Arsenal paid Southampton £10k for every 20-minute appearance by ex-Gunner

Arsenal owed Southampton £10,000 every time Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain made an appearance of 20 minutes or more, according to a report.

Football.London have highlighted claims from Alan Gernon’s book, The Transfer Market: The Inside Stories, in which Gernon wrote that Arsenal were obliged to pay Southampton £10,000 every time Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain played 20 minutes or more.

Gernon adds that this is why Oxlade-Chamberlain was “predominantly used as a substitute”, though this isn’t entirely true.

Oxlade-Chamberlain still made over half of his appearances as a starter for Arsenal, and a fair number of his substitute appearances were for more than 20 minutes.

Looking into the appearance data, Oxlade-Chamberlain made appearances of 20 minutes or less on around 60 occasions.

It’s hard to give the exact figure, as a couple of his substitute appearances began so close to the 70th minute that it’s hard to know whether they would qualify or not.

For example, does injury time count? Without seeing the exact wording or the contract, it might do, or it might not.

But the number of appearances of 20 minutes or less is nonetheless in the region of 60. That means around £600,000 of payments that Arsenal avoided sending to Southampton, compared to if they’d played Oxlade-Chamberlain a little longer in all of those games.

The other 138 appearances Oxlade-Chamberlain made for Arsenal of 21 minutes or more would all have triggered the payments, leading to £1.38m going Southampton’s way. The cap was reportedly £3m, but the player left the club for Liverpool before getting close to that amount.

Whilst £1.38m is a lot of money, and Arsenal were in particularly shaky financial circumstances at the time, it’s still perhaps a stretch of the imagination to suggest it was ever worth giving up a sporting advantage in any given game.

Considering the impact of every position gained in the Premier League table, or every round reached in the cups and the Champions League, Arsenal would probably have made a lot more money through positive Oxlade-Chamberlain contributions than they paid out by including him.

Gaining one single position in the league table (which can often be done with just a point or two) netted you over £1m during Oxlade-Chamberlain’s time at Arsenal. He’d have to make more than 100 appearances to cancel that out.

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