Arsenal transfer perspective

TL:DR at bottom.

Now that the January transfer window has opened there was hope that Arsenal would go out and start to make several purchases that would help complete the squad in the quest for Champions league football. These hopes were crushed when Emery admitted earlier this month that the club will only be making loan moves this window. This has got the fans in a state of outrage, demanding to know where the money has gone.

Due to the activity last year, where Arsenal signed Aubameyang and Liverpool signing Van Dijk, Arsenal fans have set their sights high claiming that "Players of quality CAN be found in January" and practically demand that money is spend on the team on a similar caliber of player.
The fans have taken to look into Arsenals expenditure on the current squad and calculate the total wages that they are on and try to imagine the transfer budget that can be created from that money.

Ozil being the highest paid player in the club it is only natural that he gets added to the list of players however there are a few key points that need to be addressed in this line of thought:

1. Even if you sell the player and stop paying those wages, this does not mean that you will get that money for another transfer/player.

2. Wholesale changing the squad will mean that you get less money in the transfer of our players as every club will know that we want to offload a large amount of players and their price will reflect that.

3. When rebuilding the squad with players that are "better" than what we currently have, clubs will take this into account when naming their price on players we want.

4. Player wages are not based solely on what they do on the pitch, in fact most of the wages come from what they do off the pitch.
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If we look into the first point, history at the club will show that we will not spend the money to replace the player that we sold. Look at the sale of Vieira and Van Persie for examples.
Vieira was sole to Juventus and it took over a decade to replace the club captain with a new DM.
Van Persie was sold to one of our rivals on the cheap and was replaced with a clear downgrade in Giroud.

Even looking at these last few transfer windows, we sold Walcott, Sanchez, Campbell, Perez, Gibbs and Oxlade-Chamberlain. These players have not been replaced and now we lack width in the attacking third which has really hurt our ability to go forwards and our ability to create chances has been severely hurt as a result.
This is why Emery is currently looking into getting some wide playing midfielders at the moment.
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The second and third point are very tightly woven together. If you look at a wholesale change of the team you will find that clubs will take our player for less than we are currently getting for them, which is already terrible.
Then when you want the get a replacement you will find that the prices will rocket up. When you translate this into business terms, we will be selling low and buying high and with an owner who wants to build a self sustaining model this is never going to happen.
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The final point, wages are based on what you bring to the club, NOT what you do on the pitch alone. For an example, Ramsey works hard on the pitch and earns 110,000 a week, however he wanted to earn more in line with the wages that Ozil gets. This was never going to happen as although Ramsey works hard on the pitch and is considered a leader in the club, he will never shift the merchandise that Ozil does.

Ozil is consistently one of the top jersey selling names even out selling big names like Bale, Lewandowski and Aubameyang and is more on par with players like Ronaldo and Messi. In fact Arsenal shirt sales gone up to as much as 12 times the usual since the arrival of the mega star.

Arsenal have managed a reported number of 1.23m jerseys which manages to keep us in the top 10 football kits for sales. This is very note worthy as we reportedly sell a great deal more kits than European giants PSG kit sales of approx 0.69m or Premier league leader Liverpool sales of 0.7m. Ozil is seen as a key reason for numbers like this.
With Arsenals new deal with Adidas and some brand new kits incoming, a man Like Ozil becomes a very highly sort after asset.

Finally, Arsenal are not as attractive a team for players as we used to be. We have not challenged for the either the Premier league or the Champions league in over a decade. We are settled in the Europa which is a negative point for attracting players.
However Arsenal still sign some amazing players despite this. When you look at what the new arrivals say you will see a trend and this is probably the reason a lot of these players come to Arsenal.

"It's incredible really to be able to be in the same squad as a player like ​Mesut Ozil and obviously other players too, players that have achieved a lot and have great quality. It makes me proud."

"I'm happy to be able to be in the same squad, and I try to learn from them when I'm on the pitch. It's about gelling and trying to enjoy myself on the field of play so that fans have something to shout about." - Lucas Torreira

TL:DR - Keeping Ozil at Arsenal is worth more than selling him. We wont get any transfer money anyway. We cannot offload players that easy as we need to replace players already without losing more as this will cause the prices we pay to soar.