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Arsenal offer key man new £180k-a-week deal – report

By mac14 on December 16, 2016

According to a report in the Mirror, Arsenal have offered Alexis Sanchez an improved contract worth £180,000-a-week but it still falls well short of his expectations.

Sanchez has just 18 months left to run on his current deal and the club have been locked in negotiations over an extension with his representatives for several months.

An agreement is yet to be found and talks have been complicated by ridiculous offers coming in from the Chinese Super League offering Sanchez around £400,000-a-week.

Nobody expects the Chilean international to move to China but understandably his agents are using the offers as leverage to get a better deal out of Arsenal.

The Mirror claim that we’ve now put forward a new contract worth £180,000-a-week, however, it still falls short of Sanchez’s £250,000-a-week demands and the club fear negotiations could drag on until next summer.

So it looks as though there is still no resolution in sight and the same can be said about Mesut Ozil – who’s also in the final 18 months of his contract – although the newspaper suggests that Arsenal are ready to offer him £200,000-a-week.

We’ll have to wait and see whether that will be enough to persuade the German international to commit his future to the club but Ozil will know that like Sanchez, he could earn a lot more elsewhere.

A interesting sub-plot to all of this is the future of Arsene Wenger – who’s contract runs out at the end of the season – and the Mirror claim that neither Sanchez nor Ozil have asked for or been given any indication on whether the boss will sign a new deal.

It’s obviously a huge six months for Arsenal with the future’s of our two star players and the manager yet to be resolved and you get the feeling that our title challenge may be the determining factor.

If our season implodes and we fall away by March only to scrape fourth place, then I wouldn’t be surprised if Ozil and Sanchez think hard about a move away while Wenger would be unlikely to sign a new deal.

However, if we prove to Ozil and Sanchez that we can sustain a proper title challenge then it might be enough to persuade them to sign new contracts and it may also tempt Arsene into penning the two-year deal that’s sitting on his table.