Arsenal have told staff they plan to cut 60 jobs, or up to 60 by one account, months after winning the Premier League and posting record revenues for 2024-25. Richard Garlick, the chief executive, broke the news on Wednesday. The football department, The Arsenal Foundation and security are spared, so the cuts land elsewhere in the club. Around 850 people are believed to work there, which would make it roughly 7% of the staff. Arsenal say they'll try to find other jobs for those affected where they can.
The plans seem to grow out of an efficiency drive that followed a BCG audit, so this is a choice made from strength rather than one forced by a crisis. The wage bill was £346.8m in the results to May 2025, and operating costs hit £200m last year after climbing £126.7m over three years. In 2020 Arsenal made 55 staff redundant after Covid, months after first-team players and coaches had accepted a temporary 12.5% pay cut. That came in a pandemic, but this comes after a first title in 22 years and a £20m new deal for the manager, which is a far harder sequence to justify to anyone being let go.
The same week took away a man who began in Arsenal's box office. Ken Friar has died aged 92, after nine decades at the club that carried him up to the boardroom as club secretary and managing director. He was central to leaving Highbury for the Emirates, a project he shared with his friend and fellow director Danny Fiszman. The crowd stood to applaud him before the Lille game. Mikel Arteta said he'd had "the privilege, the honour" of learning from him. "Ken Friar was Mr Arsenal," said Charlie George. A fuller tribute is planned for the Everton game on 24 October.
Arsenal Women's Champions League trip to Barcelona has moved back a day because of a general strike in Spain. The strike was called after the fixtures were set and would have left the game short of staff and transport. It's now at Camp Nou on Thursday 12 November, kicking off at 5.45pm UK time. Barcelona put forward Tuesday 10 November, but Arsenal's trip to Liverpool on 8 November ruled that out. Saying no to the Tuesday was right for the players, though supporters who'd already booked to travel for the Wednesday are likely to face extra cost and disruption.
Arsenal's under-19s lost 3-2 at home to Lille in the UEFA Youth League despite goals from defenders Josh Ogunnaike and Elijah Upson.
The first team handled Lille rather better, and Arteta's account afterwards adds something to Bukayo Saka's part in the 3-0 win. On Monday Arteta had said his attackers should aim "to score two or three per game". Later he tracked Saka down mid-massage to tell him, "Bukayo, I just killed you in the press conference." Illness meant Saka wasn't ready to start, but within moments of coming on he'd set up Eberechi Eze, and four minutes later he scored. That's four goals and an assist from nine appearances this season. The illness matters more than the joke, because a winger who wasn't fit to start and still made one goal and scored another is the best reply Arteta could have hoped for.
Leave a Reply