Arsenal are proposing to cut as many as 60 jobs across their football and corporate operations, barely five months after ending their 22 year wait for a Premier League title. Staff were told of the plans this week by chief executive Richard Garlick, with the Telegraph first reporting the scale of the proposed cuts on Tuesday.
The timing is what makes this story land so awkwardly. Arsenal are the reigning champions. They posted record revenue of £691 million in their 2024/25 accounts. Mikel Arteta has just signed a new contract worth up to £20 million a year, a deal that makes him the best paid head coach currently working in English football. And now, with the consultation period only just beginning, up to 60 people could lose their jobs.
What Is Actually Being Proposed
The redundancy plans follow a review by the management consultancy Boston Consulting Group, commissioned to look at how the club’s football and corporate sides are structured. According to reporting on the plans, roughly 60 roles out of a total workforce of around 850 could go, which would amount to close to 7% of the club’s staff.
Three areas have reportedly been ring fenced from the cuts: the football department itself, the Arsenal Foundation, and the club’s security operation. Everything else, from commercial functions to administrative roles, appears to be in scope. Arsenal have said they will try to redeploy affected staff into other positions where possible, and no final decisions have been made while the consultation process runs its course.
It is worth being precise about what has and has not happened here. This is a proposal, not a confirmed set of redundancies, and the number could still change before anything is finalised. But staff have been told, and the scale being discussed is significant enough that it was always going to generate attention regardless of how the club tried to frame it.
A Club Still Operating at a Loss
Part of why this has cut through is the apparent contradiction between the headline figures and the club’s financial reality. Arsenal’s revenue has grown sharply, helped by a first title in over two decades and a run to last season’s Champions League final. Yet the club continued to operate at a loss in its most recent accounts, with wages alone costing £346.8 million in the year to May 2025, by far the single biggest item on the balance sheet.
Reporting drawing on Athletic and New York Times analysis has pointed to operating costs climbing by roughly £126.7 million over the past three years. Arsenal are not unusual among their peers in that respect. Manchester United and Everton have both gone through their own rounds of staff cuts in recent years, and this would not be the first time Arsenal themselves have gone down this road. In the summer of 2020, during the pandemic, the club made 55 staff redundant shortly after players and coaching staff agreed to a temporary 12.5% pay cut. The departure of Jerry Quy, the man inside the Gunnersaurus costume for more than two decades, became an unlikely symbol of that round of cuts and the row it provoked among supporters.
The Wider Picture Across English Football
This week’s news also lands days after the Independent Football Regulator published its first draft State of the Game report, which paints a stark picture of the finances underpinning English football. The regulator found that 94% of clubs across the top five divisions in England were operating at a loss, with nearly two thirds of clubs in the EFL and National League described as technically insolvent and increasingly reliant on their owners simply covering the gap.
IFR chair David Kogan said some clubs are “standing on the edge of financial disaster” and would not survive if their owners walked away, while culture secretary Lisa Nandy said fans have lived with the fear that their club could be “one bad owner or poor month away from ruin.” The Premier League and the EFL are also locked in negotiations over a new revenue sharing settlement, with the top flight having offered £1.8 billion over ten years against the EFL’s request for £1 billion over five.
None of that report is specifically about Arsenal, and the club’s own situation bears little resemblance to the financial precarity facing clubs further down the pyramid. But it provides useful context for why even one of the richest clubs in the country, fresh off its most successful season in a generation, is still looking to trim its workforce. Growing revenue has not translated into profit, and boardrooms across the game appear increasingly focused on costs rather than simply chasing bigger numbers on the income side.
What Happens Next
For now, Arsenal’s affected staff are waiting to find out which roles will actually be lost once the consultation concludes. The club has given itself room to adjust the final number, and redeployment within the organisation remains on the table for at least some of those involved. Supporters, meanwhile, are left weighing up a familiar tension: a club they have just watched win a long awaited title, still finding reasons to cut jobs behind the scenes.
It will not be the story anyone associated with Arsenal wanted to be telling in the weeks after ending that 22 year wait. But as the wider regulatory picture shows, this is a sport in which spectacular success on the pitch and uncomfortable decisions off it are increasingly happening side by side, even at the very top of the game.
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