I hosted our Same Old Arsenal pod last night for our summer series “one in, one out, one bangs” and had good friends Akhil, Albert and Dave join me to talk about what they’d like to see this summer. We also touched on the Man City rumoured suing the Premier League situation briefly, which I talked about yesterday, so I won’t go over again. But what surprised me yesterday was some of the conversations from the gents about who they think might be moved on and, I must admit, I thought people would take a few more easier options of players we might see depart this summer.

There was no talk of the likes of ESR, Tierney, Lokonga, Tavares, etc. Perhaps it’s because they are fairly obvious exit candidates, but there was Nketiah, Zinchenko and Gabriel Jesus who were listed by the panel. And I find that interesting, because I didn’t expect such high profile names to be on fans’ exit lists this summer. I mean, I get it, but I just found it a little surprising. Perhaps the perception that Arsenal aren’t a great selling club has something to do with it? After all, we don’t have pots of money or a way to game the accounts like some clubs have done in the past and the expectation from most of us is, I think, that we won’t be getting big cash for most of our fringe players. Tierney has had his injury problems, Lokonga has too, plus Tavares has hardly set the world alight at Forest. If we’re going to generate money to add to our existing coffers this summer for acquisitions, then perhaps selling one of the more established players like Zinchenko or Gabriel Jesus is how  Arsenal are going to tweak their squad.

We made an investment of £38million last summer in Timber too and the fact we didn’t really see him all season means that – to invoke the words of a former manager of ours – we sort of have a ‘like a new signing’ player already. Perhaps that will enable the club to try to cash in on either of our former Man City players but I’m not so sure. It feels like there is a lot of work that is needed to be done to this squad from an exits point of view and if I’m in Mikel Arteta’s shoes, wouldn’t I prefer to offload those players who didn’t really get much game time last season? Both Zinchenko and Gabby Jesus played plenty of minutes compared to the likes of ESR, Vieira, Nelson, etc, so if you can generate around £50million for those players, surely that would be a better option than losing one of those players who can play across multiple positions like Gabriel Jesus?

The challenge, of course, is that there might not be as much of a market for those players who are on the fringes right now, whereas there might be for the likes of Zinchenko and Gabriel Jesus. Both are established players, both have experience of winning big trophies, both will still have a big market value. So if there is a club that wants to strike quickly with their targets, perhaps those two players and their level of experience are more of an option. It does feel to me as if they are both players who you could see going overseas rather than stay in the Premier League. I have no intel, but last night we spoke about Zinchenko and rumours of Bayern Munich, plus I suspect there might be one or two Italian and Spanish clubs that would take a look at Gabby J. The problem is that only Bayern would probably have the sort of  money that would tempt Arsenal in to selling those players early on and if the price is right. Otherwise, I suspect Arsenal might be batting away any initial enquiries that might be happening earlier in the summer.

I think there’s a bit of a consensus amongst some of the Arsenal fans I speak to that we don’t expect much to happening any time soon though. Players, coaches and football admin teams are all on holiday and some of those players are now with their international teams prepping for the summer international tournaments. Deals can of course be done during these tournaments, but that isn’t normally a ‘thing’ that we see; usually there’s lots of talk and lots of clubs also holding out to see which of their players might ‘bang’ in one of these competitions, that immediately jacks up their price. I remember that tournament in which Arshavin had a stormer for Russia. During that tournament I recall him suddenly being linked with a bunch of clubs like the Madrid’s, Barca’s, Munich’s and of course us. But it wasn’t until the following January he moved because Zenit decided they wanted to jack up and inflate the asking price for Arshavin immediately after the tournament that summer. He ended up staying until January and even then, we only did the deal towards the end of the January deadline I seem to recall. So I suspect we’ll not get tonnes of movement pre and during the Euro’s and Copa America, which means there might be a lot of noise really heating up around mid July.

Which might also lend itself to a deal like Gabriel Jesus or Zinchenko to be done earlier. If the price is right and Arsenal get offered decent money early on for a bigger name, they might decide it’s more worthwhile to make some early cash, rather than hold on and hope the money pot is stocked up with those players on loan last season with other clubs.

It’s all a bit of a waiting game at the moment and I guess patience is the name of it right now. How patient are Arsenal willing to be though? Do they need to move quickly and secure their primary acquisition targets, with the hope that there will be the money rolling in later? Or are they mandated to get the work done now on sales before they make any moves? Either way it’s a risky strategy. If I was to guess I’d think the latter, but that hasn’t been our approach in previous windows, so we’ll have to wait and see.

I think I’ll leave it there for today. Time to keep on playing catch up with work and getting the swing in to not drinking myself sleep with wine. Catch you all tomorrow.