Arsenal may sell long-serving players, says Arteta

Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta has admitted the club may have to make difficult decisions over the futures of some long-serving players, insisting that such conversations must be handled with “real honesty and transparency”.

Arteta addressed the issue on Thursday ahead of Arsenal’s Premier League opener against Coventry City, saying the club had a responsibility to make football decisions even when they could be difficult for players who have been at the club for a long time.

“It’s a really, really tough moment, you need to face that reality.

“But you need to face it with real honesty and transparency because when you are on the other side, that’s exactly what you need.

“You might not like what you’ve been told, but if it’s truthful, if it’s the reality, if it’s honest and it’s going to help you to make better decisions and have more clarity for the next steps in your career, you have to do that,” the coach said in a club statement on its website.

He said such discussions were difficult but necessary when a player no longer feels important or wants to pursue another chapter of his career.

“These are always very difficult conversations, but they need to be done,” Arteta said.

“It’s like when a player doesn’t feel that he belongs or he’s important, he wants to have a different chapter, I think that communication has to exist and it has to be both ways.”

Arteta said Arsenal would seek to preserve respect for players even when their time at the club comes to an end.

“We all know, everything has a start and has an end,” he said.

“When it comes to the end, I think our duty, our responsibility is to do it in the best possible way, maintaining the respect and admiration for the player and the relationship, but understanding that at the end, we need to make football decisions.”

His comments come as Arsenal continue to reshape their squad while attempting to retain the Premier League title.

Arteta rejected the suggestion that Arsenal were simply a “bad selling club”, saying transfers out of the club depended on a number of factors, including the quality and contracts of players and whether they themselves wanted to leave.

“It’s not bad or good. It depends on what you have relative to the options you have to sell,” he said.

“Maybe we’ve been extraordinary, depending on the level of the players that we have, the ability and their contracts and their will to go.”

He added that Arsenal could sometimes want to make decisions over players who were themselves happy to remain at the club.

“A possible issue that you can face is that maybe you want to make certain decisions with certain players, but they are happy and want to stay as well,” Arteta said.

“There are a lot of factors that have to be right when you have to sell a player, but it’s not that simple, in my opinion.”

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Arteta also rejected the suggestion that Arsenal necessarily needed to sell players before making further additions, pointing to the club’s growth in value, performances and revenues.

“Well, it depends on the sporting success as well,” he said.

“I think there isn’t any club in Europe that has had the growth that Arsenal had in terms of the value, in terms of the performances, in terms of the revenues.

“So that’s something very big. Some other clubs, maybe they need to sell. I think we’re taking an approach that has increased the level and the capacity of the club, big time.”

Despite the possibility of difficult decisions over some players, Arteta said he wanted Arsenal’s squad to remain as deep as possible because of the demands of the season.

“The players have to feel important and valued and in order to do that, they need to play minutes,” he said.

He also stressed the importance of keeping players developed through Arsenal’s academy.

“Certainly. I mean, the players that have been raised in our system and they feel generally that love and that connection with the club, it brings something else,” Arteta said.

“There is no question about that, and we need to look after them in a really special way because they bring value that is very difficult to find.”

He added: “That’s why, when we can, we want to protect those assets as much as possible, develop them and make them extremely important for the club.”

Arteta nevertheless confirmed that Myles Lewis-Skelly would remain an Arsenal player at the end of the transfer window.

“100%,” he said when asked if Lewis-Skelly would still be at the club.

He also said Arsenal were actively looking to strengthen their defence because of William Saliba’s long-term injury.

“The ambition is to improve the squad,” Arteta said. “We have a really specific issue in the backline, especially with the long-term injury of Wilo [Saliba] and the fact that we miss one more defender; that’s clear.

“So we are trying to reinforce that area. Whenever we’re ready, we’ll announce something.”

Four longest serving players
While there are no direct indications or mention from Arteta about who the affected players would be, PUNCH Online, however, reports that Bukayo Saka currently stands as Arsenal’s longest-serving first-team player, having made his senior debut back in November 2018.

He is followed closely by fellow academy graduate Reiss Nelson, who has been involved with the senior squad since 2017 despite intermittent loan spells.

Brazilian forward Gabriel Martinelli ranks next as the longest-serving external signing, having arrived at the club in July 2019, while his compatriot Gabriel Magalhães anchors the defense as a mainstay of the squad since his transfer in August 2020.