Gonna hit you up with a quick post today as I am up against it… so here we go.
Arsenal are about to go into a consultation period with a view to making at least 60 jobs redundant. Could be less, hopefully it’s less, no one knows right now.
This is quite the story right now because of monstrous club revenues, loads of success on the pitch, and the recent announcement that Mikel Arteta’s latest deal could fetch in the region of £100m.
I’m jarred by the story, at the core of any redundancy effort, even the mutterings of layoffs, sits a group of people who are worried about paying their mortgages after giving chunks of their lives to a job that is usually more about passion than making big cash money.
The savings also seem marginal in comparison to the outlay on the sporting from. Let’s be generous, say you’re finding 60 folk who earn £100k a year, which is unlikely; your yearly saving is £6m. Gabi Jesus was paid £13.9m a year to sit on the bench. The final year of Reiss Nelson was £5m. Saving £6m a year, even £10m, feels a little bit like sacking Gunnersaurus to save money during the pandemic.
Back to it…
I live in a country where this sort of process is part and parcel of the corporate life we choose to participate in. KSE are sustainable owners and a lot of what they’ve done over the past 7 years has been anything but… I’ve been writing for a while about Arsenal wanting to get back to a more rational business model, and this feels like the new finance people on the board having an input on how we move going forward.
However, my feelings on it are shaped by my understanding that the moves aren’t about cost-cutting measures to make savings; they’re about retooling for the new world, under a new CEO, who has different objectives and motives than the last one. He’s a year into the job and now he’s moving on his plans that were in motion well before the end of last season.
Business hat on, the idea that Arsenal is the same company it was 5 years ago, is as absurd as believing Arteta should have been able to win the Premier League with the first squad he picked up. Arsenal were not a prestige product on the global stage 5 years ago in the way we are now. The world was not the same. The opportunities are now bigger, grander, and they’re time-limited. The only guarantee we have now is this current squad, will be good, until it’s dismantled after 4 years. After that, we could become Liverpool, on the struggle bus to nowhere. Strike while the football is good is probably a decent plan.
I prefer to understand this story through the business imperative of retooling for new frontiers. Any job losses are disappointing at a sports entity, but chopping to put more money in the pockets of sporting is different from retooling to generate more revenue at an opportune moment in time.
What many don’t see from the outside is that most sports clubs, particularly the lavish spenders, do not spend much on the corporate machines. Budgets are tight, teams are leaner than you’d imagine, and it’s tough to grow departments. I know people at the biggest clubs that spend fortunes on shite players, who talk of hiring freezes, no promotions, and no-backfill policies.
I’d also imagine the CEO expends a lot of reputation capital with ownership for sporting asks, and probably needs a good story on the back office… namely, we can reshuffle resources and grow revenue without adding headcount.
Is that shitty? Yeah. It’s not great. But those feelings we have are because we believe in Arsenal marketing speak and talk of ‘family’ values that comes from the manager. Our utopian view is that football is a community endeavor, and it shouldn’t be held to blue-chip standards is naive. The language used is performative. Business isn’t family and that’s the same on the sporting front. It’s business, and business is harsh.
Corporate shilling for Arsenal isn’t where I want to be… all of the rationale makes sense in the cold light of day, what doesn’t is hiring in one of the most expensive consultancies on this planet to do the analysis. A bunch of 28-year-olds with HP laptops looking at spreadsheets and using ChatGPT to get to a generic view on how to cut the business in pieces. Why isn’t the leadership at Arsenal capable of building a future-proof business and making the decisions on headcount without using a generic framework that was probably sold to them using pithy lines like ‘AI is changing jobs faster than companies are redesigning operating models’ (literally pulled from the BCG site). I can’t buy into the heat shield argument… because the move is so soulless. If your leaders can’t retool based on a strategic directive, what does that tell you?
To close… what I wanted for 15 years is an organization that can produce a world-class football team, that has a sustainable future, and we have one. I don’t like anyone losing a job, but it’s also easier to stomach if it’s about modernizing in a fast-changing world because we’re winning. I trust the club will look after those who exit.
Ok, I’m outta here. Check out a very fun podcast I did with FK over at Latte Firm. x