Thinking behind Arsenal’s £40m+1 bid for Liverpool star finally revealed

The details behind Arsenal’s £40,000,001 offer for Liverpool’s star Luis Suarez have finally been revealed by their former transfer chief Dick Law.

Back in 2013 the Gunners launched a failed transfer swoop for the Uruguay striker, an offer which has since been used as a prime example of the club’s transfer failings in the recent past.

The offer even reportedly provoked the response of : “What do you think they’re smoking over there at Emirates?” from Liverpool owner John W Henry at the time once the bid had arrived.

Ian Wright once queried: “How can £40,000,001 for Suarez – who went to Barcelona for £75m and made them better – get through the different levels of management?

“For that to come out into the public domain? There’s massive problems at Arsenal.”

Now, Law has revealed the thinking behind the strange offer, admitting that it was never a serious final bid but rather a ploy to bring their rivals to the negotiating table.

“That spring, news got round to us that Suarez wanted out of Liverpool,” he told Goal.

“We got information that showed us what was negotiated between Liverpool and the player, and in our internal conversations decided that the clause was meaningless, that it was not a buy-out and it didn’t obligate Liverpool to do anything apart from have a conversation.

“So, whoever agreed to that clause in the Suarez camp was being less than clever because it was never a buy-out. What there was, was an obligation to discuss a transfer if a threshold was met and that threshold was £40m.

“Now, we didn’t know if Liverpool received an offer of £40m whether they would say, ‘that’s not more than £40m’. We could have gone with £45m, but the point is we knew there was never a buy-out.

“So, it was never going to be a bid of £40m+1, it was always going to be the start of a negotiation.

“We knew that we had to exceed a certain threshold and so we decided to throw another pound on it,” he continued. “We could have thrown £50 or £500,000, but it wasn’t going to make any difference to the final negotiation.

“The offer was just a trigger. Liverpool wanted to make a big deal out of it and that’s fine. When they received our offer they immediately publicised it.

“I think John Henry wanted to know what we were smoking, which I thought was a bit disrespectful. It was him having a bit of a go because he was getting ready to lose his star player. It was a good way to deflect attention.

“I always thought that the move to publicise it was counter-productive.

“One of the things we were always very proud of at Arsenal was working quietly behind the scenes. Ivan, Arsene and I always worked very hard on being discreet in all transfers.

“And I thought Liverpool shot themselves in the foot by basically saying they were now forced to entertain offers because of this clause, by publicising it they just made everyone aware and eventually they lost the player.”

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