Arsenal chairman Sir Chips Keswick has suggested that the club will not give in to the contract demands of Mesut Ozil or Alexis Sanchez this summer.
Both players will see their respective contracts expire in June 2018, and so the race is on to agree on new terms before the Gunners are forced into a position of selling them in order to avoid losing them for nothing.
As noted by The Daily Mail, the pair have refused to pen new deals thus far as Sanchez wants more than £250,000-a-week, while Ozil is asking for a similar pay rise which would be a significant jump up from his current £140k-a-week wage.
Arsenal painted a healthy financial picture this week with cash reserves of £100.5m, with turnover increasing from £158m to £191m.
However, Keswick remained resolute on the matter, and warned both players that they would not be breaking the structure at the club to satisfy their demands.
“We have continued to invest in the region of key players,” he is quoted as saying by the Mail. “Francis Coquelin, Hector Bellerin, Laurent Koscielny and Olivier Giroud have all signed new contracts, while we have taken up options to extend the contracts of Per Mertesacker and Santi Cazorla.
“Further work is required in the area of contract renewals and we will continue to invest rationally in our squad retention.”
Naturally, this will frustrate Arsenal supporters who believe that Sanchez in particular deserves his big-money contract having been such an influential figure this season.
Given his ability to drag the club to major honours with the right players around him, it will be crucial that Arsenal agree new terms with him, as they can ill-afford losing him.
As for Ozil, he’s been poor in recent months and has continued to go missing in big games. In turn, many Arsenal fans would argue that perhaps he is undeserving of his new lucrative deal anyway.