I didn’t blog yesterday, as I didn’t have time, because I was on my way to the Emirates to film a documentary a mate of mine is making. But when I was on my way back, listening to a few podcasts, I was thinking to myself, “I wonder when the transfer silly season will start to ramp up?”

Well, it looks like it’s underway now, because this morning I’ve had a little flick through my social feeds and a few websites, and there are about half a dozen names that have popped up. Morgan Rogers from Villa is the loudest one, but there was also Gabriel Jesus to Everton, Calafiori to Real Madrid, Frankfurt’s Nathaniel Brown from Leverkusen, Declan Rice to Real Madrid, Rafael Leao from AC to Arsenal, Julian Alvarez to Arsenal from Atleti, Enzo Fernandez from Arsenal to Chelsea and hilariously, Igor Thiago from Brentford to Arsenal – For £99.5million!

We all know the drill by now. Transfer rumours make clicks. Spurious links to players towards Arsenal will ‘do numbers’ and websites will try to make hay whilst we have this void between the end of the domestic season in Europe and the start of the World Cup next week. They’ll still make hay during the World Cup, but the distraction of football will mean that some people are less interested than others.

I always feel like I’m in some kind of No Man’s Land with this sort of stuff. I just can’t be arsed to entertain certain transfer rumours until certain sources start saying it. I’m not trusting MSN News for a second, for example, so I try to filter out the transfer stuff. But equally, I’m less fussed about international football and the World Cup. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll watch it when it’s on and convenient, I’ll follow, and as a person who was born and lives in England, I want to see England do well (especially given we have a few more Arsenal players in the squad these days). But I’m only partially invested. The Management won’t see my heart rate hit 130 beats per minute when watching, as I do with The Arsenal.

I probably will talk about matches I watch on here, mainly because what the World Cup does do is slow a lot of the transfer rumour stuff down. Lots of players put blockers on talking about their future, and the media obviously know this, so the value of clubs making enquiries just isn’t there until early/mid-July. I guess if you’re a player too, you’re probably getting a bit cheesed off if you’re getting phone calls from your agent whilst preparing for what is a big game for yourself, representing your international team. As buying clubs, you really don’t want to cheese off any potential new signing by disrupting them when they are focused on the World Cup, which is something you’re also going to feed back to your agent. So I think up until next Friday, we probably WILL see this flurry of news and transfer gossip, before it starts to go quiet, albeit not completely silent, from next Friday.

The funny thing is, the transfer window doesn’t open up until 15th June, which is four days after the World Cup has started. So it’ll be weird because there will probably be announcement videos, etc, for players who have done deals a week earlier, but who are now in the World Cup. Will be slightly odd for some of them I suspect, because I’m sure there are some deals that are already ‘being done’ so to speak.

Personally, I think it is good that Arsenal are in a position of strength. I think it was Mark Goldbridge who said yesterday that Arsenal could probably not sign anyone and still be in the strongest position to win the Premier League next season, and personally, I would think that’s a pretty decent shout. If you think about our situation right now, we have a stable and settled team, we have a deep squad that has been able to deal with the second-most injuries of any team last season, I believe behind Spurs (168 absences – 1 x player missing 1 x game – across the whole squad this season – which I believe was worse than last season), plus we have players who will only get better – Big Vik’s improvement in the second half of the season as he adjusted, Kai missing most of the season, MLS in midfield, Max Dowman’s emergence, etc. Even the more established players are merely just reaching their prime.

Of course, I don’t think Arsenal will, in fact, just stick with the existing squad. I think renewal is healthy, and so there will be some players who will inevitably depart whom we love. But given our position of strength as Premier League winners, this will be the first summer transfer window I personally will go into feeling super chilled, knowing that the basis of this team is there. As I said in the piece the BBC asked me to write this week, we don’t need a revolution, we just need cherries on top of cakes.

Right, I’ll leave it there for today. There’s not a lot else going on, but if you do fancy listening in later, we’ve got a crew of people together to chat to us about the season in a bit of an end-of-season-review style get-together on the Same Old Arsenal podcast. Come join us tonight if you fancy it.

Otherwise, I’ll catch you all tomorrow for some more Arsenal musings.