Report: Edu set to depart Arsenal

Yesterday at 11:14 AM

The Brazilian set to head up Nottingham Forest, Olympiacos multi-club portfolio.

Edu, Arsenal's Sporting Director, will be leaving the club, perhaps imminently, per reports. The Brazilian departs to head up Evangelos Marinakis', owner of Nottingham Forest and Olympiacos, multi-club portfolio. The new position comes with a significant salary increase and the opportunity to oversee and control multiple clubs — it's not difficult to see why Edu would be attracted to the post.

The move ends Edu's second tenure in North London. He spent four years at the club as a player between 2001 and 2005 and has been an executive since July 2019. He helped hire Mikel Arteta and has worked closely with the Spaniard reinvigorate the club, helping rebuild the roster, change the culture, and repair the relationship with supporters.

Arsenal will undoubtedly hire somebody to pick up at least some of the slack created by Edu's departure, although I'd expect to see Mikel Arteta play a larger role, along with the already increasingly involved Tim Lewis and Richard Garlick.

The club won't lack for options — they should have their pick of anybody and everybody in the football world. Arsenal are one of the most attractive clubs in world football. They've got an excellent, young squad, a highly-rated young manager, play in the Premier League, the richest and financially strongest domestic league in the world, are primed to reprise their role as perennial Champions League participants, and have owners who seem willing to spend competitively to keep them near the top. In a way, the fact that Arsenal haven't won trophies (an FA Cup aside) contributes to the attractiveness of the job. Who doesn't want to be the executive who pushes the club over the top? They couldn't quite manage it before, then [whoever] came in, and the club finally won. That's quite the feather in the cap and ego-booster, isn't it?

From where I sit, the most important characteristic for whoever the Kroenke's hire as the next Sporting Director at Arsenal is his or her ability to create a strong working relationship with the existing decision-makers at the club and to pull in the same direction. That's not to say that they should hire a yes-man to rubberstamp Mikel Arteta's whims or be a stooge to Josh Kroenke. It's important that the hire have their own ideas and strengths — they need to bring something to the table. But a large part of Arsenal's recent success stems from the front office being on the same page, not in-fighting (at least visibly) for power and control, and working well together.

From the outside looking in, that was one of Edu's greatest strengths. He worked well with Mikel Arteta, the Kroenke's, and everybody else at the club. He also did a pretty good job! It would be impossible to analyze every single decision Edu made — we don't know which were "his" and which were the brainchild of one of the other power players within the club's hierarchy. But during Edu's tenure, Arsenal have mostly gotten the big stuff right.

First and foremost, they hired Mikel Arteta. They extended Bukayo Saka. They "repaired" the relationship with William Saliba. He helped sign Gabriel Jesus and Oleksandr Zinchenko, who while they may not be significant contributors now, played a major role in catapulting the Gunners into the title picture. Most of the other big signings — Ben White, Declan Rice, Kai Havertz, Jurrien Timber, Riccardo Calafiori, seem to have been excellent moves.

Signing Martin Ødegaard for £30M is among the best transfer moves of the last decade-plus. Gabriel Martinelli was a fantastic, diamond-in-the-rough find.

From the available information, the club has done a good job reigning in wage spending and signing players to reasonable deals. They've started selling pretty well too, which was one of the big knocks on Edu and the Arsenal front office for a while. I think most of us were pleasantly surprised with the return for Eddie Nketiah, Emile Smith Rowe, and Aaron Ramsdale. And don't forget the Joe Willock sale a few years ago.

The Aaron Ramsdale and David Raya saga was weird, to say the least. Plenty has already been done to analyze and unpack those decisions, and I'm not sure that any of the energy and digital column space spent has brought us any closer to an explanation / understanding. So I'm not going to spend any more on it here.

The Edu-led (Edu-included?) braintrust at Arsenal certainly did not hit on every decision during his time with the club. David Luiz was a headscratcher. Willian was a disaster. The Aubameyang extension, while probably necessary at the time, didn't work out at all. The biggest miss is probably Fabio Vieira, who cost £30m and hasn't done anything of note for the Gunners. Some of the moves around the periphery of the squad, Sambi Lokonga, Nuno Tavares, Marquinhos, etc. didn't work out, but you could easily describe those more as lottery ticket / flier moves with low downside and medium to high upside.

Edu avoided making big mistakes. None of those misses hamstrung / crippled the club, which is more than you can say about the previous regime. The Nicolas Pepe boondoggle set the club back two or three years. Critically, Arsenal didn't splash the cash for Mykhailo Mudryk. It did look as if they were going to buy the Ukrainian, but at what price? There is a number at which Mudryk, combined with Arteta's coaching and vision, could have turned out alright. We'll never know and Arsenal are probably better off without having to find out.

I'm not going to bother "evaluating" the other transfer moves that didn't happen. There are plenty of rumored targets from the past few years that aren't at the club, but we don't know nearly enough (anything) about the inner workings of whatever negotiations there may or may not have been.

Personally, I'm one to give Edu (and Arteta) a pass for whatever gaps might exist in the roster as currently constructed, too. I feel fairly confident in saying that they are capable of recognizing where the shortcomings of the squad are. I'm going to assume that they endeavored to fill those gaps and, for whatever reason, were unable to. I think the last-minute signing of Raheem Sterling on loan is solid evidence of that position. They knew Arsenal could use a bit more attacking punch and that loan (which hasn't really worked out thus far) was the best they could do in the market.

You can't really blame Edu for the injury issues that have kept some of his signings from being resounding successes, either. It would be one thing if he'd signed guys with checkered and questionable injury records. But for the most part, the players signed weren't fitness risks when they joined the club. Kieran Tierney and, perhaps, Takehiro Tomiyasu are exceptions, although we're not privy to the medical staff's evaluations. Both guys took somewhat frequent trips to the training room before joining Arsenal. That said, one of the ways to find value is by signing guys for less because of injury risk and then have them not get hurt as frequently, either because you figure out and fix the underlying cause or you just get lucky.

None of Thomas Partey, Oleksandr Zinchenko, nor Gabriel Jesus, the three players who have been most slowed by injury (other than Tomiyasu) in the past few years at Arsenal, had anything in their injury history that raises a red flag for me, someone who isn't a doctor nor plays one on television. Pinning those players' injury struggles on Edu (or Arteta) is neither fair nor a valid criticism.

If you twisted my arm for criticism of Edu, I'd say that he doesn't have many "finds" to his name, other than the aforementioned Gabriel Martinelli. You could question whether that's even possible in the modern era — pretty much every player of note is known to, well, everybody who should know. As I said, Edu took chances on guys, but those didn't pan out. There aren't any players on the Arsenal roster that he signed where you can see he / his scouting team recognized something that others didn't and they were proven right when the guy blossomed into a player worth much more than what was spent to acquire him.

Martin Ødegaard doesn't count, although maybe he should! Maybe Ben White should, too. Most observers did not think he'd become the player he is today when Arsenal signed him. I think the £50m price tag holds that signing back from being a "find" and keeps it from being a steal.

Edu was certainly a good enough Sporting Director. I'd even suggest that he was very good, meriting a solid B to B+ grade overall. Hopefully that's the baseline for whoever Arsenal bring in to replace him. They'll walk into an excellent setup, which again speaks to the job that Edu did at Arsenal.

The timing of Edu's departure works out decently well. There is enough time to settle in before the January window, which is likely long-since outlined anyway. The club has a potential inflection point / period coming in 2025-27 because of contract structures, too. The new Sporting Director won't want for things to do!