Patience needed as Arsenal’s attacker due diligence needs to work its way through the process

It’s funny, because I do this every season, but I forget that this time of the year is the worst when it comes to the football period. If your team isn’t successful, that is, because it all feels a little barren. In about a week or two’s time, the euphoria from other fans has warn off and we all revert back to the same base level, which is pouring over every transfer rumour that exists. But there’s a fair few rival fans who can still do a bit of basking whilst we’re looking at transfers and the new season already.

The only problem is, that we’re not even in June yet, hence why this period of the season being the worst. It’s because you are ready to start pouting over transfers, but you know that it’s going to end up being quite a slog of a summer if you start going hard now.

Take the Gyokeres vs Sesko debate which seems to be unfolding on social media and in some corners of the press. People are drawing their battle lines, which player they would prefer, discussions and debates are abound, but if this drags on – as I’m sure most of us expect it will – then we could be looking at another month of this before any deal is done. We all know The Arsenal; they like to take their time when it comes to announcement. The deal is done, the Ornbomb has dropped, Fabrizio Romano has ‘here we go’d, yet the club take an extra few days for pictures, videos, interviews and more. I get it to be fair; transfers are a fair bit of work to complete and so a half-hearted “here he is” on the website these days doesn’t cut it. But the problem we Arsenal fans have right now is that we’re all still licking our wounds a bit. So when you’re doing that, naturally you try to look elsewhere and that ‘elsewhere’ is the transfer market. But if you go to early then you become a little anaesthetized to the transfer news when it happens. It all ends up feeling quite numb. I’ve already written a number of pieces on both players now and I’m not really sure what else there is to say. I’ve stated my case for preferring Sesko, but I’ll happily take an excellent ‘oven-ready’ striker like Gyokeres now, so from my part what is there left to say?

I’ve had a look at their respective stats on TransferMarkt.

I’ve looked at their injury record.

I’ve discussed which deal might be easier based on release clauses or ‘gentlemen’s agreements’.

I’ve debated the respective quality of opposition in both leagues that both players are up against.

I guess I’m holding off a little on much more (is there much more?) until we get something a little more concrete. But I’m now firmly in the ‘holding pattern’ mode with either of these players and the problem with that is that I suspect we might be ‘holding’ a little while. That’s because both players represent risk, both players lo0k very good and both players will improve us. Both look to have similar wages and I believe both would expect similar wages. Both have bagged goals this season and you can offset one’s flabbergasting record with the fact he plays in a vastly inferior league than the other. So if Arsenal are spending a lot of time, doing a lot of analysis, waiting that extra bit longer to do all the due diligence they can, then that’s great from a fan perspective because we know they will pull the trigger feeling like they’ve absolutely made the right choice.

That makes me think about how often that has happened versus how often it hasn’t happened under Arteta’s time at the club. I wanted to feel a little bit of comfort in whether we have, broadly speaking, got the right players in who have improved us versus the flops. So I had a little look on TransferMarkt and have broken down into whether they were – in my opinion – a success or not. Now, for the sake of simplicity, I’ve ignored the fee, i’ve ignored any injury problems, I’ve purely looked at the quality of the player in question. My logic for this is that if we are comfortable that Arsenal get in more successes than duds, I think we can all agree that the qualitythe club brings in is good. We can certainly question decision making on getting in injury prone players like Tomiyasu or Calafiori, for example, but I don’t think there are many Arsenal fans arguing on how good these players are when they are on the pitch.

So, what are we looking at here, in terms of successes or duds? Here’s my estimation:

By my count that is 17 successes against 11 duds, which is a 61% – two-thirds – success rate. But when you look at those names and where some of those deals came from, you realise that it’s a collective effort, because Edu had his hand in a few of those and so did Raul Sanllehi (cough cough, Cedric, anyone?). Regardless of that, I think when you look at the most recent deals then we’ve tended to get it right more than wrong and that gives me hope that whilst Arsenal are doing their analysis, they are going to make sure they get the right guy in who will do the job we’ve needed at times this season – put the ball in the back of the net. Especially when we’ve got players out injured.

It’s also why this summer is going to be an interesting one in terms of the Arteta/Berta dynamics. The successes from the last few transfer windows have come with Arteta and Edu working in tandem. For all of his faults, perhaps also why we didn’t have a great end of summer in the attacking side of the team (Edu’s head turned towards another, more expensive, BBQ perhaps?), Edu did manage to be involved in some impressive signings for us. Andrea Berta needs this ‘win’ of a marquee signing and so getting it right will be as much on his mind as it will Arteta’s and the rest of the Arsenal team.

So we have to remain patient, wait for the club to have concluded its analysis, then hope that by the end of it they are 110% sure they got the right guy.

Catch you all tomorrow.