Kia Joorabchian expects David Luiz to stay at Arsenal for another season even though an option to extend his current deal for another 12 months has expired.
Much to everyone’s surprise, it was confirmed last week that the Brazil international had penned a 12-month contract, rather than 24-month deal, when he joined from Chelsea for £8 million last summer.
Amy Lawrence reported in The Athletic at the weekend, that the total financial outlay for one season, once wages and agent fees had been taken into account, totalled approximately £24 million; a quite staggering amount.
Joorabchian, a close friend of football executive duo Edu and Raul Sanllehi, has taken issue with the report and downplayed the chances of his client leaving the Emirates.
“The agent’s fee that was reported by The Athletic is so, so, so wrong. The fee for David was less than 10 per cent of that,” he told Sky Sports.
“He [David] is very happy at Arsenal,” added Joorabchian.
“He has an extremely good relationship with both the coach and the sporting director. He has good relationships all throughout the club, right up to the owner. He respects everybody.
“Arsenal had an option, which expired. We also had a pandemic [coronavirus]. So the option expired in the middle of the pandemic. We are all very aware of that situation and we are all trying, very slowly, to get back to this ‘new normal’.
“These contract situations, these renewals, if he stays or if he goes… will all sort themselves out when we get back to some kind of ‘new normal’.
“David will sit down with Arsenal before the season begins, have his conversations and they will both decide if he will stay or not. That will come before the season starts. The chances are very high [of Luiz being at Arsenal next season]. There is no desire to leave.”
Arsenal have 23 days to arrange a short-term extension to Luiz’s current deal that will allow him to complete the current season as a Gunner. Whether we also push ahead with another 12-months remains to be seen. Given he’s on big money he could still be deemed expendable…but who knows? Once you’re in bed with ‘super’ agents it can be hard getting out again.
Joorabchian also touched on the futures of his other clients; Willian and Philippe Coutinho. Both have been linked with summer moves and even been touted as possible future Arsenal players.
He seemed to hint that Willian would be leaving Chelsea with the club unwilling to hand him the three-year deal he wants and that Coutinho’s future is in the hands of Bayern Munich who have an option to sign him permanently from Barcelona.
That puts his wages and agent fees at about 300 grand a week…..clubs and agents must really see us coming
Am I the only one who thinks Raul is bad for the club?
No…
It is true that Raul is not good for the club, and he makes stupid deals, but to be fair he would make one hell of a toilet paper holder.
Proper feels like a new age for arsenal where an agent has so much power he can come out to the press and say “No Luiz isn’t leaving.”
Normally anything like that would have to come from the club.
He’s probably like “oi lads, you sign Luiz up for a couple more years I’ll make sure Willian and Coutinho sign too, luvly jubbly”
and we sadly may believe him.
“He’s a good player, not a great player”……..
Since Artetas arrival, the defensive effectivity by our midfield has been changed radically, so our CB area looks less chaotic (Freddie also “got that”)
That fact doesn’t mean that Luiz isn’t prone anymore to his occasional catastrophic brain farts.
Overall defensively we are improving, even though we don’t have a Van Dyke ( or a Paul McGrath for that matter) to parole majestically.
I think that should be “efficacy”..
IMO it only makes sense to keep him if we can shift either Mustafi or Sokratis (or both), and that’s far from guaranteed. For my money Luiz is better than either of them, though maybe not so much better that we can justify the huge outlay for him.
Whilst I don’t trust Kia J at all (not his relationship with Raul), I believe he’s probably more correct about the agent fees in this than Amy Lawrence who wants a story that will obviously rile fans in this climate.
500k agent fee seems a realistic figure for an 8m signing. Which is “less than 10% of the quoted figure” 6m that’s mentioned.
10m salary seems very high though I’d have expected him on 150k a week not 190, but then again we like to spend money at Arsenal don’t we.
The last thing Amy wants to do is ‘rile fans’. She is not a clickbait merchant.
I think people need to look at the scope of her work over many years as a journalist, and consider the information she put in that article very carefully. It will not have been made-up, rather extremely well sourced.
Also read what Kia Joorabchian says specifically about the ‘agent’s fee’, when Amy reported it cost ‘£6 million to intermediaries to fix everything up’.
This isn’t a single payment to a single person.
With all due respect, how do you research or source private and confidential contract information and why doesn’t she supply sources? One of the issues i have with the framing of our sign of David Luiz is the context upon which he was signed. Never a mention of the role the behaviour of our former captain that had undermined an otherwise well thought-out and coherent recruitment strategy with the long term signing of Saliba. And never a mention of the transfer fee received and wages saved in selling Koscielny off setting the costs of Luiz either. It’s a dishonest and… Read more »
Journalists don’t reveal their sources in articles like this. You know that. That’s not how it works.
It’s up to everyone to decide on the article in their own way I suppose, but the credibility and track record of the reporter plays a big part in that.
Do journos like Amy Lawrence and yourself sit down with their contacts over lunch and get shown the paperwork supporting these stories on a for your eyes only basis? Genuine question .. I am interested how it works. Thanks.
I can’t tell you exactly how Amy has sourced her information. I do know I was told something very similar a few weeks ago, but it will depend on a story by story basis.
It’s quite clear there’s someone within the club that doesn’t like Raul and is drip feeding the likes of Arseblog with negative stores. The tone of anything on this site mentioning Raul doesn’t make any attempts to hide its contempt.
So Kia (the main agent involved in the deal) walks away with 500k, and allows 5.5m to head in other directions? I just don’t buy that. For one he’s too greedy, and two who else / how many others would need to be involved to take such high fees??? Im allowed to question your golden girls credibility as there is no sources mentioned or quotes. Yes she probably isn’t deliberately riling fans maybe that was going too far, but it’s all too ambiguous. IF we have paid 6m in fees it’s not Luiz’s fault anyway, it’s much more Raul’s. I… Read more »
I’m also not sticking up for anyone here FYI, just playing devils advocate and questioning all sides
I obviously can’t prove it, but I can comfortably imagine a fee structure where not all of the costs are labelled “agents fee”. Kia might be able to accurately claim that the agents fee was 10% of what was quoted but omits mentioning that he and other “arrangers” also got fee X, fee Y and fee Z. Can’t remember seeing many articles from Lawrence over the years which have been clickbait
I hate all this emphasis on agents and their influence on Arsenal’s transfer policy although I’m under no illusion that it only happens to our club. Unfortunately it’s the way of the football world we inhabit today and we have to live with it.
Where we can improve is in the actions and the quality of the people we have negotiating on our side because it seems that agents simply run rings around our executives. The first transfer window post-pandemic will hopefully see all the clubs, through necessity, begin to regain some semblance of common sense.
We’re a corporate club, effectively managed by super agents who control footballers, siphon money out of this club and into their own hands.
Wenger would never have allowed this to manifest and spread like a disease. I’m ashamed of Arsenal and what we’ve become.
We’re in a corporate world, effectively managed by super agents who control …
As much as I like Amy, she seems to have her facts wrong on this. I trust what the agent says here, and as another comment says the fee was probably 500k. And I can’t imagine he’s on 200k a week – 10mil a year. Probably 120k ish.. I like what the agent says about the extension – we’ve got to see what happens when things settle down – I would like to keep him for another year, but if we can’t sell Socrates or Mustafi, then I would understand if the club let him go. We can only keep… Read more »
See my reply above.
And while you’re obviously entitled to your own opinion, I wouldn’t trust a football agent with huge levels of self-interest in this matter, over Amy Lawrence.
You say some who researched a topic is wrong… to then rebut with imaginings and probabilities? I wouldn’t class that as a particularly good debating tactic! I look forward to REAL evidence detailing why Amy is wrong.
Just because you like what he says doesn’t make it true. I’d take Amy Lawrence’s word over a player’s agent anyday.
cant they both be wrong?
Kia’s numbers will be rounded down to better reflect him and amys may be rounded up by her/her source/her editor
20 payments that are 99% accurate add up to x
20 payments that are 100% accurate can add up to y
There’s always a cost to doing business. You’re damned if you do…. and damned if you don’t…. At the time many thought we had our best transfer window for many a year last summer, I disagreed. You can offset the majority of the Luiz deal from the Koscielny and Bielik transfer fees and wages. At least this agent is portraying a situation of stability, the last thing we need with still much to play for, is David Luiz with his head elsewhere. Hopefully with Luiz playing for a new deal, we can get 14 quality games out of him, and… Read more »
Out of interest, anyone know how Bielik is doing at Derby? You would hope that the coaches would really know if he had potential and he did sign for Derby. But then again it was Unai as the coach at the time. He seemed to have all the ingredients to be a very good centre half.
He suffered a ACL knee ligament injury back in December, estimated 9 months out.
Before that he mainly played in midfield.
So the fee for initial transfer was 10%, but wouldn’t arsenal need to pay another fee again from any renewal since it has expired.
Let’s see what the fee is the second time around, not sure i trust agents until UEFA/FIFA gets it’s house in order and starts putting its foot down on having standards for agents.
Wenger was well known to hate agents who were not in the best interests of the game or their clients, so watch this space!
If he stays he will give away silly fouls that lead to goals, give away the ball that will give mustafi a brain fart that would lead to a goal, or just panic and get stupid red cards. Now if he goes we will just go ahead and buy David Luiz 2.0. So either way who cares what happens when the outcome is the same.
We currently have about 8 CBs. Why would we go out and buy another one?
He’s hardly put a foot wrong since Arteta has take charge so I can’t understand why you envisage that scenario. Still we know that negativity is your way of life when it comes to Arsenal
Now I know for sure, 100% you dont watch any Arsrnal games. You have zero knowledge about Arsenal. Just a troll with nothing better to do in life. Google Chelsea vs Arsenal, 2-2 this season under Arteta. I hope you learn something. Haha
I was so excited when Sven joined and his approach would have really paid off with recent events. Now we are saddled with huge fees and wages with a lot less income.
The only good news is we have Arteta.
Spot on Karl. I still think losing Sven is the most damaging thing to happen to this club this decade. It is not a short-term thing either. Given time and authority I believe he would have scouted us out of this hole. Him and Klopp got Dortmund from mediocrity to the CL final and league champions in around 5 years.
Now we’re super agent puppets just like the rest of them.
Why is everyone so quick to try and discredit Amy on this? A journalist who has a history of writing well sourced articles and not producing clickbait. People who say her facts are wrong, well how do you know? Because Kia said so? Not like he’d have a reason to lie about this would he! Also not saying that it’s 100% that Amy is right but I’d be much more inclined to believe her given her previous work than some super agent.
I really hope that Sanllehi winning his power struggle with Mislintat isn’t the the sliding door moment that cements our position in midtable anonymity. The guy is a dinosaur, doesn’t have a clue about football or business, just in it for the schmoozing I’m shocked at the wages Luiz is on. I thought he came here because he was desperate for game time after being demoted to 4th choice at Chelsea, and we were the biggest/most convenient club interested. Why, then, did we give him marquee signing wages? Who else would have paid him as much as we are? Why… Read more »
Obviously I don’t know him, but I get the impression that Sanllehi is one of those people who says the right things to the senior management, who are too stupid/neglectful/both to notice they’re crap at their job. The type of person that doesn’t really know what they’re doing, but says a few buzz words/phrases to sound important, talks louder than everyone else and takes credit for other people’s good work. They usually cream an organisation for all its worth, making other people’s lives a misery (see Sven and Sir Chips), then fuck off to the next mugs to pay them… Read more »
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Man the constant bitching and whining of our fans is so irritating at times, we were whining when we refused to deal with agents and we are doing the same when are dealing with them. In order to buy certain good players you have got to deal with agents, what’s so hard to understand here? I don’t think any club would buy a player solely on an agents recommendation, a club always scouts, analyses and then decides to buy a player, whether that player has an agent or not is secondary
We also didn’t actually want to buy him but were instead forced into by the actions of Koscienly, we weren’t exactly in the strongest bargaining position
The Boss has spoken.