Shh…do you hear that? Listen, very quietly….

….

Do you know what that is? That is the sound of sympathy for FC Barcelona’s current plight on losing one of their star players at the peak of his powers. 

That is the sound of, as Timberland on a Justin Timberlake song once said, “what goes around comes back around”.

That is karma. 

That is what most other football fans have to deal with.

That is the sweet sound of El Mundo or whoever the local biased Catalan press is, slowly eating itself from with from the rage that it’s currently feeling.

That my friends, is also me and my very upfront and open Schafenfreude towards a football club who tried a bit of tapping up this summer with Bellerin, or who through its players put a Barcelona shirt on a contracted Cesc Fabregas. 

To say I have no sympathy for that football club would be an understatement. Glad they’re getting totally shafted by Neymar. And if the rumours of him buying out his own contract are true, it makes it all the more delicious if Barca are not getting as much from the deal as they normally would. 

As Nelson Muntz would say:

Ha-ha.

It’s this sort of transfer, however, that is putting me off football. The figures are so far beyond reality that to coin a phrase which is now being used in a parodying fashion: the games gone.

The figures are eye-watering, the players are less relatable, the industry feels depraved and quite frankly every time I hear these kinds of stories a little bit more of my love for football dies. I currently write about football through my Arsenal specs, I go to home games and some away, I get exposed to it in some fashion a minimum of half a dozen times a day, but this kind of stuff makes me check my Twitter feed a little less, avoid the football media a little more, and ignore conversations about what’s happening in the football world.

Arsenal are frustrating as hell, but it’s the only thing that stops me from basically giving up on football and trying other things, I’m afraid to say.

So on that note, let’s talk about Emi Martinez, who is off to Getafe for a season and with Ospina declaring that he’ll stay at Arsenal for one more year, it’s clear that if Martinez will ever have the chance of stepping up, he has to have a blinder in Spain for 2017/18. Next summer will probably see Ospina depart and Cech at 35 and coming to the end of his time as a first class stopper, so Martinez has to do something akin to Courtois at Chelski by impressing at Getafe and let’s be honest, with the way things are going at the moment there will be a lot of deals that are needed next summer so having a player promoted from within the ranks would not sound completely unfeasible to me.

So this is a big year for our big Argentine. Let’s hope he delivers.

The other key challenges for us at the moment are, unsurprisingly, issues at centre half for the start of the season. Only Arsenal could have a surplus of centre backs and STILL be facing a challenge for the first game of the season. 

Koscielny is fine for the glorified friendly at the weekend, but will miss the first two league games through suspension and whilst Mustafi has only just started training after the Confederations Cup and holiday, we also find ourselves down with Gabriel injured too. Holding and Chambers are options, but both played in the Euros so I don’t know whether they’ll both be fully fit yet. Holding hardly played at all to be fair, so he’s probably going to be better and we have Nacho Monreal to come in, but I’d like to see Chambers given a run.

If you’re a regular reader then you know I really rate Calum and it is my hope that he and Holding can break through as regulars at Arsenal. Having both of those either side of an aggressive central centre half in a three could really work I think. But the rumours are still bubbling away under the surface for Chambers, so we’ll have to see what comes out of it.

Righto, in offski for another day, so you have a good one.