Only an Englishman could wear a suit like this.
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Arsenal Hire Richard Garlick To Replace Huss Fahmy
- Thread starter Mo Britain
- Start date
- Replies 103
- Views 12,297
- Thread starter
- #82
Mo Britain
Doom Monger
**** Head.
GunnerShy
Well-Known Member
With respect to Huss... He didn't have much to show for his time here.
At the very least he should keep that Vampire Kia away
At the very least he should keep that Vampire Kia away
Breezy
Active Member
Another inept decision by the club.
The name says it all.
The name says it all.
Iceman10
Established Member
Finding a current day Bergkamp from somewhere would be ten times worth any of these boardroom moves. Not to diminish the role or person. The role seems needed, no idea as to how good the hire is.
Country: Norway
**** Turpin would be a steal.
TakeChillPill
Established Member
Looks like he could be Tierney's dadOnly an Englishman could wear a suit like this.
Country: Iceland
Big **** ****!
scytheavatar
Established Member
Kroenke obviously supports it, but he has never been the type of person to seek attention. So he's more than happy to sit back and let the idiots at Liverpool/Utd take all the heat.
Country: Canada
This is a Tim Lewis hire, lawyers are like a fraternity. Hope this ends up being a shrewd appointment from a contracts perspective where we fail miserably. Also agree, we need a Campos/Rangnick to supplement this hire.
Rasmi
Negative Nancy
Country: England
Can’t we just hire English people with normal last names?
Country: Norway
Featherstonehaugh for big win.
RacingPhoton
Established Member
Opened the first page of the thread and was surprised to see some posts from people who have been banned. Then I checked the date.
Well at least he knows how yo deal with agents and has an eye for stupid contract clauses. It's a start.
<<reed>>
Lidl Tir Na Nog
Garlick out
Arsenal1508
Mods are unethical! Özil, come assist me please!
if we are going this route, we should have gone for someone similar to Daniel Levy profile.
I respect Levy on how he has built Sp**s and stuck to a strict wage policy.
I respect Levy on how he has built Sp**s and stuck to a strict wage policy.
I hope he can do a good job with Balogun and Guendouzi
Player:Saliba
Rumour has it Rich walked in and slapped Özil and made him give back all his wages for the past 3 years
Country: England
Richard Garlick: The lawyer with 'charm and grace' who could be key to Arsenal's summer rebuild
Richard Garlick arrives at Arsenal with a huge summer ahead of him. So what is he like, and where will he fit in?
theathletic.com
Arsenal are facing a busy and difficult summer. There are 20 first-team players who are currently either out on loan or have a deal that expires by the summer of 2023. That’s a lot of futures to be resolved, and a lot of contracts to be negotiated.
The arrival of Richard Garlick as the club’s new director of football operations, then, provides some long-awaited support to the technical team of Edu and Mikel Arteta. A qualified solicitor specialising in sports law, who has held high-ranking roles with West Bromwich Albion and the Premier League, it is Garlick who will now effectively act as Arsenal’s ‘closer’.
Garlick is a man who arrives steeped in different aspects of running a football club.
At The Hawthorns, he dealt with everything from outrageous contract demands to escorting a horse from the training ground. At Arsenal, Garlick will have a broad remit — although not quite as broad as his previous equine experiences.
He is ostensibly the replacement for Huss Fahmy, the contract specialist who spent three years with the club after joining from cycling’s Team Sky. Garlick’s appointment was also made to help compensate for the impending retirement of long-serving club secretary, David Miles. Part of Arsenal since he began working in the club shop at age 16 precisely 50 years ago, Miles will leave his post after their final game of the season on Sunday.
Although Garlick’s appointment had officially been earmarked for the end of the season, the fall-out from the Super League debacle has seen the process accelerated. Arsenal can now call upon their well-connected newcomer to help build some bridges with 14 disgruntled Premier League associates who were not among the Super League Six.
While a degree of diplomacy will necessarily come under his remit, it is the contractual component that Arsenal supporters will inevitably be most focused on. Edu and Arteta may be charged with identifying talent, but identification is only worth so much if you cannot strike a deal to get those talents to play for you.
The Athletic contacted several former West Brom colleagues for memories of Garlick and three came back with the same response, almost word-for-word.
“I only have good things to say about Rich,” they replied.
That was despite Garlick coming up short in arguably his biggest role at the West Midlands club. In 2013, having joined the club as assistant secretary, Garlick was chosen to replace Dan Ashworth as sporting and technical director.
It proved an impossible task and it lasted a little over a year before the role was split in two. Former Wimbledon manager Terry Burton was appointed as technical director but Garlick stayed on in a newly-created role, director of football administration, giving up control of scouting and coaching but remaining in charge of contract negotiations and a host of other departments. It was a sign of how highly Albion rated his administrative abilities, but also testament to the charm former colleagues almost universally speak of.
The then-chairman, Jeremy Peace, had earned a reputation for ruthlessness and for jettisoning any staff members, however senior, who had outlived their usefulness. Yet he created a role just for Garlick. “Rich had a charm and a grace that meant he was possibly the only person to arguably fail in a job and be given another one by Peace,” one former colleague tells The Athletic. “He clearly had something about him. He was very sharp and very astute.”
Despite Garlick’s background as a player — he was on Rotherham United’s books at youth level before being released and embarking on a career as a lawyer — his stint as sporting and technical director fell down partly, former colleagues believe, due to the absence of the kind of coaching background Ashworth had boasted. Garlick was popular with everyone but struggled to command quite the same level of professional respect his predecessor had enjoyed among the football and recruitment staff.
“He was always taking on a big challenge because Dan was a hard act to follow,” says another former colleague. “Plus, he had to take on the post-Roy Hodgson era and his first summer transfer window was basically having to replace Romelu Lukaku, Peter Odemwingie and Shane Long, who didn’t go until the January but who the chairman was determined to sell.
“It was an impossible job. He got a raw deal from the fans because he wasn’t Dan. They didn’t appreciate the difficulties behind the scenes he contended with. Some couldn’t see past his suit and his law degree, but he’s a real football man; a big football fan, extremely knowledgeable on players.”
Those difficulties included the presence of Dave McDonough, a former analyst who had Peace’s ear and influenced the ill-fated appointment of Pepe Mel (as manager in January 2014) for which Garlick effectively carried the can by losing half of his portfolio. But he retained the respect of colleagues and it was McDonough who left the club.
Ultimately, it was in the business of doing deals that he made the strongest impression.
“He’s a good negotiator,” says one agent. “Very calm, very fair. I’ve known him to have an agent lose their rag with him, screaming and shouting, and he doesn’t let it sway him.”
When leaving West Brom, Garlick was asked to reflect on the strangest requests he’d ever received during negotiations.
“I’ve got two,” he told local newspaper the Express & Star. “During negotiations for the first one, the agent suggested his mum needed some new gates for her house and the club should pay for them. To which my response was, ‘Given how much we’re paying him a week, do you not think the son can afford to pay?’
“The second one, myself and Dan (Ashworth) were in the room with the player and I don’t think he had an agent at the time. The requests that he made were astounding in terms of wages and signing-on fees.
“But the best thing is that he asked for was a buy-out clause if we got relegated where he could leave for free, but only to five named clubs — Manchester United, Liverpool, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich and Hamburg.
“I was trying not to laugh! I was thinking it would be West Ham, Everton, Southampton, not any of the top six. When he said, ‘Bayern Munich’, I’m looking at Dan going, ‘Is he taking the piss?’
“It was in his contract, we agreed to it! But only because we knew we were agreeing to something that was never going to happen.”
Garlick became accustomed to being asked to intervene in many aspects of life at the club.
“People fly through the doors saying, ‘The police have just arrived in the car park — a player hasn’t paid a parking ticket’,” he explains. “And I have to deal with that. Why? You’re a lawyer.
“Players tend to feel that parking restrictions don’t apply to them all the time — that’s the same at every club.
“Or, ‘There’s a horse loose on the back field, the chairman wants you to make sure it’s gone by the end of the day’. How am I going to get rid of a horse?
“Because you’re the only lawyer in the building, people come to you with whatever problem they’ve got, whether it’s personal — ‘I’ve got this dispute with the plumber’ — through to international transfers, work permits, and shirt sponsorship deals.”
At Arsenal, Garlick will be supported by a strong legal department.
He will, in theory at least, be able to focus more on the urgent business of managing contracts.
Garlick, a boyhood Sheffield Wednesday fan, remained a talented player too, despite having made a career behind a desk.
“Everyone liked him,” recalls Pat Frost, Albion’s former kit man. “The only time I saw him turn was in the staff football matches, when I saw a different side to him.
“He played in three or four matches that I played in and, because he was decent and people like me weren’t decent, if you accidentally kicked his shin or his ankle, which happened on more than one occasion, he could square up to you. He would soon walk off shaking your hand but he was a decent footballer and he didn’t like you tapping his ankles.
“He didn’t understand why everyone else wasn’t as good as him in the staff games and a lot of them were — the likes of Steve Clarke, Kevin Keen, Keith Downing and Dean Kiely.
“He fitted in with them in the staff team but he didn’t like the fat, balding kit man kicking him.
“But he was one of those blokes who could calm everything down. Let’s just say two players were having a barney, Rich was one of those blokes who could just calm it down with his personality. He just had a knack of being able to do the right things and everyone liked him.
“It’s hard to describe his qualities, but he just had a little bit of everything.
“Dan Ashworth trusted him, and in my book if Dan trusts you, you must be alright.”
In the summer of 2018, Garlick became the Premier League’s first director of football.
Having spent eight years with West Brom, he was ready for change — in fact, in 2017 he was a candidate for a job at Arsenal, but was pipped to it by Fahmy.
His administrative experience, however, made him the ideal candidate for the newly-created Premier League job. It also means he arrives at Arsenal as a more experienced, connected executive.
His responsibilities with the Premier League were remarkably wide-ranging: he oversaw the youth department, liaising with academies and managing competitions from under-nines level through to the under-23s. He also had a role in implementing the Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP), as well as developing coaching pathways and schemes, including the Elite Coach Apprenticeship Scheme (ECAS).
Garlick also represented the Premier League on the board of PGMOL, English football’s official refereeing body. He has been across the introduction of VAR from the get-go — when they effectively took the technology on a roadshow to introduce it to players, pundits and club officials, Garlick was one of the key presenters.
Working with the Football Relations and Football Operations departments, Garlick helped manage the Premier League’s fixture lists and kick-off times. He was also required to liaise with the Premier League match centre at Stockley Park, managing live incidents such as delayed kick-offs or the recent postponement of the Manchester United vs Liverpool match due to fan protests. This has parallels with the “operations” aspect of the job at Arsenal: the task of managing the movement of the first-team party from game to game.
The feeling among club officials is that Garlick really came into his own, and demonstrated his value to the Premier League, when the pandemic struck.
In the first instance, he was involved in conversations with Arsenal around head coach Mikel Arteta’s COVID-19 diagnosis, and the subsequent decision to postpone the 2019-20 Premier League season for what turned out to be three months.
Later, Garlick was designated as the COVID-19 lead from a non-medical point of view and tasked with handling the mountain of logistics and football admin.
Working with the Premier League’s medical advisor, Dr Mark Gillett, he helped resuscitate English football. His task was to translate the government guidelines into practicable protocols for the game. He oversaw the implementation of the league’s testing programme, instructing digital healthcare company Prenetics to lead the project.
“We were flying blind, really, as there was no manual for dealing with this,” Garlick told The Athletic earlier this year. “But we’ve got a good team of people here and the clubs were great.”
He held frank and sometimes fraught conversations with clubs to hammer out the specifics of how the Premier League could return to play. “At times, he came in for really hard questioning from the clubs because early on some of the protocols seemed unworkable,” says one Premier League executive. “To his credit, he withstood a lot of the questions, which were fairly direct.”
In the process of planning Project Restart, Garlick received more than 100 queries from concerned club doctors. Ultimately, he and his department got through them all.
He and Dr Gillett have more recently collaborated on the Premier League’s implementation of concussion protocols.
Garlick’s centralised role has seen him become a familiar — and popular — face among Premier League executives. He sat in on shareholders meetings, so is well-known to owners, chairmen and chief executives.
From a political perspective, Garlick’s arrival is timely.
Arsenal’s decision to join the breakaway Super League did not play well with the 14 Premier League clubs who were not involved. Chief executive Vinai Venkatesham made individual calls to his 14 counterparts across the country, apologising for the club’s part, but there are still many lingering wounds which require healing.
Arsenal have already announced that the new recruit will help manage their relationships with football’s governing bodies.
Garlick’s mix of amiability and credibility might be key to them mending fences with the rest of the Premier League.
What we don’t know yet — and what presumably may not become clear until Garlick has settled into life at Arsenal — is precisely how the dynamic between him and technical director Edu will function.
Edu has made no secret of his desire to be the football “point of contact” at Arsenal — if players or clubs have an enquiry related to transfers, he wants that to go through him. At what point, then, does Garlick become involved? Part of the reason for Fahmy’s departure was his reluctance to be the man who simply dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s.
Those who encountered Garlick at West Brom found him to be a competent and confident negotiator — but will he get the opportunity to do the talking?
It will also be interesting to see how Garlick attacks the contract renewals he’ll find piled up on his new desk.
Under Arsène Wenger, Ivan Gazidis and **** Law, Arsenal tended to err on the side of simplicity: all first-team contracts were effectively structured in the same way, with the same ratio of basic pay to bonuses. While there was clear disparity in what players made, there was a shared structure that underpinned everything. It wasn’t hugely flexible, but it was fair.
Fahmy deviated somewhat from that basic structure, looking to secure the club advantages in any way he could. While that work was appreciated by his colleagues, it did not always make him popular among agents. He gained a reputation as a skilled but difficult negotiator, with contracts that were perceived by some as convoluted.
Where on that spectrum will Garlick sit? At West Brom, he was known for being straightforward in his negotiations, not given to offering substantial sweeteners or incentives. Will that approach suffice at the Emirates?
The key, of course, will be collaboration. “It’s all about trust,” says one former executive. “And there’s no shortcut to trust. It takes time. Richard’s going to have to screw up a few things, and Edu’s going to have to forgive him for that. Edu’s going to screw up a few things, and Richard’s going to have to swallow that too.”
Time is a scarce commodity in football.
There’s a big summer ahead, and much business for Arsenal to conduct.
It seems that for now at least, Edu and Garlick will have to feel out their dynamic on the job.
The arrival of Richard Garlick as the club’s new director of football operations, then, provides some long-awaited support to the technical team of Edu and Mikel Arteta. A qualified solicitor specialising in sports law, who has held high-ranking roles with West Bromwich Albion and the Premier League, it is Garlick who will now effectively act as Arsenal’s ‘closer’.
Garlick is a man who arrives steeped in different aspects of running a football club.
At The Hawthorns, he dealt with everything from outrageous contract demands to escorting a horse from the training ground. At Arsenal, Garlick will have a broad remit — although not quite as broad as his previous equine experiences.
He is ostensibly the replacement for Huss Fahmy, the contract specialist who spent three years with the club after joining from cycling’s Team Sky. Garlick’s appointment was also made to help compensate for the impending retirement of long-serving club secretary, David Miles. Part of Arsenal since he began working in the club shop at age 16 precisely 50 years ago, Miles will leave his post after their final game of the season on Sunday.
Although Garlick’s appointment had officially been earmarked for the end of the season, the fall-out from the Super League debacle has seen the process accelerated. Arsenal can now call upon their well-connected newcomer to help build some bridges with 14 disgruntled Premier League associates who were not among the Super League Six.
While a degree of diplomacy will necessarily come under his remit, it is the contractual component that Arsenal supporters will inevitably be most focused on. Edu and Arteta may be charged with identifying talent, but identification is only worth so much if you cannot strike a deal to get those talents to play for you.
The Athletic contacted several former West Brom colleagues for memories of Garlick and three came back with the same response, almost word-for-word.
“I only have good things to say about Rich,” they replied.
That was despite Garlick coming up short in arguably his biggest role at the West Midlands club. In 2013, having joined the club as assistant secretary, Garlick was chosen to replace Dan Ashworth as sporting and technical director.
It proved an impossible task and it lasted a little over a year before the role was split in two. Former Wimbledon manager Terry Burton was appointed as technical director but Garlick stayed on in a newly-created role, director of football administration, giving up control of scouting and coaching but remaining in charge of contract negotiations and a host of other departments. It was a sign of how highly Albion rated his administrative abilities, but also testament to the charm former colleagues almost universally speak of.
The then-chairman, Jeremy Peace, had earned a reputation for ruthlessness and for jettisoning any staff members, however senior, who had outlived their usefulness. Yet he created a role just for Garlick. “Rich had a charm and a grace that meant he was possibly the only person to arguably fail in a job and be given another one by Peace,” one former colleague tells The Athletic. “He clearly had something about him. He was very sharp and very astute.”
Despite Garlick’s background as a player — he was on Rotherham United’s books at youth level before being released and embarking on a career as a lawyer — his stint as sporting and technical director fell down partly, former colleagues believe, due to the absence of the kind of coaching background Ashworth had boasted. Garlick was popular with everyone but struggled to command quite the same level of professional respect his predecessor had enjoyed among the football and recruitment staff.
“He was always taking on a big challenge because Dan was a hard act to follow,” says another former colleague. “Plus, he had to take on the post-Roy Hodgson era and his first summer transfer window was basically having to replace Romelu Lukaku, Peter Odemwingie and Shane Long, who didn’t go until the January but who the chairman was determined to sell.
“It was an impossible job. He got a raw deal from the fans because he wasn’t Dan. They didn’t appreciate the difficulties behind the scenes he contended with. Some couldn’t see past his suit and his law degree, but he’s a real football man; a big football fan, extremely knowledgeable on players.”
Those difficulties included the presence of Dave McDonough, a former analyst who had Peace’s ear and influenced the ill-fated appointment of Pepe Mel (as manager in January 2014) for which Garlick effectively carried the can by losing half of his portfolio. But he retained the respect of colleagues and it was McDonough who left the club.
Ultimately, it was in the business of doing deals that he made the strongest impression.
“He’s a good negotiator,” says one agent. “Very calm, very fair. I’ve known him to have an agent lose their rag with him, screaming and shouting, and he doesn’t let it sway him.”
When leaving West Brom, Garlick was asked to reflect on the strangest requests he’d ever received during negotiations.
“I’ve got two,” he told local newspaper the Express & Star. “During negotiations for the first one, the agent suggested his mum needed some new gates for her house and the club should pay for them. To which my response was, ‘Given how much we’re paying him a week, do you not think the son can afford to pay?’
“The second one, myself and Dan (Ashworth) were in the room with the player and I don’t think he had an agent at the time. The requests that he made were astounding in terms of wages and signing-on fees.
“But the best thing is that he asked for was a buy-out clause if we got relegated where he could leave for free, but only to five named clubs — Manchester United, Liverpool, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich and Hamburg.
“I was trying not to laugh! I was thinking it would be West Ham, Everton, Southampton, not any of the top six. When he said, ‘Bayern Munich’, I’m looking at Dan going, ‘Is he taking the piss?’
“It was in his contract, we agreed to it! But only because we knew we were agreeing to something that was never going to happen.”
Garlick became accustomed to being asked to intervene in many aspects of life at the club.
“People fly through the doors saying, ‘The police have just arrived in the car park — a player hasn’t paid a parking ticket’,” he explains. “And I have to deal with that. Why? You’re a lawyer.
“Players tend to feel that parking restrictions don’t apply to them all the time — that’s the same at every club.
“Or, ‘There’s a horse loose on the back field, the chairman wants you to make sure it’s gone by the end of the day’. How am I going to get rid of a horse?
“Because you’re the only lawyer in the building, people come to you with whatever problem they’ve got, whether it’s personal — ‘I’ve got this dispute with the plumber’ — through to international transfers, work permits, and shirt sponsorship deals.”
At Arsenal, Garlick will be supported by a strong legal department.
He will, in theory at least, be able to focus more on the urgent business of managing contracts.
Garlick, a boyhood Sheffield Wednesday fan, remained a talented player too, despite having made a career behind a desk.
“Everyone liked him,” recalls Pat Frost, Albion’s former kit man. “The only time I saw him turn was in the staff football matches, when I saw a different side to him.
“He played in three or four matches that I played in and, because he was decent and people like me weren’t decent, if you accidentally kicked his shin or his ankle, which happened on more than one occasion, he could square up to you. He would soon walk off shaking your hand but he was a decent footballer and he didn’t like you tapping his ankles.
“He didn’t understand why everyone else wasn’t as good as him in the staff games and a lot of them were — the likes of Steve Clarke, Kevin Keen, Keith Downing and Dean Kiely.
“He fitted in with them in the staff team but he didn’t like the fat, balding kit man kicking him.
“But he was one of those blokes who could calm everything down. Let’s just say two players were having a barney, Rich was one of those blokes who could just calm it down with his personality. He just had a knack of being able to do the right things and everyone liked him.
“It’s hard to describe his qualities, but he just had a little bit of everything.
“Dan Ashworth trusted him, and in my book if Dan trusts you, you must be alright.”
In the summer of 2018, Garlick became the Premier League’s first director of football.
Having spent eight years with West Brom, he was ready for change — in fact, in 2017 he was a candidate for a job at Arsenal, but was pipped to it by Fahmy.
His administrative experience, however, made him the ideal candidate for the newly-created Premier League job. It also means he arrives at Arsenal as a more experienced, connected executive.
His responsibilities with the Premier League were remarkably wide-ranging: he oversaw the youth department, liaising with academies and managing competitions from under-nines level through to the under-23s. He also had a role in implementing the Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP), as well as developing coaching pathways and schemes, including the Elite Coach Apprenticeship Scheme (ECAS).
Garlick also represented the Premier League on the board of PGMOL, English football’s official refereeing body. He has been across the introduction of VAR from the get-go — when they effectively took the technology on a roadshow to introduce it to players, pundits and club officials, Garlick was one of the key presenters.
Working with the Football Relations and Football Operations departments, Garlick helped manage the Premier League’s fixture lists and kick-off times. He was also required to liaise with the Premier League match centre at Stockley Park, managing live incidents such as delayed kick-offs or the recent postponement of the Manchester United vs Liverpool match due to fan protests. This has parallels with the “operations” aspect of the job at Arsenal: the task of managing the movement of the first-team party from game to game.
The feeling among club officials is that Garlick really came into his own, and demonstrated his value to the Premier League, when the pandemic struck.
In the first instance, he was involved in conversations with Arsenal around head coach Mikel Arteta’s COVID-19 diagnosis, and the subsequent decision to postpone the 2019-20 Premier League season for what turned out to be three months.
Later, Garlick was designated as the COVID-19 lead from a non-medical point of view and tasked with handling the mountain of logistics and football admin.
Working with the Premier League’s medical advisor, Dr Mark Gillett, he helped resuscitate English football. His task was to translate the government guidelines into practicable protocols for the game. He oversaw the implementation of the league’s testing programme, instructing digital healthcare company Prenetics to lead the project.
“We were flying blind, really, as there was no manual for dealing with this,” Garlick told The Athletic earlier this year. “But we’ve got a good team of people here and the clubs were great.”
He held frank and sometimes fraught conversations with clubs to hammer out the specifics of how the Premier League could return to play. “At times, he came in for really hard questioning from the clubs because early on some of the protocols seemed unworkable,” says one Premier League executive. “To his credit, he withstood a lot of the questions, which were fairly direct.”
In the process of planning Project Restart, Garlick received more than 100 queries from concerned club doctors. Ultimately, he and his department got through them all.
He and Dr Gillett have more recently collaborated on the Premier League’s implementation of concussion protocols.
Garlick’s centralised role has seen him become a familiar — and popular — face among Premier League executives. He sat in on shareholders meetings, so is well-known to owners, chairmen and chief executives.
From a political perspective, Garlick’s arrival is timely.
Arsenal’s decision to join the breakaway Super League did not play well with the 14 Premier League clubs who were not involved. Chief executive Vinai Venkatesham made individual calls to his 14 counterparts across the country, apologising for the club’s part, but there are still many lingering wounds which require healing.
Arsenal have already announced that the new recruit will help manage their relationships with football’s governing bodies.
Garlick’s mix of amiability and credibility might be key to them mending fences with the rest of the Premier League.
What we don’t know yet — and what presumably may not become clear until Garlick has settled into life at Arsenal — is precisely how the dynamic between him and technical director Edu will function.
Edu has made no secret of his desire to be the football “point of contact” at Arsenal — if players or clubs have an enquiry related to transfers, he wants that to go through him. At what point, then, does Garlick become involved? Part of the reason for Fahmy’s departure was his reluctance to be the man who simply dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s.
Those who encountered Garlick at West Brom found him to be a competent and confident negotiator — but will he get the opportunity to do the talking?
It will also be interesting to see how Garlick attacks the contract renewals he’ll find piled up on his new desk.
Under Arsène Wenger, Ivan Gazidis and **** Law, Arsenal tended to err on the side of simplicity: all first-team contracts were effectively structured in the same way, with the same ratio of basic pay to bonuses. While there was clear disparity in what players made, there was a shared structure that underpinned everything. It wasn’t hugely flexible, but it was fair.
Fahmy deviated somewhat from that basic structure, looking to secure the club advantages in any way he could. While that work was appreciated by his colleagues, it did not always make him popular among agents. He gained a reputation as a skilled but difficult negotiator, with contracts that were perceived by some as convoluted.
Where on that spectrum will Garlick sit? At West Brom, he was known for being straightforward in his negotiations, not given to offering substantial sweeteners or incentives. Will that approach suffice at the Emirates?
The key, of course, will be collaboration. “It’s all about trust,” says one former executive. “And there’s no shortcut to trust. It takes time. Richard’s going to have to screw up a few things, and Edu’s going to have to forgive him for that. Edu’s going to screw up a few things, and Richard’s going to have to swallow that too.”
Time is a scarce commodity in football.
There’s a big summer ahead, and much business for Arsenal to conduct.
It seems that for now at least, Edu and Garlick will have to feel out their dynamic on the job.
Rasmi
Negative Nancy
Country: England
So a lawyer who failed at the football side at West Brom is gonna play huge role in our rebuild lol. The club will hire anyone who except top football people with proven record. He sounds like another person not qualified
