“The intention was simply to bring the issue to a head,” says Dick Law, who was then serving as Arsene Wenger and Ivan Gazidis’ transfer negotiator, of the infamous £40,000,0001 offer. In his autobiography, Arsene Wenger admitted that the bid could be seen as “ludicrous”, but there was a method to the madness. “Nobody at Arsenal expected to sign Luis Suarez for that price. We knew we had to go in over £40 million — obviously, we didn’t want to go in and offer £50 million, because maybe Liverpool would have sold for £45 million. We didn’t see any real reason to throw money away… we knew there was going to be a negotiation, we just needed to trigger it.”
What they triggered, however, was fury in the Liverpool boardroom.
John W Henry was on holiday in the Bahamas when Arsenal’s bid for Suarez was lodged. Correspondence had arrived via email from Merseyside. Forty-million plus a pound, he thought to himself. Arsenal were taking the piss. He had thought of Arsenal as a classy club — and had a good relationship with chief executive Gazidis — but this damaged his opinion.
Suarez claims there were informal enquiries about his availability and other clubs suggested they were willing to pay a higher fee than Arsenal but Liverpool were always adamant that he was not leaving for any price. Though he did not see Liverpool’s strategy in a positive light at the time, he eventually came to realise that the club’s determination to keep hold of him was worth something.
Arsenal, ultimately, were the only club to make a bid for him. They were in the Champions League but this meant staying in England. Suarez wondered whether living in London would be different, where it was possible to live with a greater sense of anonymity. “Deep down, it wasn’t what I really wanted but I began to tell myself that this might work.”
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Suarez’s “head was all over the place”. He soon realised that if he left Liverpool for Arsenal, his life could become even worse because it would result in Liverpool’s supporters hating him as well. “I was about to alienate the only people who had really stood by me."