Arsenal cut 60 jobs this week. Seven days earlier, they handed Mikel Arteta a £20m-a-year contract. The manager's response when asked about it? Essentially: don't ask me.
"This question is not for me," Arteta said, before offering the club line about the cuts being necessary to "evolve and improve." He acknowledged he wasn't the right person to answer, asked for respect, and shut the conversation down. It wasn't quite a defense. It was a deflection dressed as solidarity.
The numbers make this impossible to spin
Arsenal posted revenues of £691 million for the 2024-25 financial year — the same year they won their first league title in 22 years. And yet 60 of their 871 employees are now out of work, laid off via a phone call from CEO Richard Garlick. Not a meeting. A call.
The club brought in Boston Consulting Group to review operations and streamline efficiency. What it's actually streamlined is fan goodwill. Football finance expert Kieran Maguire called it an "own goal." That's putting it charitably.
Playing staff were untouched. Of course they were. But that's exactly what makes the optic so corrosive — the people who can least afford to lose their jobs are the ones losing them, while the manager who signed a contract worth more than most clubs' entire wage bills is standing at a press conference talking about evolution.
Sound familiar? It should
Manchester United went through something similar after Sir Jim Ratcliffe's arrival, and at least Ruben Amorim stood up and said it was devastating, that it hurt morale, that he regretted it. Arteta offered no such candor. His answer was procedural. Managed. Careful.
None of this touches Arsenal's league title odds or their squad depth. The football operation is clearly ring-fenced. But a club's culture isn't just its first team, and the backlash here — from supporters who just watched their club win a championship — is a signal that the trust built on the pitch can erode pretty quickly off it.
Arteta said "hopefully everybody will respect" his decision not to engage further. Whether they do is another matter entirely.
