Arsenal struck gold selling PL star for £35m profit

Arsenal have been utterly transformed over the last four years, from a team struggling in midtable to one fighting for the Premier League and Champions League.

Mikel Arteta has worked wonders on the pitch with his tactical approach, but alongside Edu Gaspar, he has also turned the Gunners into shrewd operators in the market, both in terms of incoming and outgoings.

The likes of Emile Smith Rowe, Eddie Nketiah and Folarin Balogun have all been moved on for sizable fees under the Spaniard and Brazilian, which is something that rarely happened under the former leadership.

However, for all the poor sales conducted before Arteta found himself in the hot seat, there were some great ones here and there, including one player loved by Arsène Wenger.

Wenger’s biggest sales

So, before we get to the player who netted the Gunners a considerable profit, let’s look at a couple of the most significant sales completed while Wenger was still at the club.

The first player that has to be mentioned is English midfielder Alex Oxlade Chamberlain, who joined the North Londoners from Southampton in the summer of 2011 for a fee reported to be around £15m, including add-ons.

Over the following six seasons, the Portsmouth-born star would make 198 first-team appearances for the club, in which he scored 20 goals and provided 28 assists, so it was quite a surprise when Liverpool were willing to pay £35m for his services in August 2018.

The 31-year-old would go on to enjoy a relatively successful stint on Merseyside, winning several trophies, but the injury problems that saw him miss around 178 games for the Gunners continued up North.

Another of Wenger’s most significant sales was another midfielder who left for a fee in the region of £35m: Cesc Fàbregas.

The Spaniard joined the North Londoners in 2003 for around £2m and would go on to make 303 appearances for the first team over the following eight years before finally returning to Barcelona and then making a number of moves that would see him play for Chelsea, AS Monaco and Como.

Unlike Chamberlain, losing the exceptional international was a severe blow on the pitch. Still, the silver lining was the enormous profit, but another player loved by Wenger, who Unai Emery sold, netted the club an even larger profit.

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The sale of Alex Iwobi

Yes, the player in question is none other than Nigerian international Alex Iwobi, who joined Arsenal as a youngster before breaking into and establishing himself in the first team under Wenger.

The Lagos-born dynamo, whom the Frenchman dubbed “exceptional” in November 2017, made 149 first-team appearances for the North Londoners between the 13/14 and 18/19 seasons, eventually being sold to Everton in the summer of 2019 for a massive fee of £35m with 15 goals and 24 assists to his name.

Now, while the versatile academy gem wasn’t a star of the team at the time, Emery’s decision to offload him when he did was a surprise, but given that he joined the club’s youth set up as a youngster, the fee he bought in was all profit, making it one of the best sales in the club’s history, at least from a financial perspective.

Moreover, while the 28-year-old has since established himself as a Premier League-level player, making 140 appearances for the Toffees and 34 for Fulham, he hasn’t quite developed into the world-beater that some at Hale End thought he might.

Ultimately, Iwobi was a useful player for Arsenal when he was at the club, but Emery and those in charge at the time did exceptionally well to get such a significant fee for him in 2019, especially as, at the time, the Gunners were not known for being particularly great sellers.

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