Originally Posted by
I am invisible
Well, the Adidas deal should give us an extra £30m of annual revenue to work with, and losing Ramsey, Welbeck, Cech and Lichtsteiner will probably free up another £25m - chuck in the basic amount that all clubs are allowed to increase their spending by each year without boosting revenue (£7m is it?) and we’re already past the £60m mark without doing a thing.
Again, it’s important to stress that we’re talking about amounts that we can increase our *annual* overheads by here, and not how much we can spend on transfer fees in one summer. If someone like Torreira, for example, was signed for £22m (ish), to be paid over 4 years, and on a contract of £70k/week (ish), then that would only account for about £8m/year of our budget (5.5 in structured repayments and 3.5 in wages) - it’s not as straightforward as saying we’ve got a transfer budget of 60m and then subtracting 22m (which is how the papers usually frame it).
It’d be a dream to get rid of Özil and Mkhi - they can both go for nothing with my blessing - but there’s literally loads We can do, even if just leave those two to rot until their contracts expire. Mustafi and Kolasinac must be in that 90-100k/week club - both could easily be replaced with players just as good (or better) on half their wages. Xhaka too - hasn’t been the worst player this year by any stretch, but we could bring in someone just as good or better for half the money. And we’d probably get some kind of fee for all three of those guys too.
I love Koscielny and Monreal, but they’ve got to be on pretty big money after all these years, and both are going to need replacing soon anyway - might as well deal with it now. Why are we keeping Elneny and Jenkinson around? Sell. Get them off the wage bill. The amount they’re played they wouldn’t even need replacements. Ditto for Chambers - find a place for him or sell him.
I’d even consider letting Bellerin go, if a crazy offer came in - Maitland-Niles has been looking increasingly good in the same role, and is probably on a much smaller contract... nice to have two players there of that standard, but it feels like a bit of a luxury given the amount of surgery we might need.
Honestly, I’m really not worried about how we might finance a rebuild - by far my biggest concern right now is whether we actually have anyone at the club who I’d trust to oversee the recruitment!