. But control costs where the costs actually are. Arsenal's wage bill is driven by the manager deal and the transfer fees they just announced with press releases and smiling photos. You don't get to cry poverty with one hand while writing eight-figure cheques with the other and expect anyone to buy it.
Sixty redundancies looks like a gesture at discipline, a box ticked on a spreadsheet so somebody upstairs can point at a leaner org chart. It buys the appearance of prudence at the expense of people who did nothing wrong and earn a fraction of what the club spends on a squad player.
Stop blaming vague 'market forces.' Name the man. Stan Kroenke owns this club. His ownership greenlit the title-winning spend and the new manager deal, while the record revenues piled up underneath it. The same ownership is now signing off on cutting 60 jobs. Both decisions came from the same office. You cannot celebrate one as ambition and excuse the other as necessity when the same person authored both.
Arsenal can afford the title, Arteta, and Madueke. The one thing they've decided they can't afford is the people who kept the lights on while the trophy was won. That's a choice, and it's a shabby one.
