By the time Bukayo Saka hangs up his boots, there is an outside chance that he may have cost Arsenal more than the Emirates Stadium itself. For context, that’s £390m.
The forward, 24, has this week signed a new contract, reportedly making him the club’s best-paid player.
An official announcement from Arsenal is expected this week. Fittingly for Arsenal’s homegrown star boy perhaps on the eve of the North London derby.
Saka will now remain at the club until at least 2031 on a deal trailed as being worth at least £300,000 per week. In reality, however, a complex matrix of factors mean that the Ealing-born player will earn – and cost Arsenal – much more than billed.
Contracts are rarely as simple as a flat weekly wage. The numbers we see in the press, which in turn are typically briefed by either the club themselves or intermediaries involved in the negotiations, are usually a low-end estimate and not borne out by the numbers in clubs’ official, audited accounts.
We don’t have Arsenal’s final books for 2024-25 yet, but we do have the Deloitte Football Money League’s figures, which are based on official information from the club.
According to that data, Arsenal’s wage bill last season was £344m. About 75 per cent of that figure is, industry sources say, likely attributable to first-team players rather than the wider staff. Using that assumption, the average weekly player wage is nearly £200,000, excluding players out on loan.
Saka, Arsenal’s most valuable player, will be at the apex of the wage structure. He’s worth every penny, but a £300,000-a-week deal is therefore virtually inconceivable. Remember, £200,000 is an average. Many players in the squad earn far less, but Saka, as the top earner, forces the mean up.
Side note: wage aggregation websites are not reliable sources here. Time and time again, their payroll numbers have been proven entirely fictitious by first-hand accounts from players and experts alike.
TRUE or FALSE: Bukayo Saka should start in the NUMBER 10 role more often!
So why the discrepancy between the press figures and the range we can quite easily deduce from the accounts?
Well, for one, players are almost always paid monthly, but that’s a pedantic point. The real difference between Saka’s real wages and the finger-in-the-air figures fans are given is his fixed and variable pay.
In layman’s terms, the latter encompasses elements like performance-related bonuses, appearance fees, loyalty clauses and image rights.
Premier League contracts are highly incentivised. Industry sources routinely explain that incentives can make up 25-50 per cent of the total value of a player’s deal. Sometimes that value will be written into the player’s terms specifically. In other instances, bonuses are paid from a pool that the club sets at the start of a season.
The logic is that if a team does a Tottenham and has a pitiful season on the pitch, the club is protected from revenue shocks. And if a team, like Arsenal, has a generational campaign, players are rewarded commensurately, with a chunk of prize money and sponsorship bonuses making their way indirectly to their payslips.
Image rights are also a major needle-mover. Most top players, including Saka, have set up private companies to which a chunk of their salary is paid in exchange for the license to use their likeness to sell products and sponsorships. Because corporation tax is currently set at 25 per cent of a company’s profits while the top rate of income tax is 45 per cent, players like Saka’s ultimate take-home increases the more heavily weighted his contract is towards image rights.
In April, Saka’s image rights company, BS7 Rights Limited, will publish its accounts. In the last financial year, BS7’s earning increased from £2.4m to £4.6m.
In commercial terms as well as sporting ones, he is extraordinarily valuable. Industry publication SportsPro named him the Premier League’s most marketable player last November, reflecting his brand deals with New Balance and, as of January, TCL Electronics among others.
From April 2027, the government will introduce stricter limits on what clubs can pay players in image rights. That will be a blow for clubs as well as players. Why? Because under the current system, the likes of Arsenal also don’t have to pay NIC on image rights payments. Once the net tightens, the Premier League’s already stratospheric annual wages (£3.95bn at the last count) will become even more dizzying.
At 15 per cent of a player’s wage, NIC is a significant hit. It’s the difference between a contract that costs them £300,000-a-week deal and one that costs them £345,000 per week.
Over the course of a five-year deal like Saka’s, that equates to nearly £12m and, assuming a £300,000-a-week basic wage, pushes the value of the contract close to £100m.
On top of that, agents’ fees.
Last season, Arsenal paid intermediaries £23m – and that figure covers a season when transfer expenditure was a relatively modest £100m, or thereabouts. FIFA and the FA have attempted to cap agents’ fees to 10 per cent of the value of a player’s contract, which over the course of Saka’s deal could reach £10m, but were unsuccessful. The player’s agency – Elite Sports Management, which represents the likes of Chelsea’s Jamie Gittens and former Hale End graduate Alex Iwobi – will have had their pockets lined handsomely for their role in negotiations.
Provided he doesn’t leave the club in the next five years, Saka will likely get at least one more long-term contract at the Emirates. By that time, the club’s total expenditure on the player will be well into the hundreds of millions.
Can Stan Kroenke afford it? Yes, absolutely, though the financial dynamics at the Emirates are shifting away from the benefactor model where Mikel Arteta and Andrea Berta rely on subsidies from their billionaire owner towards a more self-sufficient system, financed by booming commercial revenues.
Kroenke has sanctioned an enormous increase in expenditure in both the transfer and wage markets in recent years. And a fair chunk of that spending has come out of his own very, very deep pockets.
The club has lost over £300m since Kroenke increased his stake to 100 per cent in 2018. That deficit has been covered by, among other means, loans from the owner. Per the latest official figures, Kroenke has lent the club £324m. He is unlikely to recoup that sum in any meaningful sense until he sells the club.
But as University of Liverpool football finance lecturer Kieran Maguire explains in exclusive conversation with Arsenal Insider, the Gunners’ renaissance on the pitch in recent years and, crucially, their sustained participation in the Champions League means that Kroenke’s days of underwriting the club’s losses are likely drawing to a close, with the club able to afford the extraordinary wages of extraordinary players like Saka under their own steam.
🤔 DESERVED OR UNDESERVED: Bukayo Saka getting a £300k-per-week contract at Arsenal…
“Arsenal are in a virtuous circle,” the Price of Football podcast host said.
“The club was static for a long time under the previous regime. Now, wages are starting to go up, reflecting the club’s attractiveness to really elite players. At the same time, they are generating more money from the UEFA coefficient, qualifying for the Champions League and all the other revenues that go with that. So they are in a sweet spot at present.
“It’s difficult to see them failing given the position that they are in at the moment. On the footballing side, they have the best squad with interchangeable players who are really suited to domestic and European football.”
The Premier League is a monument to financial excess, but Saka will be an Arsenal legend. And whatever he is ultimately costing the club, he’s good value for it.
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