A lot can be said about Arsenal’s technical director Edu. The Brazilian has had his fair share of critics over the last 13 months for some of his decisions in the transfer market.
The signings of Pablo Mari, Cedric Soares and Willian combined with his role in David Luiz’s contract extension caused an uproar among supporters.
Thankfully almost all of those deals have worked out pretty well. Edu played a key role in signing Thomas Partey in the summer and Martin Odegaard on loan in January as well.
Our technical director deserves a ton of credit for that but his best work at Arsenal so far has been the departures he orchestrated in the January transfer window.
Arsenal save over £15m in wages
Mesut Ozil, Sokratis Papastathopoulos, and Shkodran Mustafi were all shown the door while Sead Kolasinac, William Saliba, Ainsley Maitland-Niles and Joe Willock were sent out on loan until the end of the season.
That trims the squad considerably but more importantly, it reduces the burden on our enormous wage bill.
Ozil was on a mammoth £350,000-a-week contract, while Sokratis, Kolasinac and Mustafi earned a salary in the region of £90,000 each every week.
Maitland-Niles, Saliba and Willock’s departure frees up an additional £95,000-a-week while Matt Macey leaving permanently saves up £10,000 every week as well.
Considering that contracts usually last until the end of June, Arsenal will have saved about £15.2 million on salaries. That is incredible work by Edu and that money will surely come in handy when Arteta looks for reinforcements in the summer.
Disclaimer: It is important to note that the money Arsenal have reportedly agreed to pay the likes of Ozil and Sokratis to terminate their contracts haven’t been taken into consideration here. This is just a mere representation of the ease of burden on our wage bill.
Huge thanks to Spotrac for all the data.
