One week after renewal with Arteta/ Unexpected: Arsenal lays off 160 staff!

One week after signing a $106 million contract with Arteta, Arsenal has laid off 60 of its employees.

According to "Verzeh Se", the English Arsenal club plans to lay off 60 employees in line with a plan to restructure its administrative and operational structure. The move comes months after the team won the Premier League for the first time in more than two decades and just a week after Spanish coach Mikel Arteta signed a new contract worth around $106.2m (£80m). This decision reflects the financial challenges that the club is facing despite its recent successes in the field of sports.

According to the British newspaper "Telegraph", the management of Arsenal on Wednesday morning in a general meeting in which the CEO of the club, Richard Garlick, participated, informed the staff of the club about the reduction plan and explained to them the details of the anticipated changes in the organizational structure.

Staff concerns about possible layoffs increased last month after Arsenal hired management consulting firm Boston Consulting Group to review the club's performance, assess cost effectiveness and human resources in order to improve financial and operational performance.

Retrenchment will be done mainly in administrative and non-sports related departments and will not include the technical, medical and administrative staff of the main men's team, women's team or academy teams.

Also, these actions will not include jobs related to the Arsenal Charitable Foundation, community programs or security management; Because these departments are excluded from the retrenchment plan.

The decisions come just seven days after Arteta, 44, announced a four-year contract extension worth $26.5m (£20m) a year. With this contract, Arteta is known as the most expensive manager in the English Premier League.

The total value of the new contract is around £80m, which reflects the position Arteta has secured at the club. He led the team to the Premier League title last season and ended a wait of more than twenty years.

However, this sporting success has yet to be fully reflected in the club's balance sheet, as Arsenal's financial accounts show that the club has been loss-making for seven consecutive years, despite a dramatic improvement in the team's results since Arteta took over.

The latest published financial data for the 2024-25 season shows that operating costs have risen significantly to $266.7m (£201m), up from $196.4m (£148m) in the previous season.

This means operating costs have increased by $70.3m (£53m) over the course of the year, equivalent to almost 36%. This shows the amount of financial pressures that the management is currently trying to deal with.

Arsenal's management is trying to create a more sustainable financial model that will allow the team to remain competitive in the long term, especially given the financial regulations that English Premier League clubs are required to adhere to, which impose limits on spending and losses.