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Arsenal’s £160MILLION black hole: From Ozil to Sanchez and Welbeck to Wilshere, how Arsenal have released some of their most talented players and not received a PENNY back as Sokratis becomes the latest victim of Mikel Arteta’s big clear-out
- Mesut Ozil and Sokratis have become the latest Arsenal players released
- Mikel Arteta is trying to streamline his bloated squad while reducing wage bill
- In recent years, Arsenal have allowed £160m of talent leave for nothing
- Alexis Sanchez, Danny Welbeck and Shkodran Mustafi are other examples
- A shake-up behind the scenes and managerial changes have had an effect
Arsenal’s ruthless squad thinning has continued at pace this week.
Mesut Ozil was put on a plane to join Fenerbahce after the Gunners ended his contract six months early before defender Sokratis Papastathopoulos also had his deal terminated.
Both players had been frozen out the Gunners squad by uncompromising manager Mikel Arteta, with Ozil not playing a single minute of first-team football since July and centre-back Sokratis redundant all season.
Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta has continued his thinning out of his bloated squad this week with Mesut Ozil and Sokratis the latest players to have their contracts terminated
Mesut Ozil left Arsenal six months early and is poised to join the Turkish club Fenerbahce
Defender Sokratis, 32, has also seen his contract terminated and will look for another club
Arsenal’s farewell to Sokratis was a good deal warmer than Ozil’s but it simply continues a theme of the club simply letting go of players for nothing having spent considerable amounts to sign them.
Indeed, in the past three years, Arsenal have seen £160million worth of players – as well as Jack Wilshere and Henrikh Mkhitaryan – leave the Emirates Stadium for not a single penny.
It will seem like a very wasteful business model to many but Arsenal seem more than happy to get big earners off the wage bill even if they don’t receive a fee.
So what has happened to those players and why are Arsenal doing this?
ALEXIS SANCHEZ
Signed for around £35million from Barcelona in 2014, the Chilean truly was a game-changer for Arsenal during the late years of Arsene Wenger’s long tenure.
Sanchez enjoyed three highly productive seasons, scoring 25, 17 and 30 goals for the club respectively from 2014-15 onwards and helping the club to two FA Cup wins. He was twice named Arsenal’s Player of the Season.
Alexis Sanchez was a star performer for Arsenal for three seasons before leaving for Manchester United in a swap deal for Henrikh Mkhitaryan
Perhaps Arsenal started to notice signs of decline as a swap deal was agreed whereby Sanchez moved to Manchester United, where he completely failed to scale such heights, with Henrikh Mkhitaryan coming the other way, in January 2018.
Sanchez would probably have commanded a market value of around £60m had it been a conventional move with United agreeing to an absurd salary to sign him. Having flopped at Old Trafford, he is now at Inter Milan.
MESUT OZIL
The other expensive signing of Wenger’s later years in charge. German star Ozil cost Arsenal £42m to bring in from Real Madrid in September 2013, then a club record.
Ozil’s creative forces peaked around the 2015-16 and 2016-17 seasons when he supplied assists with remarkable regularity. It didn’t deliver Arsenal the league title but he did win three FA Cups.
Ozil was one of Arsenal’s best players for several seasons but fell out of favour under Arteta
Ozil, while earning £350,000-a-week, was excluded from Arsenal’s squad this season
But when Ozil signed a £350,000-a-week contract extension in January 2018, the rot set in. Injuries and dips in form meant he never recaptured his best and his time with Arsenal ended with his excluded from their Premier League and Europa League squads at the start of this season.
Arsenal released Ozil from his contract six months early, shifting his enormous wages off their balance sheet, and he is poised to take a huge pay cut to sign for Fenerbahce in Turkey.
AARON RAMSEY
Having made his breakthrough at Cardiff City, Ramsey seemed like a real steal when Arsenal bought him for just £5m in the summer of 2008.
The midfielder would spend 11 seasons with the Gunners, playing 369 games, and was, for a long time, an integral player for them. He too was twice named the club’s Player of the Year.
Ramsey, who played 11 seasons at Arsenal, was allowed to depart to Juventus on a free
His contract ran down and he left for Juventus on a free at the end of the 2018-19 season, agreeing an extraordinary £400,000-a-week contract that made him the highest-earning British player ever.
His market value at that time was estimated at around £36m.
SANTI CAZORLA
The cultured Spanish midfielder cost Arsenal £10m when signed from Villarreal in the summer of 2012.
Cazorla was a star performer in his first couple of years – 12 goals and 12 assists in the Premier League in his debut season and seven goals and 11 assists in 2014-15.
Injuries held Cazorla back, however, and he returned to Villarreal when his contract expired at the end of the 2017-18 season. Given his age at the time and injury record, Arsenal probably didn’t lose a great amount.
Arsenal paid £10m for Santi Cazorla but his resale value had diminished when he departed
SOKRATIS
Arsenal’s seemingly eternal quest to stop their flakiness in defence led to the £18m signing of Sokratis from Borussia Dortmund ahead of the 2018-19 campaign.
Unai Emery valued him, Mikel Arteta less so. The Greece international helped the club to the Europa League final in 2019 and last season’s FA Cup triumph, appearing for a late cameo in the final.
But Arteta then left him out of Arsenal’s Premier League and Europa League squads, as with Ozil, and the 32-year-old is now looking for a new club. Again, Arsenal probably haven’t lost out on a huge transfer fee for him.
Sokratis last played for Arsenal in the FA Cup final in…
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