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Arsenal are planning to cut up to 60 jobs. Their manager has reportedly agreed a contract worth £20 million a year. Their billionaire owner has seen his estimated wealth soar.

At a time when Arsenal are enjoying some of their greatest success in years, I should be happier than ever as a supporter. Instead, after more than three decades following the club, I find myself feeling increasingly disconnected from it.

My first Arsenal game was against Tottenham at Highbury in April 1995.

I was six years old. Ian Wright scored, Jürgen Klinsmann equalised, and I was hooked.

In the three decades since, I’ve followed Arsenal home and away, travelled across Europe to watch them and devoted more time, money and emotion to the club than I could possibly calculate. I’m still a season ticket holder today.

Arsenal have been a constant in my life. But increasingly, I find myself wondering whether I’m falling out of love with football.

Not because of results or performances. It’s everything else.

The proposed redundancies have brought that feeling into sharper focus. I don’t just question the decisions being made at Arsenal. I question what those decisions say about the game I’ve spent my life loving.

The People Behind the Numbers

Arteta’s response to the proposed redundancies only made things worse.

Asked about the decision, the Arsenal manager explained that it was intended to help the club evolve and improve, before talking about putting people in the right roles and continuing to invest in success.

I found his comments extraordinarily tone deaf.

Here’s a man who has just signed a contract worth £20 million a year, explaining why one of the wealthiest football clubs in the world needs to eliminate the jobs of ordinary employees in the pursuit of further success.

Arteta is not responsible for every financial decision Arsenal make. But he is one of the most influential people at the club, and his words carry weight.

Nobody expected him to publicly attack his employers. But surely he could have acknowledged the human cost of what was happening?

Instead, we got the kind of corporate language that increasingly defines modern football.

And the contrast with his predecessor could hardly be greater.

In 2020, Arsène Wenger spoke about the responsibility football clubs have towards their employees when deciding how much to spend on players.

“We are a club with 600 employees… we need to have a responsible attitude towards them as well.”

The contrast in language is striking.

One manager spoke about responsibility towards employees. The other spoke about evolving, improving and putting people in the right roles.

The Billionaire and the Balance Sheet

Then there’s the man at the very top.

Stan Kroenke’s estimated net worth has risen from approximately $8.2 billion in 2021 to $27.6 billion in 2026.

That’s an increase of $19.4 billion over five years.

Broken down, that’s roughly $10.6 million every single day.

Those figures represent changes in the estimated value of assets, not cash arriving in Kroenke’s bank account. Nor are an owner’s personal fortune and a football club’s operating budget the same thing.

But that distinction doesn’t settle the moral question.

Arsenal’s proposed redundancies are reportedly expected to save the club between £5 million and £7 million annually. Against the extraordinary wealth associated with its ownership, those savings raise an uncomfortable question about priorities.

Owning a football club comes with responsibilities that go beyond making the numbers work. Kroenke has the resources and influence to shape Arsenal’s priorities. How the club treats its employees should be among them.

There is something fundamentally wrong with a system that allows wealth to accumulate on such an extraordinary scale while ordinary employees are expected to sacrifice their livelihoods in the name of financial efficiency. The question isn’t just whether a decision saves money, but who is expected to bear its consequences.

And yet it’s ordinary employees who are being told that sacrifices must be made.

Arsenal even hired external management consultants to examine the business and identify savings. I’d love to know how much that exercise cost, and how much will ultimately be spent on the restructuring itself.

Perhaps the numbers make sense in a spreadsheet.

But if the only measure of a decision is whether it improves the balance sheet, we’ve lost sight of something far more important.

When Did Football Become Just Another Business?

Arsenal are a business. But being financially responsible should mean more than finding another way to cut costs.

But football clubs aren’t ordinary businesses. They’re woven into families, communities and identities across generations. My relationship with Arsenal began as a six-year-old walking into Highbury, not as a customer acquired by a marketing department.

What troubles me isn’t that clubs need to balance their books. It’s how readily their responsibilities to people can seem secondary to the numbers.

Employees become costs to reduce. Supporters become customers to extract more money from. Decisions that ought to involve questions of responsibility and principle become calculations about what best serves the club’s interests.

The Club I Love, and the Things I Can No Longer Ignore

The redundancies aren’t the only reason I’ve become disillusioned with modern football. They’re the latest reminder of how much the game has changed.

Ticket prices keep rising, without the matchday experience necessarily feeling any better. But it’s the constant effort to commercialise every part of football that wears me down. There’s an official partner for seemingly everything, from the ball to the seats in the dugout. Even the smallest details feel like another opportunity to sell something.

None of that is as serious as people losing their jobs. But it adds to the feeling that a club I’ve loved since childhood increasingly sees supporters through the lens of what they can spend.

And then there are the much more serious questions about the moral responsibilities of football clubs.

Arsenal’s handling of the Thomas Partey situation was particularly difficult for me.

The allegations were extraordinarily serious, and I found the club’s approach deeply uncomfortable.

What troubled me was the contrast with how ruthlessly Arsenal had dealt with other players during Arteta’s early years.

We’d seen players have their contracts terminated, others allowed to leave for reduced fees and difficult decisions made in the name of changing the culture of the football club.

Those were different decisions, made in different circumstances. But they showed how willing Arsenal could be to act decisively when the club believed change was necessary.

Arsenal continued to select Partey. In June 2025, the club also confirmed that discussions over a new contract were ongoing. That, more than any rumour, brought my discomfort into focus.

I understand the importance of due process and the presumption of innocence. Serious allegations do not automatically establish guilt, and I’m not suggesting the club should have treated them as though they did.

My question was how Arsenal weighed its wider moral responsibilities against its sporting interests. Whatever discussions took place behind closed doors, I struggled with the decisions supporters could see.

We’d heard so much about standards, culture and doing things the right way. Yet I struggled to reconcile that language with what I was watching unfold.

It was the closest I’ve come to being completely done with the club.

It all contributes to a growing sense that winning, protecting commercial interests and maximising revenue have become the overriding priorities.

Remembering Why I Fell in Love With Football

For all my frustration with Arsenal and the professional game, there are still moments that remind me exactly why I fell in love with football.

Increasingly, those reminders come from outside the Premier League.

My second cousin plays for Brighton’s Under-21s. Watching him takes me back to the football I grew up with in the 1990s and 2000s.

When I’m watching him, I’m not thinking about commercial partnerships or how much money somebody can squeeze from the next matchday. I’m watching someone I care about play football, develop and enjoy the game.

Football was already big business when I was growing up. But it still felt rooted in communities, rather than packaged as a product with a sponsor attached to every part of it. It felt like football belonged to us.

When I was growing up, some of my happiest memories were of playing football in the park with my mates. After school, during the holidays, whenever we could get enough people together.

Jumpers for goalposts. Arguments about whether the ball had crossed the line. Pretending to be Ian Wright or Dennis Bergkamp. Playing until it was too dark to see.

Nobody was telling us where to stand or when to press. Nobody was analysing our performances or worrying about our development.

We were just playing football.

And it was brilliant.

I don’t need football to be exactly as it was then. But I miss how little it seemed to ask of us beyond turning up and loving it.

A Game of Two Worlds

The contrast between the top and bottom of football is staggering.

At one end, we have enormous commercial deals, players earning hundreds of thousands of pounds every week and clubs constantly searching for new revenue streams.

At the other, grassroots clubs rely on volunteers, parents give up their evenings and weekends, and communities struggle to maintain the pitches and facilities that allow children to play.

The money at the top of the game has never been greater. Yet the distance between those two worlds seems to grow every year.

Football used to feel like an escape from the world around us. Now, increasingly, it feels like a particularly exaggerated version of it.

What I keep coming back to is what football has given me over the years.

Some of my happiest memories have nothing to do with the result of a match. They’re about the people I was with, the places we visited and the shared experience of supporting Arsenal, from Highbury to away days across Europe.

You can’t put a commercial value on those things.

Or at least, you shouldn’t.

I understand that competing at the highest level requires investment and difficult decisions. But treating employees responsibly, respecting supporters and recognising a club’s place in its community shouldn’t be optional extras.

The redundancies may make financial sense to those making the decisions. I wonder what they cost in loyalty, trust and identity, things that don’t fit neatly into a balance sheet.

I’ll still be at the Emirates. I’ll still celebrate the goals, get frustrated by the defeats and care far more than I probably should about the results.

Thirty years of supporting Arsenal doesn’t just disappear.

But with every decision like this, I feel a little more disconnected from the club I’ve spent my life loving.

And increasingly, I find myself enjoying football most when I’m watching my second cousin play, standing beside a grassroots pitch or remembering those afternoons in the park.

Maybe that’s because those are the places where football still feels like football.

I don’t think I’ve fallen out of love with the beautiful game.

I’m just not sure I love what we’ve turned it into.