Well that’s it then. The summer of plenty for The Arsenal ended last night with the capture of Piero Hincapie and the exits of Jakub Kiwior to Porto, Reiss Nelson to Brentford, Sambi Lokonga to Hamburg for around £10million, Fabio Vieira on loan to Hamburg and Olekzandr Zinchenko to Forest right at the death.

Let’s start with Hincapie, who last night I decided to watch a bunch of YouTube clips of as we were awaiting the announcement and I have to say, he looks a tidy player. I guess if you’re paying around £45million for him (eventually) he probably should be. But then again we did sign Skhodran Mustafi for £35million all of those years ago, so money clearly isn’t everything. There’s been some suggestions that there are similar characteristics between the two and I’ve seen a fair few clips in which he goes to ground and wins the ball, but the faith I have in Arsenal’s scouting team and Mikel Arteta is such that I don’t think they’d be dumping that amount of cash – next season as we’re at loan stage for now – on a player if they weren’t 110% sure of his mentality and his quality. And by all accounts, I’ve heard some analysts talk about how he’s aggressive, he’s one of the most impressive young defensive prospects in Europe and having played nearly 50 times for Ecuador at only 23, he’s clearly got a bit of South American pedigree about him.

How much game time he gets will be interesting. He’ll have had plenty of offers and if we are led to believe the Spurs interest was real, he certainly would have been going there with a view to playing. Chelsea were interested too and given Colwill is out for a long period of time, there would have been more minutes for him there too, but instead he’s another one of these players who has had his heart set on joining The Arsenal and that is a really interesting development for this summer I think. When news has been breaking about each of the players we’ve brought in this summer, it has always been that the player wanted Arsenal ‘and nobody else’. That’s the kind of dedication and drive that Arteta will love and I suspect he is thrilled with the squad composition that has been built. There has been a lot of money spent, there has been significant overall investment this summer, you have to say the Kroenke’s have backed him and Berta and now it is time for us to deliver.

Of course we’re not the only ones, as Liverpool confirmed Isak’s signature last night and what I enjoyed yesterday was seeing the hypocrisy of that club, with a former manager talking about how Liverpool can’t afford to spend that big and making them out to be plucky underdogs. Welp, they’ve spent over £415million this summer, more than any club this summer and you can talk about ‘net spend all you like in comparison with us, but I won’t be convinced there wasn’t some shenanigans going on with them. The money they got for Nunez from Saudi, as well as the cosy Leverkusen inflation of two sets of fees (Wirtz for Leverkusen, Quansah for Liverpool), plus the money they got for Harvey Elliott yesterday – all very suspect if you ask me. I wonder if the media will still treat Liverpool with the same demands they appear to be putting on us, eh? I highly doubt it. A final one on Isak – there’s no way that you could convince me that a £125million+£5million deal would be sensible for us. We needed to build out our squad and getting in an injury prone player on that kind of money and wage would be crazy for us in my opinion. He is already a guy who misses around six weeks a season on average, so at Arsenal you could at least double that and whilst he’s a very good player when on the pitch, that kind of money would worry me. Maybe he’ll have some ‘magic’ inhaler stuff at Liverpool that will keep him fit, but with that record and as he gets older, does his body suddenly realise that he can stay fit for a whole season? We’ll see.

As for us, we’ve had a great window in the end, I think. You’d like to have got a fee for Nelson, Zinchenko and Vieira, but the wages for all probably made it a little more complicated and we have to hope that each player does well and allows us to get a good fee when the 2026 summer window comes around.

The balance of the squad looks better too I think. We had some senior players who were just nowhere near the match day squad and whilst there will still be some players missing, there won’t be those who would spend the entire season nowhere near the starting XI or even the matchday squad. Up until the Zinchenko announcement by Arsenal and Forest, we had the very real prospect of a player playing Kieran Tierney no minutes whilst on a huge wage for the whole season. The rumours are that we have the wages paid for by Forest, as well as a small loan fee too, so whilst he won’t come back to The Arsenal again because his contract will have expired, the fact we’ve got the wages off the book and have at least some money for the player, has to be a good thing.

Arteta now knows what he’s got to work with and he has an international break to prepare for the visit of Forest, as well as opening up our Champions League account. With the value and quality of squad we have at the moment, most of the players will be heading off to be with their international teammates now, but at least we get the chance to take stock and assess where we are at and from my perspective, we’re in a good place. We have upgraded across a number of positions, we’ve got coverage for the inevitable injury crisis with significant depth and although we suffered defeat this last weekend, I saw enough in the way we set up and the bench options we had to make me excited for what’s to come. It now just needs to be translated to wins, goals and points.

Let’s hope we get those. Back tomorrow with more post-window thoughts.