Of course, with the Champions League semi-final run and money in there, Arsenal’s fortunes were improved on the previous seasons, but ultimately, the club is still making a small loss. I’m no finance expert, so I’m not going to go into the details of it, but I can talk about how it makes me feel overall, which is that a small loss of £1.4million before tax is pretty decent. I’m also not a tax expert, but I suspect the club’s aim is to get as close to break even as possible each year, and even a small loss isn’t that bad, because they can still avoid paying Corporation Tax, and can even apply for a tax refund I think – if I’ve read the stuff right on the UK Government website. What’s the point in making £500k profit if the Government is going to take a chunk of it, eh?

Anyway, the most important news is that this Arsenal team has turned winning, with investment, into hopefully a relatively sustainable enterprise and as long as we can keep doing it, then as a fan who is not that invested (pun intended) on the financial side, what you want to hear is that the club is in a decent position and we aren’t going to have to send round donation buckets in the North Bank any time soon.

The Champions League is part of that cash bump we’ve had, as I talked about yesterday. We’ll find out about who we have in the draw tomorrow. But it has, at least, been narrowed down. It’s Leverkusen or Atalanta in the next round of the competition, and I have to declare my interest right now. If Arsenal get Leverkusen, I’d really love to go to that one away. I have an aunt in Koln, which is 10 miles away from the centre of Leverkusen, and it is my favourite City in Germany. I’d love to be able to get my arse over to Koln and then do a long weekend over there for sure. Atalanta, I have no such ties, plus it’s a bit of a longer trip, so I wouldn’t be making much effort to go there. They also gave us a little bit of an awkward time last season in the group stages, so I’d be a little more wary of them, plus we haven’t played Leverkusen in an official game since 2002, where we beat them over two legs with a draw away and a win at home 4-1. I’d take a repeat of that again this time, thank ye kindly.

So that’s me declaring our hand, but we’ll find out the reality on Friday, for which we can all start making our arrangements.

As for the here and now, well, it’s Chelsea that is starting to loom on the horizon, so I guess the build-up for that really starts today. And as I usually like to do, the first question I asked myself as I started to think ahead of that massive game, was:

How many in uries and suspensions do Chelsea have?

There are people in this world who say things like “I want to play against their best team” or “I don’t want that team relegated because it diminishes our achievement” or “I don’t want them to get points deductions – I want us to win it fair and square”.

I am not one of those people.

I want to take any – and every – tactical advantage that is humanly possible. Give me rivals relegated. Give me points deductions for everyone except us. Give me suspensions. Give me injuries. I want them all. Last weekend, we played a shocking Spurs side, but they were also shocking because they were decimated by injuries. I cared not. In fact, I didn’t say anything to anyone, but before the game I was worried, I feared a backlash, but the rational side of my brain did tell the emotional side that this team were not good and they were missing most of their best players, so we should surely have the better of them. I want that for every future game between now and the end of the season, please.

We’ll find out for definite their situation tomorrow when Liam Rosenior gives his team update, but without knowing everything there is to know about that horrendous football club (why would I?), I would think that their best back line includes Cucurella, Colwill and Fofana. Perhaps a Chelsea fan would tell me differently, but those three are – I think – going to be missing on Sunday. Colwill has a long-term injury. Last weekend, Rosenior said Cucurella had a hamstring injury (so that should be a few weeks out), and Fofana is suspended because of the sending off (another one!) against Burnley. I hope that it certainly gives us an advantage from an attacking point of view. They still have that combative midfield of Caicedo and Enzo Fernandez, who will be there for them, but hopefully our attackers can have the upper hand against a weakened Chelsea defensive line. They will have Gusto, Adarabaiyo and Chalobah (who scored against us in the reverse fixture) available, I suspect, which is still a collective of decent players, but maybe we can get at them a little more than we might have with those other guys in the team. We’ll see. I’ll do more of a tactical look at how they might play against us either tomorrow or Sunday, I think.

And so until then, I hope you have a grand day, and I hope you enjoy your Thursday, whatever you decide to do with it.

Catch you all tomorrow.

You’ve probably already read some of the articles and so you’ll be aware that the talk is about finding an additional 10,000 seats that will bring our capacity up to 70,000. It first broke by The Telegraph I believe and fair play to Sam Dean, who has also done a few spin off pieces on his exclusive, as he and the Telegraph eek out as much of their ‘scoop’ as possible (I might sound a little sarcastic there, but I actually think they did a good job on this one).

It’s an interesting one, this, because if you think about the current complaints that are circling the ether right now about how hard it is to get tickets, it makes sense that layering in another 10,000 tickets each week would help the burden. I do think that if they do this, however, they can’t be upping the amount of season tickets. The current problem is that fans get nowhere (or that’s the perception) in the current ballot process, so opening up to members who don’t go very often is the right thing to do, in my opinion. And I’m speaking as somebody from a position of privilege; I have a season ticket, have done for years, so whilst I love the idea of The Management getting fast tracked on her season ticket with these additional seats, I think the problem lies in the ballot and access to Red/Silver members.

Apparently the way in which the club can do this is through deeper seating, or by adding an extra layer of seats to get us closer to the pitch. I like how Andrew Allen at Arseblog has referenced what Benfica have done to add 5,000 seats to their stadium in the examples they’ve given here. In the Telegraph they talk about those steeper seats like the – ahem – Tottenham Hotspur stadium, but whatever they do, it would mean a temporary move to another stadium and Wembley has been mooted as an option. I’ve seen plenty of fans talk about how they’d hate it, but for that season we’d be talking 90,000 fans in the ground, plus it’d make my commute a hell of a lot easier from Uxbridge!

Whatever is decided, I doubt anything will happen within the next few seasons, as there will be consultations and more. But what I find interesting about that is that whatever Arsenal team step out on to the pitch when these changes finally happen (in whatever form), the team that does play at Wembley (if that is the case) will probably be totally different from this one. If I was to hazard an uneducated guess, I’d think this is a solid five year’s down the road from now, which means it’s probably only Max Dowman, Bukayo Saka, Lewis-Skelly and Nwaneri who might be sure-fire bets to be part of the change. Heck, Mikel Arteta might not even be there.

Which then makes you think about the football team as well. The clamour for tickets right now is because the team is looking amazing. But what happens when this current ‘Project’ has run it’s course? One of the hardest things to do in football is renewal. Wenger joined in 96 and inherited a superb back line. He sprinkled his magic and built on that foundation to forge a title winning side in 98. That evolved in 2002 and was completely changed into his image by 2004, which was his pinnacle. But by 2008 the team had gone again and we spent a number of years away from the top table, scrabbling around for Champions League Top Four. I’m not going to dredge up old stories and turn this into a history lesson, but there’s an argument to be had that Wenger never really managed to really renew his team effectively (we can all find reasons why that is that I won’t go over today).

We don’t know what this Arsenal team will look like in five years time and we don’t know whether we will be back to being a team fighting for top four, or worse, but I do still think the need is there to increase the stadium. The demand is there now, I just hope that if we fall away a bit, the demand will still be there. The waiting list suggests so, but I’ve got pictures of me turning up to a midweek game at The Emirates in the middle of winter against Man City, being able to lie flat across four seats because there was hardly anyone else around me. I will be there – god/higher power permitting – for as long as possible regardless of how the team are performing. I just hope that those who are infrequent visitors and are currently clamouring for tickets now, will also be there with me. As I say, the waiting list and the demand for tickets suggests we should be ok, so the club clearly feel there’s an opportunity there.

Whether that translates to loads more cash to the club remains to be seen. As the Telegraph article points out, Arsenal made a gamble on match day revenue at a time in which commercial and sponsorship deals sky-rocketed, making the percentage of revenue from match days a little less relevant, but if you’re charging an extra 10,000 people £40 on average, that’s £400k on ticket sales per match, let alone all the extra merch and so on. That’ll help I’m sure, certainly at a time in which it seems that football clubs are looking for every little marginal gain to draw out more profitability, but as Man united are finding out to their detriment, you have to have a competitive team on the pitch.

That’ll do for today I think. Back tomorrow as I desperately try to find a way not to talk about England or the internationals.

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I don’t think I’m the only one who was surprised – pleasantly so – about the Ornbomb that dropped yesterday. William Saliba has agreed a new deal at The Arsenal. Five years, all done but the official announcement, the club get to keep a player who has proven himself to be one of the best players in the world in his position. I have to say, I am thoroughly delighted with this one, more so than many of the other recent contract announcements that have been made. Don’t get me wrong, signing up Ethan, MLS, Big Gabi – all very important. But I think the reason why this one is the most pleasing for me personally is that it was the one that I have – for some time now – haboured genuine concerns that this would end up with him exiting next summer.

Why? Well, I think it is because of some PTSD from other players, both at our club and elsewhere. The most recent example is Trent at Liverpool. He was a Liverpool lad, he’d made it sound (I believe) as though it was just negitation time with two years to go. With one year to go that was still ongoing but there were no major concerns. Then as the clock ticked down on that final year, it became more and more clear that he was going to exit to Real Madrid. We’d heard the rumours, the Madrid press, some of the hierarchy, had all started making those noises and I think most football fans know there is no smoke without fire. Well, those noises had started to surround Saliba. We were getting it from Marca, we had it from the odd podcast like one I saw with Rudiger in which he’s said he’d love to play with Saliba and then when he was asked about that he just smiled and shrugged his shoulders. There had been fears about a little bit of Agent Mbappe work for the French national team, as I believe the two players had gotten on well.

Then, from an Arsenal side, there was a bit of paranoia given how his Arsenal career started and let’s be honest here, was a little mismanaged by the club. The loans and failed loans were a worry. Then, when he did sign, it was only a four year deal with no ‘plus one’ option on it. Even back then I remember thinking to myself (and I’m not sure if I vocalised that on here or not) that “in two year’s time we’re going to be back in this same position re: his contract”. Sure enough we were, but this seems to have never really developed into the saga that it could have been this season.

And I think real credit has to go to Arsenal, to Mikel Arteta and to Andrea Berta on this. For Arsenal as a club, it is about being in a position in which the players feel competitive and though they can realise their dreams. There was a quote doing the rounds from 2024 in which Saliba says rather confidently that he thinks he is already one of the best defenders in the world, but now all he needs is to win trophies. He ain’t signing on the dotted line if he thinks he’s the best defender in the world and he can’t do that at The Arsenal, I tell you that much. And I think one of the other massive factors about us being that competitive is Mikel Arteta too. There are people who are anti him and his approach, there are some that have grown a little more frustrated (particularly this season) with how we have set up at times (let’s not forget the injuries here guys),  but the reason we are so competitive is because Mikel Arteta has been able to (with ample finances from the club) build a very competitive Arsenal side that these players feel like success is within touching distance. I want to invoke a name not well liked in Arsenal circles, but doing it as an example of how times have changed, and that name is Robin van Persie. He did his ‘open letter’ to us and cited the lack of ambition by the club as a reason he wouldn’t renew. He’d apparently wanted reassurances of the investment the club would make in surrounding him with good players. Well, this summer, the club invested significantly and as much as the deal is about Saliba and his situation, I wonder if the signing of some of the players we have made to make us even stronger in the wake of our mounting injuries, might also have helped to convince him that Arsenal are set up for success?

This deal enables Arsenal security too. We may yet see Real Madrid come in for him, it could be in two years time even and perhaps he wants to give it a go, but rather than us losing him for nothing, or having already sold him a year earlier because he didn’t sign a deal, this would ensure that any club that comes knocking will have to pay for what could be the best defender in the world. Josko Gvardiol moved from RB Leipzig to Man City in 2023 for £77 million. Harry Maguire went to United for £80million. van Dijk moved to Liverpool in 2018 for £75million. Take inflation, take the fact Saliba will already be at a big club and on a decent contract, and if you are someone like Real Madrid that wants to come knocking for Saliba in two years time (assuming he stays fit) then his market value is going to be more than £100million easily. This contract retains the value of a valued player and I think everyone associated with The Arsenal will be delighted with that.

We’ve got Arteta’s press conference today ahead of this really tough trip to Newcastle and I’ll be back tomorrow to have a look at what he said and start looking ahead of this tricky trip to the North East on Sunday.

See you then.

Why dedicate the first 75-ish words to another team today? Well, we’re up next against them and if they are as defensively suspect as they have been for these first two games this season (and also the Community Shield), then there will be opportunities for us to exploit at Anfield next weekend.

As I said on the Same Old Arsenal podcast that we recorded yesterday morning, I’m not particularly confident of us going there and getting anything (no win since 2012), but based on the small sample size I’m looking at so far, it is not a Liverpool team that look like they’re going to sweep everyone aside and whilst we know they have goals in them, we also know that defensively they are not looking rock solid.

Of course that’s one of the areas of the pitch in which Mikel Arteta has prioritised for some years now and with the news that we’re supposedly in for this Hincapie fella from Ecuador, whose plying his trade for Bayer Leverkusen, it seems as though Arteta and Berta aren’t quite done with their spending spree. This one looks predicated on the outgoings of the likes of Kiwior and Zinchenko it seems, but given the money that is supposedly on offer, you do have to wonder where we’re getting the cash from. Supposedly Porto want to give us €20million for Jakub Kiwior.

I’m sorry, how much?

We paid £22million for him, he’s improved since arriving, he’s a Polish international and he still has a few years left on his contract. How are we having the poverty card flung at us by Porto?? We need to be telling them that €20million is the loan fee, then they have the obligation to buy him next summer for another €20million. As somebody from my social media timeline remarked yesterday “If this was Chelsea they’d already have £40million for him in their back pocket”.

We’re all loving the decisiveness with which Arsenal have moved in the market to get the incomings this season, but that outgoings situation is still problematic and as I sit here today and type out these thoughts, we are still to make a significant sale. Remember when we all thought that by being good again teams would naturally come and take some of our rotational option players? Whatever happened to that? That’s what City and Liverpool have done for years as the two best teams in England. I thought we’d be able to get on that squad player gravy train, no? But instead we find ourselves with one week left of the window and still quite a bloated squad.

Do you know what though? Maybe it’s not just us? I’ve just seen this article on Football365 about the size of each Premier League teams’ squads. We’re joint 12th. We’ve got 28 along with Newcastle and Liverpool whilst Sunderland have 35, Burnley have 34 and Brighton have 33! So perhaps there’s been a trend of stockpiling this season anyway and this is a natural consequence. I suspect it is just that some clubs seem to be covered with deals across the media and one instantly projects that they are doing fantastic business whereas we can’t find clubs for any of our players, but the truth is probably a little more distanced from that I think. Many of these teams have been setting their squads up now and only the likes of Villa, Fulham and Everton are those that need to pick up some bodies as we hit the last week of the window. Fulham might try for Reiss Nelson again I suspect, but I do wonder if what James said yesterday might be the name of the game in the last week of this year’s summer window; lots of loan signings with options to buy from clubs both in England and overseas.

I suspect homes will be found for Fabio Vieira, Sambi Lokonga and Reiss Nelson, but whether there is a permanent nature to them or not remains to be seen. Stuttgart want to pay us €20million for his signature when TransferMarkt has him at 22. That’s probably a fairer price but for a player who is still 25 and cost us £34million (€40million), that’s quite some tanking in value. If Arsenal end up accepting something like that, you’d have to think they’ll be putting a fat old sell on clause in there too. It’s how we’ve managed to make our money back on Nuno Tavares, but with Vieira I think that’s a hopeful pipe dream to claw back all of the money outlay that we did back in 2022.

But we need to do something. Zinchenko isn’t being shifted because of his bug wages and so I suspect that will be an overseas loan where we pay a chunk of them, because I can’t see a Fenerbahce coughing up all of his £150k+-per-week wages. So we’ll have to find a solution that doesn’t mean we have a guy on our books who will take the cash and not get anywhere near the first team. I’m sure he will want that solution too, to be fair, because no footballer wants to be left to just rot in the reserves when he could go somewhere else and play regularly in the autumn of his playing career. Zinchenko is still only 28 and so has plenty of time left in his career, so I’m sure a solution can be found.

That’s me done for today. One step closer to the weekend thanks to the bank holiday yesterday, so I’ll be back tomorrow at the mid-working-week point with some more Arsenal musings as always.

Catch you then.

Of course the article is more about the demand for his number given the club was giving away free printing for a limited time if you bought the Arsenal shirt, but the very fact that we’ve had such demand and there is this direct purchase, meaning more money going to the club if you buy directly from them. At least, that’s what I think happens, although this article from a couple of years ago shows that in fact, football clubs don’t get a big chunk of the money. I think that’s fair enough though; it’s thee club’s IP for sure, but if they are essentially subbing out everything – shirt design, production, distribution and shipping, etc – then why should they get the bulk of sales? The likes of Adidas also pay them a sponsorship fee too, so there’s ample cash going to the club. But if they’ve sold 100,000 Gyokere’s shirts since he signed and they get 10% of every sale, for example, that’s around £7.50 and around £750,000 – no small change indeed!

But it ain’t paying for Big Vik’s fee I’m afraid. That’s going to take 733,333 shirts to get to that £55million number. With the age of the internet and access to information that we have, we all know that the whole ‘it’s paid for his transfer’ is a myth, but it’s still fun to trot out little stories like this I think.

In the meantime, we’ve got our first pictures of the big man in training and whilst that’s also good to see, my favourite picture was the one of Zubimendi and Norgaard tussling for a ball and Zubi holding on to his shirt. Given they both play in the same position, I couldn’t help but feel like there was some kind of symbolism or metaphor in there somewhere…

I also liked picture 36 from 36, in which Merino looks like he’s holding court and telling the others around him “so I told her, I am not putting chia seed on my polenta, it’ll ruin the dynamics of my lunch”…

They are, of course, gearing up to a ‘North London Derby’ tomorrow in Hong Kong and I have to say I’m not a fan. Those are the worst games of the season for me and I get so nervous beforehand. Tomorrow won’t be anywhere near as worrying, but even thinking about it I find myself saying “we can’t lose to that scummy lot – they’ll be proclaiming Frank as the new Messiah if we do”, which is silly because it’s a friendly and there will be yet more mass rotation at varying intervals. But what we don’t need is a game full of clatterings. I hope – but will not expect – that Frank will talk to Arteta beforehand and both will agree that players need to go easy on the gas tomorrow – both teams had their injury problems and so neither needs to have players going down with injuries that will impact the respective starts to their season’s. Let’s just have a game of football without any crunching tackles please. Oh, and keep Calafiori away from the pitch! The last thing we need is him going down again like he did against Newcastle.

There’s some tenuously-linked Arsenal news that Ramsdale could be on his way to Newcastle to compete with Nick Pope, but I can’t help but find that one a little odd. If Pope is the defacto number one, doesn’t that just mean that Ramsdale is back to where he was at The Arsenal? In which case, why didn’t he just stay with us? I guess being a number one and then effectively being demoted forces you to seek a move elsewhere, but surely there are better options than being Newcastle’s backup? A quick look at the number one’s in the Premier League tells me I think he could go to any of the following clubs and be better than what they have:

• Chelsea (they buy anyone for any fee, so finding money will be no problem for them)
• Crystal Palace (price might be an issue but I think Ramsdale is better than Henderson)
• Man United (In money troubles but they’re looking at a striker so surely they should have a go at a ‘keeper first)
• The Scum (he’s not doing that though)
• Fulham (he’s already dislodged Leno once)
• Brighton (might be a money issue)
• Wolves (same again re: money)

That’s just a few but it feels to me like there should be more options for him. Hopefully that’s just a rumour in which will die. We don’t really want him going to that Orcky lot in the North East, do we?

There’s still some rumours about Eze knocking around but I suspect that one bubbles along a bit for a few more weeks if I’m honest. Feels like one in which Arsenal need to keep him sweet by telling him “we’re coming”, but I suspect there has to be some people going out the door first to free up space, so I’m not expecting anything any time soon on that one. And as a result I don’t really feel like talking much about it. The ITK stuff can be a bit weary with the whole ‘edging closer’ nonsense; we’ve just gone through that with Big Vik, so I’m a little reluctant to invest more time and energy in another saga. We’re in a good shape right now and there’s a ‘friendly’ tomorrow to focus on.

So I’ll catch you all tomorrow for some more thoughts ahead of that game. See you then.

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.

We’ll get a Mikel Arteta press conference later on today ahead of the game against Girona and I suspect the team will be flying out during the day at some stage as we prepare for our final game of this annoying Champions League group stage. It’ll be interesting to see what Arteta does with his team and whether he talks about fatigue or volume of games in his press conference, because that might give us a hint as to whether he is planning on doing a little bit of rotation. Given the massive game we have on Sunday you’d hope that would be the case; we already have plenty of injury challenges (still) so I’m hoping for a decent level of rotation on the cards tomorrow evening. The likes of Jorginho, maybe Merino, Sterling and I’d even give Neto an outing this season, although I suspect the latter is unlikely. I also wonder whether Arteta will also look at a possible last game for Zinchenko before he departs overseas – if the rumours are correct.

That’s a deal that would suit all parties, I think, because he’s clearly falling down the pecking order and with 18 months left on his contract Arsenal aren’t giving him a new one. He’s playing in a position where we are over-stocked and with KT seemingly bound for Celtic in the summer, I suspect he’ll stick around for another six months and get token minutes as and when we need to bring on a third choice left back behind Calafiori or Lewis-Skelly. It means Zinchenko can be allowed to leave and if the rumours are true and we get a solid £17million for him I don’t think that’s bad news at all. Dortmund are supposedly interested, but so are Atletico Madrid and when you get two clubs of that pedigree interested and willing to do a deal of that amount then you probably have to take the cash and say “thanks for the memories”.

I always liked Zinchenko. He was a player who came in, rocked our world, enabled us to do something slightly different with the inverted full back approach but sadly for him he just couldn’t stay fit enough. And I think this is something that we should be very mindful of, because I think that were he a player who was more robust, I don’t think we’d be letting him go. Whenever a player is out for any length of time it takes them a while to get back up to their full fitness and sharpness and with Zinchenko I always felt that when he isn’t as sharp the mistakes in his game get amplified. And because he was never fit for longer than a couple of months, when he did come back and get game time, the mistakes would seem more glaring.

What also happened with him was the same as what we saw with Tierney. KT was a regular in Arteta’s side when he joined and I read stuff saying that Arteta loved him; his attitude, the vibes and effort he brought to the team and in training, the lot. But he could never stay fit and I think clearly Arteta got to a point where he thought “I just have to move on here”. Of course there was the tactical evolution that would have moved him on eventually, but I think Tierney would have held on to that left back starting spot a lot longer had he been able to stay fit. And I feel the same about Zinchenko. But at some stage Arteta realised “I have to move on here, because he just can’t stay fit” and that’s why we have this situation where he’s leaving the club just two-and-a-half years after signing for us. He’ll have played 81 times in two season’s and when you compare that to Declan Rice – who is a lot more robust – he has also played 81 times but has done it one whole season quicker than the Ukrainian.

For us it will mean more money in to the coffers and Arsenal will be able to bank that cash for FFP which will enable us to re-invest, although with just six days left in the transfer window, that investment in key areas is looking unlikely. We will apparently get this Sverre Nypan guy from Rosenberg – at 18 he’ll be one for the future – but I wonder if Arteta will tell him he’s straight in to the first team squad if/when that deal gets done? I’ve fallen in to the trap of watching a few YouTube compilations and that will invariably mean he’ll sign for City, but if we get him then you’d think he could certainly be looking to get some minutes in the team this season given that we’ve been so decimated with injuries throughout. The challenge will be where his future lies at The Arsenal, because he’s a number eight who looks like a late-arriving midfielder. That position at the moment we have the likes of Nwaneri coming through and people keep telling me Lewis-Skelly’s future position is as a midfielder. Listen, if this kid is as mustard as he looks then the cream always rises to the top, right? He’s also had plenty of football already for Rosenberg and this season alone has racked up just under 2,500 minutes and played 33 times for a Rosenberg side whose season runs from March until the end of November. So it’s Rosenberg’s ‘summer window’ and them getting in that cash allows them to re-invest in a team that finished fourth and will want to get back towards the top of the league. So it makes sense why these noises are happening now.

It doesn’t really answer our ‘now’ problem with regards to our attacking options and with the January window creeping ever closer, I don’t know about you, but my belief that we’ll get somebody in (not just a ‘body’, but somebody who will make a difference) for Monday’s deadline is slowly dissipating. Let’s just hope I’m wrong.

Catch you all tomorrow with a Girona match preview.

Firstly, it looks like KT is set to re-join Celtic six years after signing for us from them, in what now looks like a pretty expensive and probably the world’s longest ever loan deal that has ever existed. You can’t blame him to be fair. He’s a free agent, he spoke in the All or Nothing documentary about feeling a little homesick and it’s clear as a guy who is close to his family, he wants to get back up to Scotland and re-join his boyhood club. His issue has only ever been twofold: he can’t stay fit for any period of time (11 separate injuries in five seasons causing him to miss a total of 94 football matches during that time) and he hasn’t been able to adapt to Arteta’s inverted fullback style. When Arteta signed him it’s said he loved him, his work rate, his personality, his effort and I think it’s probably testimony to the fact he’s even getting any minutes at the moment that Arteta is considering him, because to me it does feel like he’s a bit of a square peg in an Arsenal round hole.

He’ll get his move in the summer, Arsenal and Arsenal fans will wish him well, say thanks for the memories (and the iconic Tesco bag boots moment) and we hope he has a good career north of the border. Until then, let’s see if we can give him some minutes in an Arsenal shirt at some times and use him if we need him. Heck, it’s not as if we haven’t experienced full back problems this season, eh?

On that note Arteta will also tell us about fitness today and I hope he gives us news that Calafiori is fit and can start. When you look at his injury history, it looks similar to Tierney’s and already this season he’s missed 14 games for us across four different injury spells. I said it in the summer, I’m saying it again, I worry that we’ve brought another Tomiyasu / Tierney in the Italian. We all love KT and Tomi, but they can’t stay fit and that means you need to be ruthless at times. I really hope Calafiori can shake off what has already been a consistent thing with him so far in his career but I’m just saying my spider senses have been tingling ever since we signed him. But I’ll park that for now for fear of being accused of being too overly negative  on a guy so early in to his Arsenal career.

The answer will certainly not be to dip in to the left back market once again this January, or this summer I suspect, with even Josh and Stan Kroenke probably saying “enough is enough” if Arteta wants another centre half or left back. The focus should – and will – be on attacking players for the next couple of windows I suspect, with Wolves fans on the forums already talking about how Cunha is doing a dress rehearsal this weekend when we play them. For obvious reasons you and I hope not, but we do still need to do something in the next eight or so days. The need is there, we just have to move and with Arsenal seeing record growth and revenues according to the Deloitte Money League announcement yesterday, the narrative of the Arsenal fanbase has just been given another nudge as Arsenal struggle to find value and the player they want this window.

I can see the gutter press red top media headlines now “Arsenal have all this money and STILL won’t buy a striker!” will be their approach and yes, the Money League revenues show we’ve had a 35% growth in total for our revenues, we’ve hit a new PB on revenue generated to about £605million for last season compared to around £450millon this time last year. But as we all know revenue only shows part of the story. It doesn’t show all of Arsenal’s costs, only wages and whilst revenues have gone up, so have our wages with 53% of our revenue going on wages this time around, compared to 51% last season. That’s to be expected; we’re shopping in more expensive supermarkets and paying higher fees on players; you don’t sign somebody for £35million and get to out them on £20k-per-week. There’s also the new deals that come in when you reward players already at the club, so you’d expect there to be an increase. Liverpool’s are 63% of what they earn and Chelsea’s are 72% of what they earn. Compared to most other clubs who are around the 50s in terms of percentages, it seems like we’re on trend with other clubs. But when an announcement like this comes out (handily timed each year to coincide with the end of the January transfer window, I might add) there’s always going to be a few who immediately shout “why aren’t we spending that money!”. As always you need somebody like Swiss Ramble to point out in detail the reality of Arsenal’s financial situation.

That’s not to say I don’t think we have the money and shouldn’t spend it, by the way, because I absolutely think we should be going in to the market this window and definitely going again in the summer. But the complexities of football finance don’t start and end in how much money you bring in and I don’t think a 35% growth in revenue of £155million will mean that we can suddenly drop all of that extra cash this window on that attacking player we all crave. And I don’t think there’s any Arsenal fan out there who thinks we will.

And so for now we have to wait and hope. In the meantime there will be an Arteta press conference about Wolves and that has to be our focus in the immediate future – overcoming a team who have got good results against us in the past on their own turf. So we have to be ready and up for it.

Catch you all tomorrow.

Yesterday as I was about to start cooking dinner after work I did my usual switch on of the TV in the kitchen, to see that the first skirmish between the Premier League and 115 Charges FC has concluded, with Sky Sports reporting that ‘both sides are claiming victory’. Cue the barrage of clearly partisan fan opinions flying all over the place on social media, as City Fans rejoice in a perceived win, whilst other fans try to understand what to make of the ruling yesterday – of which you can read all the details here. It’s a beast of a document and I’m not going to bother reading through each bit line by line and make notes because a) I’m not a legal professional and so I probably would miss stuff, b) I have better things to do in my life, and finally c) I ultimately don’t believe that anything will come out of this and the wider process of charging City for their misdemeanours.

What was interesting to see was where City have been recruiting their foot soldiers, in the form of journalists, maybe even where some clubs and the Premier League have been doing theirs. As soon as the findings for this first salvo were released, there was, inevitably, a slew of journalists with their fingers on the ‘publish’ button to give their two penneth worth, which ranged from more balanced and attempted neutral views, to the farcical Martin Samuel’s click baity “Unlawful, unlawful, unlawful, unfair, unfair, unreasonable, unreasonable. The seven conclusions of the arbitration panel make for sobering reading” – which I’m not linking too because I don’t want to be an accessory to this kind of nonsense. Some of these articles came out within minutes of the ruling; it’s almost as if some of these journo’s have been briefed by one side or the other…

The reality of this situation is that the panel decided City were right in a couple of instances, whereas the Premier League were right in the majority of their assertions, for which they mention here. What will happen next is the Premier League will re-write the rules in some cases and then it’s back you go to the courtroom to sort out the 115 Charges. And yes, it is still all of those charges, because this relates to City’s counter argument against the Premier League; they haven’t knocked down a bunch of those charges, they’ve just had their counter-argument heard (Dan Roan explains that in his BBC article here).

So where we are, it’s hard to tell, but where we could be after the 115 charges have concluded will have an unparalleled implication on the way this league is structured. It could open the floodgates for the likes of Newcastle to pump crazy levels of cash in, likes of which no club has ever seen, which obviously feels like it will impact the competitive edge of the division. There will be those fans who will argue that this happened before the billionaires and nation states all had their grubby mits on football, but never to this extent. Manchester United accumulated wealth through their commercial revenue brought on their success, Arsenal to a lesser extent, but Chelsea got theirs artificially through the Ambramovich era, as well as City through their Oil cash. The race to the morally bankrupt bottom was set in motion a long time ago, this ruling could just see how quickly it accumulates.

And all of this happens whilst we go in to an international window, which only amplifies the conversation, because so many fans like me just aren’t interested in the latest pointless international distraction, so we end up talking about this kind of rubbish. I hate it. It isn’t what football is about; football is about competition, it’s about sporting integrity and it’s about what goes on, on the pitch. This is anything but that.

What will be going on the pitch is these internationals and our latest unwelcome news (maybe) is that Kai Havertz has withdrawn from the Germany squad with knee problems. Gulp. Now, we can perhaps all talk about the old Fergie era ‘ he’s injured’ nonsense that used to go on, but I’m sure I’ve read on a couple of occasions that players do have to report for international duty unless they can provide evidence of their injury. We’ve seen that with Saka in the recent past where he’s reported and then been sent home. Obviously when it’s a flight involved it might be a little different; there might be dialogue with the Arsenal medical team and they provide them with information about the player that the medical team for the respective national team have to review before coming to the same conclusion. I just hope that there’s a little bit of artistic licence in this case, because we can’t really afford another injury to another key player in this Arsenal team.

The good news is that the noises are that it isn’t too serious and the fact Havertz was able to play the full 90+ minutes on Saturday has to be cause for positivity. But it’s still enough for us all to get a little nervous. That, in itself, is testament to the 16-odd months in which we’ve had Havertz. The German arrived at Arsenal with people like me saying “why are we signing a striker who doesn’t score goals, make assists, or even know what his best position is?”, started off looking like a player with his confidence smashed in to a million pieces, missing chances like that fresh-air swing against United that I still shudder over. That penalty goal he was given against Bournemouth last season was the beginning of the rehabilitation of his confidence and form, which culminated in his excellent end to the season which he has now carried over to this.

What we now have is a guy who is feeling the love, is banging in the goals (six this season including that brilliant strike last Saturday), talking like a man who is at ease and confident and somebody who, I think, as long as he stays injury-free, will bag 20 goals this season. He has six goals in 10 games already. I doubt he’ll maintain that ratio, but even if he just matches his goals-per-game ratio of last season, in which he averaged a goal every three-and-a-half games, if he plays the same number of matches as last season (51), he’ll get another 11 goals at least. That will notch him to 17 in all competitions which won’t be too bad a tally, but I’m deliberately being cautious because that factors in the start of the season last year in which he got one goal in his first 13 games for us. He also played as an attacking midfielder in all but one of those games, whereas he is now firmly established as our main centre forward. At the weekend he played right eight in the absence of Odegaard again, but as soon as Jesus had gone off and he was pushed back in to the centre forward spot, he scored our equaliser. If we can keep him centrally and up top, he’s going to get more than 11 goals for the rest of this season.

And that is massively positive for us. At a time in which we’re all a little concerned about Gabriel Jesus’ form and potential crisis of confidence, Havertz is doing the business, so hopefully this knock is something that can see him recovered for the trip to Bournemouth in a couple of weekend’s time.

Back tomorrow with some more ramblings. Catch you then.

On Eddie Nketiah

Feels like this one has been going on forever, right? I mean, I feel like I’ve talked about him about 25 times this summer and I’m not even that invested in what happens either way. Just when it appears there isn’t any other ‘angles’ to explore, old Fabrizio drops a ‘Marseille pull out’ comment on the socials which, to all intents and purposes, sounds like the French club have walked away. That’s fine by me, by the way, because the last thing any of us wants is for a club like Marseille to come in and plead poverty, then get a cheap deal for a striker who would probably bang in France next season. I’ve seen some argue that our valuation of €30million compared to what they offered at I believe €27million is a little too ‘steep, like we’re haggling over a few million, but I think Arsenal are right in what they are doing. This is a proven goal scorer who has done it in one of the hardest leagues in the world and will score even more in leagues like France. Surely the ‘haggling’ angle should be flipped 180 here; surely Marseille shouldn’t be quibbling over a few million?

What this does do – even if it feels like a risky strategy – is to show to the world that we aren’t in the mood for lowballing any more. Arsenal can’t be pushovers. We see Liverpool and City get big money for players who have barely played for their first team (Carvalho to Brentford for £27million, anyone?), so why should we be forced in to a position where we have to sell Eddie? Arteta has already shown he will use him so I think from that perspective Arsenal can stand firm, because if he doesn’t go elsewhere Arteta will use him I think. So I applaud the club on standing firm.

Also, having seen Julian Alvarez head to Atletico Madrid for £82million, I am wondering to myself what happened to be repeatedly told that clubs in mainland Europe had no cash, eh? Seems to me that this rule only seems to apply when clubs want our players…

On Aaron Ramsdale

Apparently Ajax want him and I have to say, if there can be a deal done there, I’d love that. It would keep him away from us in terms of playing against us in the Premier League, it’d mean we could love him from afar and although the talk is of an initial loan, you’d hope he’d absolutely smash it in the Netherlands and we’d get a fee next summer. I think we all know he needs to play, as much as it will pain us all when it happens, so letting him go on loan with an option based on triggering performance metrics, would be perfectly palatable for this here Arsenal fan, I can tell you. Apparently the first offer of a loan was rejected; I imagine Ajax want us to pay some of his wages, which of course makes no sense for Arsenal to accept. Pay his wages, give us a million or two for a loan fee, then have him for £20 – £25million next summer if he does well. That’s probably unlikely as their current record transfer is €30.5million and they’re not going to match that for a ‘keeper, but on this one if it meant we get £5million now and £15million next summer €18million I’d probably take that just to see him not play in England. Then, in an ideal world, you whack up a big sell on clause if he comes back to England in a couple of years time.

This transfer malarkey is easy, eh?

There’s not really a lot else going on as we prep for the new season now, to be honest, other than the new Arsenal third kit dropping through a lovely video that I enjoyed watching yesterday. Have already bought me the new shirt and hopefully it’s arriving this week, which would be nice. Be good to rock those new threads in the ground on Saturday, even if it’s a kit that will barely be worn all season. I might also be tempted in to the ‘keeper jersey too, which is quite a lovely little black number that can easily pass off for a non-keeper jersey if you buy it in short sleeves. Look at me, I haven’t bought a ‘keeper jersey since I was 16, plus I’m dedicating a whole paragraph to Arsenal apparel as I wrap up today’s ramblings – what has happened to me?

Adidas has happened to me, that’s what.

Catch you all tomorrow. Be good and be nice.

Tomorrow the team line up against Leverkusen in our penultimate friendly before the season kicks off properly and it’ll be the return of Xhaka who I’m sure will get a good reception. I suspect Arteta might do something today, maybe not a press conference (or maybe he will?) but maybe a video or something ahead of the game. It’ll be interesting to see where his head is at in terms of how ready the team is physically for the season start. All players are back now and in training mode and we’ve been treated to some training ground pictures back at London Colney. I suspect there will be a glimpse of Calafiori tomorrow, maybe from the bench or something like that, but it’ll be interesting to see how we line up in general because it feels like this is when we’ll get the closest thing to the starting XI for the Wolves game, although I suspect Lyon in the Emirates Cup will be the proper dress rehearsal.

There won’t be any new signings to speak of I don’t think (check my reversal psychology going on here…), but maybe by the weekend Merino is moving along. It all seems to have stalled based on the news that is being drip-fed to us, which makes me wonder if Arsenal are going to drag this out a little bit. If their valuation is closer to £20million+ and Sociedad want £26million+, you could probably save yourselves a few million by entering negotiations towards the end of August. Sociedad have a player who is free come next summer and if they have him in January then Arsenal could probably negotiate a free transfer anyway, so if we’re getting to late December and a deal hasn’t been done, that’s my feeling about this situation, that Arsenal are trying to save a few bucks, as the Americans would say.

I’m sure there are a few that will take the view we should just “pay the damn money” but £6million is no small chunk of change. Sure, for these clubs it isn’t as much as that sort of money would mean to you or I, but Arsenal has always prided itself on being a financially well-run club. We don’t need shady sponsorship deals, selling of property to ourselves or two do weird and inflated transfer sales of our academy players to other clubs who are also operating in the murky grey world on the edge of the rules. So £6million – if my speculating is correct and that is what Arsenal are doing, is worth holding on a little longer for.

We’ve also got a very good team who you’d hope are all able to survive without the likes of Merino for the first few weeks of the season. A lot can change of course with injuries, etc, but we seem to have a pretty fit squad – poor old Tomi aside – to start the season, so Arteta has plenty of very good options in almost every position as it stands. We need reinforcements for a busy season, for sure, but the first few week’s you’re only playing one game a week anyway, so there’s no need to press the panic button just yet.

The Eddie news is still rumbling along too. The noises I’m reading on the socials are that Arsenal are happy to use him should the valuation we have not be met. Which I think is fair enough really. Would I like to get a good fee and look to get a player in Arteta is more willing to use? Of course I would. I know we used him more at the beginning of the season, but towards the end he really didn’t get a look in and never made it off the bench for the last six games. In fact, after Fulham away on 31st December he never started a game again last season and only racked up 86 minutes in total for the last 15 Premier League games of the season.

But Arsenal do need to stand firm. If Marseille really want the guy, then they have to pay the asking price and I think if Arsenal a playing a little hard ball here, it’s a slightly different situation to Merino. That’s because his contract runs until 2027 and so even by next summer he’ll still have two year’s left to run. Arsenal don’t need to sell. They – we – probably think it’s best for all parties, but if a club wants to play silly buggers and leave it until deadline day with us given no chance to get a replacement in, you’re better just keeping Eddie as a squad player. Our forward three has Martinelli, Trossard, Havertz, Jesus, Saka and Nketiah in it, not to mention Nelson and Vieira has been trialled wide left this pre season, so we are pretty well stacked. Perhaps we could try to shuffle the deck a bit with an Nketiah and Nelson exit, but we aren’t desperate for that and so I think we’re in a strong position. So ‘good for you’ I say to Arsenal for holding out. get closer to €30million/£25million and a deal is there to be done guys.

I feel like i’ve been talking about Eddie and Merino for the last week and I’m getting to the stage where I might be repeating myself, so it is perhaps quite merciful that we have the friendlies to get a look at the team tomorrow and Saturday. Then we can start to get back to the real football in 11 days time. Can’t wait.

Catch you all tomorrow. Have a good one.

We had goals, we had drama, we had teams going for matches and not relying on own goals, penalties, boring sufferball; it was how the Euro’s or any international tournament should be played. Not what we’re all now used to if you’re of a certain vintage i.e. cagey risk-averse football for the most part with the occasional moment of magic sprinkled in.

It’s kind of why I’m never overly-enamoured with international football, if I’m honest, because it never really lives up to the hype of club football and you never get the same quality of football match as a neutral. There never seems to be as much movement, quality players often seem to take a step down and it just isn’t as much fun. It’s only saving grace is that it happens during the summer when football is normally on a short hiatus, which is why it becomes mildly palatable.

But yesterday felt like there was some football to be had. The Romanians kept the game with a little bit of jeopardy for as long as they could before the Dutch ended up sealing it through former Arsenal lad Donyell Malen. I’ve seen him a little bit in this tournament and kept an eye on him because of The Arsenal connection, but let’s be honest here, it doesn’t feel like he’s the sort of player I’d be desperate for us to go out and buy for us next season. He’s 25, his value is rumoured to be around £35million, he’s versatile having played 24 times for Dortmund at right wing, 11 left wing and 3 as a centre forward last season, but he has seemed a little wasteful to me in this tournament. He bagged 15 goals and five assists from wide positions last year but he’s not exactly going to displace any of our players we currently have. So whilst I’m happy he’s gone on from Arsenal and made a career at some decent clubs, it doesn’t feel like the right kind of fit and I doubt he’d want to come in and get League and FA Cup minutes when Saka needs to be rotated.

In the second game I had a lot more fun watching Turkey versus the Austrians and not just because I had Turkey in my sweepstake. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fun to see my £2 advance to the quarter finals, but it was more fun to see both Turks and Austrians have a proper go at each other. There was some good old-fashioned set piece goals, there was some back to the walls defending, as well counter-attacking football that had you thinking that the game was on a knife-edge right until the last few seconds. Nobody likes to see games peter out when you’re a neutral, so I enjoyed seeing that go right to the end and then the response from the Turkish fans and players was lovely. You could see how much it meant to them. I also thought that lad Ferdi Kadioglu, who I think we’ve been linked with, had a pretty good game indeed. He loves to run at defnders, he’s definitely got the ability to beat a man and I also thought he did a pretty stand-up job in a defensive sense. You could see why some clubs like Dortmund, Barca and us have been linked and given there are strong noises about us getting a left back in this summer then his ability to play there, but also as a right back feels like a natural fit for the links. But could he play that inverted role? Last season he operated primarily as a left back and made nine appearances as a right back but the season before he played 25 as a right back, nine in right midfield, nine at left back, nine in left midfield and once as a left winger. This kid looks like he’s a good dribbler of the ball and his eye for a pass looked decent enough, so maybe this is something to keep an eye on.

I suspect we’ll be focusing more on outputs right now though, with Sambi Lokonga rumoured to be attracting interest from Sevilla. The noises have mainly come from the Spanish press and they’re saying Sevilla won’t go above €8million, which is pretty low given he did well for Luton last season, but Sevilla are in one of the more precarious financial positions of the Spanish clubs and so I can understand why they’d want the player for a cut down price. But we paid €17.5million for him and he’s still of an age that you’d expect a decent return, so my hope is that we hold firm on our rumoured valuation of the player at around £10million. That doesn’t seem unreasonable to me; this kid has talent, he’s still young, he will go somewhere and make it work, but let’s not get shafted on the fee. Also, when he does go, let’s have a hefty sell on fee. The last thing we want is him to go to a club like Sevilla, absolutely bang then having got him for peanuts, we end up seeing them sell him on for €30million in a couple of season’s time. We need to be telling clubs that it’s 10million, but oh by the way, we’ll take 33% of any future sell on fee, thank you very much.

That’s supposedly why Bologna want €40million for Calafiori, because two season’s ago he was at Basel and made 34 appearances there before playing regularly for Bologna last season. They picked him up for €4million and Basel agreed a 40% sell on fee. So the Italians want to make sure they get north of €25million for themselves from the deal. We need to be doing the same deals for every player that leaves The Arsenal because those small values like we get for Omari Hutchinson who went to Ipswich, can quickly add up if you do those deals regularly.

It means you can speculate a little more on players. Imagine if we paid roughly £15million for Sambi, sold him for £8million, but get a 33% sell on. If he bangs for his next club and in two year’s time is sold for, let’s say, £21million (around €25million). That would be £7million in Arsenal’s coffers and would mean we have effectively made our money back on a player who was alright, wasn’t quite at the level, but we managed to do some business that works for us. That’s where Arsenal need to be smart. Less “sell your best players for £100million” and more player acquisitions that we try, if they don’t work out, we can still move on and keep refreshing the squad.

Anyway, bit of a longer one from me today with those musings, so I’ll pause for now and let you get on with the rest of your day.

Have a good one peeps. I’m doing the Same Old Arsenal summer series tonight so if you fancy joining us at 7.30pm, you can do so here.

I’m sure Barca love the look of Big Bill – who wouldn’t given he’s just come off of another season in which he’s proven himself to be one of the best defenders in world football – and they think they can snaffle him from us for £86million.

£86million? Do me a favour. That’ll get you his left peg and maybe left arm, at best, because Arsenal aren’t going to be shipping off their best players for below market value. So even if Arsenal did feel like they had to offload Saliba, Barca would have to come up with a few more Euro’s than that paltry sum for a defender who has just shown Deschamps what he’s been missing. The French national team boss has finally relented and realised that he’s got to include our guy at the back and already he’s proving what an important player he is. Deschamps doesn’t come to watch him in England, he’s had a few weird words to say our Big Bill, but ultimately even he isn’t going to cut his nose off to spite his face and Saliba is starting to show that he can be the main man at the back.

Barca also have no cash whatsoever. This article here sums it up. So if Barca are going to try to take Saliba from us, they’ll basically have to spunk a whole load of that new Nike deal on it and then have nothing left for any other signings, so I can’t see it happening. And it’s not as if we have any massively positive relationship with them, is it? I hope the Arsenal administrative team don’t even pick up the phone if Barca come knocking. Remember Cesc? Remember how they spent the best part of a decade snaffling our players and trying to unsettle them? Well, tables have turned now, bitches. If you want a player like Saliba you better be dropping Coutijnho numbers and if you do that, hopefully it’ll plunge them in to even more of a financial crisis.

It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that Barca have tried to offload some of their players like Villa and Chelsea are doing with their dodgy player trading deals. It’s gaming the system, you just hope that it  all falls apart, but you’ve got two ‘Murican owners trying to apply US approaches to the Premier League and in the context of our competition, in my opinion, it stinks. You probably are already aware, but just in case you aren’t, they’re basically using the ‘book value’ and ‘amortisation’ rules to game the system:

• Home grown player A goes to Club C from Club A for £10million
• Club C split that cost over five years so on their books they’ve only payed £2million this summer
• Home grown player B goes from Club C to Club A for £10million
• Same as above but Club A account for £2million
• Club A and Club C both ‘bank’ the £10million they’ve just received
• Both Club A and Club C account for an £8million profit on their books.

Even though basically no money has exchanged.

It’s dodgy as hell and a way for clubs to get around PSR rules. My only hope is that these players who are being moved around and having their careers chucked around like ragdolls, don’t end up on the scrap heap in a few year’s time. But if they do it’ll be yet more money spunked by these clubs who, if you recall, had their fans talking about how the system is rigged and how they were hard done by. No, guys, you and your owners have been careless with the money that has been accumulated and the spending you’ve undertaken and now they’re trying another dodgy approach. Chelsea aren’t allowed to sell hotels to themselves any more, so they’re in cahoots with another club who have decided to outspend their means and hopefully it all ends badly for both.

So back to my original point, which is that it wouldn’t surprise me to see Barca trying that sort of sh*t; they did it a previously  with Juve, moving players around so they could find ways around not being punished for their reckless spending, so to see them linked with some of our players just makes me hope that should a bid or an offer come in, we just laugh them out of town.

We’ve got a good thing going on right now with Arteta and with the current set up, so my hope is that our journey with these players continues its upwards trajectory, because if it does, then we could be about to see good things happen for us as fans and hopefully we can ward off from the likes of Madrid and Barca.

Right, I’m going to leave it there for today. Got a day of sitting in the sun ahead but I think i’ll start it off with a walk.

Catch you wonderful people tomorrow.

Not that there’s a lot going on, to be fair, because we’re on the verge of the Euro’s kicking off and then a week later it’s the Copa America. So if you’re a football fan and you’re starting to break out in hives because you haven’t had your fix, you’re about to get an overdose. It’ll start on Friday with Germany taking on Scotland at 8pm, then we kick off a week or so of games every few hours starting at 2pm, then 5pm, then 8pm, which will basically run like that until Wednesday 26th June with those group stages. But just in case that isn’t enough, from 1am in the morning on 21st June the Copa America will keep people going and the matches for that tournament go on at 11pm, 1am and 2am UK time. So basically you can watch football for 12 hours straight if you really want to.

I like having it on in the background and I’ll watch England and Germany games (family ties to Germany, you see), but other than that it’ll be a case of watch whatever is convenient. For me it’s always interesting to see who the stand out players are that are going to have their prices inflated, or how The Arsenal players are getting on. It’s funny though because four or five years ago I used to even get worried about the psychological damage that would happen to an Arsenal player who see’s his team get knocked out, which let’s face it will be 95% of the players from the club who actually go to the tournament. But Now that we’ve had back-to-back season’s in the Premier League in which we’ve actually competed for the title, I feel less worried about it. Winning breeds confidence and also given that when the tournament is over the players return back in to that environment in which they’ve shown what a good team and great set of players we have, I’m pretty sure they’ll be able to get back in to the cadence of being an Arsenal player rather than an international player.

It speaks volumes too that so many of them also seem excited to go back to The Arsenal when these tournaments do eventually end. We’re in a good place as a club and we all need to recognise that. We’ve got a good squad, good players, all young enough that for many the expectations is that even if we did nothing in the transfer window this summer, we should still have a side good enough to compete at the top. That’s a nice feeling I have to say. So many year’s of thinking we’re miles off, of needing to pull some sort of transfer rabbit out of a hat – or multiple rabbits – has been replaced by many of my Arsenal mates saying that we’re in a good space and that they trust the club. That’s a nice feeling, eh?

There’s some stuff about the Real Madrid ‘keeper Andry Lunin and with Courtois coming back and then playing at the end of the season and in the Champions League final, clearly he’ll be looking at his situation and thinking that now he’s had a taste of playing all season, he’ll want more substantial game time. Unless Arteta is going to do another ‘mega pivot’ and sign this guy with a review to binning off Raya (not completely out of the questions I think we’d all agree!), I think it’s an unlikely situation. He’s 25, he’s had a taste of first team football, if we sign Raya (nothing suggests we won’t) then dropping at least another £20million on this Ukrainian chap feels a little spurious to me. We’d kind of find ourselves in a similar situation to Ramsdale and Raya, only this time it would be an extra non-home grown space taken up in the squad.

And given that this is the only real story that’s emerged in the last 24 hours, I think I’ll leave it there for today. We’ve got our next ‘one in, one out and one bangs’ tonight with Harry Symeou and Mike McDonald at 7.30pm, so if you fancy joining me then you can do so here.

And towards the end of the pod James picked three players and asked me for a collective figure on what I’d ‘take’ for them if we were offered. I tried to be realistic; we’re not getting mega money for players that just haven’t played much for us this season just gone. The three players were:

• Eddie Nketiah
• Reiss Nelson
• Maquinhos

I had a little think and then suggested I’d want £30million for Eddie, £5million for Reiss and £3million for Marquinhos. Upon reflection though, I would probably revise down at last one of those figures. With the money that Eddie is on I think we need to be realistic; we’re not getting £30million for him. Broja is going to Everton for that cash because he’s on a significantly lower wage, so for Everton to have an interest in Eddie I’d suspect they’d be wanting closer to £20million for the player. I think that devalues him a little bit so I think if we said that we’d get £25million for Eddie, who scored a few goals in the Premier League and so you’d say with games would be ‘oven ready’ for the division, everyone should probably be happy. So perhaps we’d be looking at around the £32-£33million mark for those three players.

But I didn’t really touch on too many others in terms of what I’d take. I reeled off the Transfermarkt valuations but, as I’ve already stated, we know they are sometimes a little off the mark.

Would you, for example, take £22million for Ramsdale? Or just under £20million for Smith Rowe? I know neither have seen loads of minutes in the last season, but I would have thought given their status as England players and given both have won caps for England, we’d see a little more cash for them than what is being suggested. Perhaps I have my red and white tinted specs on here, but that feels a little on the low side. But then again, given Zinchenko is on there for around £35million (we paid £30million for him a couple of year’s ago I believe), I wonder if we should perhaps do an exercise in both Transfermarkt and my own valuation for the fringe players and see what comes up?

For me, the players that I’d think we might/could/should be open to offers for this summer would be (Transfermarkt valuation next to each one):

• Ramsdale (£22million)
• Kiwior (£27million)
• Zinchenko (£35million)
• Partey (£15million)
• Smith Rowe (£19million)
• Vieira (£19million)
• Nketiah (£26million)
• Nelson (£12million)

That’s a combined amount – if all were up for sale (I’m not sure they are) of around £175million (I’ve not done exact calculations from Euros in to pounds because, apologies, but I can’t be arsed).

I haven’t even included the loan players of Tierney, Sambi and Tavares. I think the money for those players will be small and so if we got £15million for all of them that would probably be about right.

That’s a big chunk of change. Probably too big I would wager (well, I certainly wouldn’t wager that kind of money even if I had it!). So Let me drop my expectations for a combined amount there. I think closer to £145million would be the value on those combined assets of players I’ve listed from Transfermarkt. If you add another £15million to that and we’re up to £160million. Do I think Arsenal will sell all of those players though?

No. I do not.

That’s because there’s already been 22 players released from Arsenal this summer already and we have seen the exits of Cedric and Elneny. Ethan Nwaneri will surely be promoted to the first team and there’s probably another space for a young player that Cedric’s departure could account for. I do think Arsenal will try to move players on, but I can’t see it being all of those 11 players. If you do that you leave yourself with a heck of a lot of summer work to do to keep the squad depth up. So If I’m having a guess I’m probably thinking that four from that eight will go. Then it becomes more of a question of which four and that becomes really difficult to answer, because I think it depends on who they can get cash in for earlier. One thing is for certain: we need to be able to sell assets this summer. We have a stockpiled squad of players and we will need to see a few exits. At most I would have thought seven, at least I’d have thought four. If the four that exit are those with the lower valuations, there will no doubt be more questions about Arsenal’s selling ability and I think those questions would be fair.

We still have time though. There’s a lot of ‘on hold’ feelings at the moment. It’s a bit like that bit in Star Wars IV when the fighter pilot is repeatedly going “stay on target”. You want him to fire the rockets earlier, but he knows that he needs to hold, stand his ground, then wait for the moment to strike. That’s what we have to hope is happening now.

Back tomorrow with some more thoughts on all things Arsenal.

Have a good’un.

• Semi-automated offside technology
• In-stadium announcements
• Big-screen replays of VAR intervention in the stadium
• More robust training for officials

All of this is welcome to be fair; as somebody who goes to most of the home games the match day experience has been terrible whenever VAR happens. We just stand/sit and wait whilst knowing nothing that goes on, as the PGMOL ignore the example set by sports like rugby by not allowing us any insight in to what is happening. At least they’re looking at that now. But the bottom bullet is the one I am most sceptical on. My view is that they just need to start weeding out the current collective of inept officials and start bringing in new blood who are more au fait with the technology. We need to be promoting younger referees and fast tracking ones from different geographies and ethnicities so that we can bring more diversity in to the PGMOL. In business it is well documented that organisations that have diverse backgrounds of employees are more productive and deliver better results and if we had a group of referees who can all learn more from each other and come from different backgrounds, then we will 100% see an improvement on the standards of refereeing, in my opinion. Until we get ourselves out of the current ‘old boys network’, or ‘cartel’ of existing referees, then we’re not going to advance very far in my opinion.

And I use that word ‘cartel’ deliberately for my next segue, which I have found quite amusing over the last few days, because it seems that is the latest credulous angle from Man City fans – and weirdly some fans from other clubs – to describe the general disdain for which the media has rounded on Man City’s attempt at changing the rules by suing the Premier League, is to talk about some kind of ‘red cartel’ that is stopping them from doing what they want in terms of spending what they like.

The ‘red cartel’, as it is amusingly called, includes Liverpool, Arsenal and Man United and apparently these three teams are the reason behind the fact that Man City can’t spend more and that other clubs can’t play ‘catch up’.

Let’s remind ourselves of some ‘facts’ here, shall we:

• Man City and Chelsea have spent more than any club in England over the last 10 years. In fact, if you look at this article and scroll down on the table, you can see just how much more. But yeah, it’s definitely the ‘red cartel’ who are the ones who are stopping others from competing. Definitely…
• Man City have won the league six out of the last seven times. But yeah, it’s DEFINITELY’ the ‘red cartel’ who are stopping this league from being competitive…
• The Premier League has been won by teams in red six times in the last 20 years. Chelsea, City and Leicester have all won it during that time, a total of 14 times. But it’s DEFINITELY a ‘red cartel’ who are responsible for the current situation of voting for these spending rules.
• The rules on spending and the current spending cap rules have been agreed by the majority of the Premier League clubs. In fact, Man City have claimed themselves that it is the ‘tyranny of the majority’ that is the reason why they cannot spend what they like. Last time I checked, three out of 20 was not a majority…
• The English media has pretty much roundly criticised Man City’s attempt at trying to change the rules by their approach in trying to sue the Premier League – here is a page which shows some of the views of these journalists. But these journalists have DEFINITELY been put up to it by the ‘red cartel’ who are all paying them, or have these journalists supporting them. Because these guys have NEVER criticised those ‘red cartel’ members of anything ever. Nope, definitely not, never…
• Man City have been charged 115 times for rule breaking and as a result the Premier League has charged them and immediately referred them to an INDEPENDENT COMMISSION. But yeah, it’s DEFINITELY the ‘red cartel’ who are the ones behind this. They definitely are the ones that are behind this. Oh and also behind the Everton and Forest points deductions, as well as the sanctions that could be imposed on Leicester too. Yeah, definitely, for sure…

I think I could go on and on about reasons as to why this ‘red cartel’ stuff is nonsense. But I’ll keep today’s post to under 2,000 words, I think!

I’ve seen some City fans talking about the fact that Arsenal, Liverpool and Man United spent fortunes IN THE 90s and that is the reason that nobody else can reach the same levels as them. So stuff that happened 30 years ago is supposed to be impacting today? I’ll remind you again of bullet point two and three. The rules have been in place for this whole time and City have had no problem at all with the rules. But when it was found out that they were deliberately breaking the rules and then admitting the way in which they were trying to break those rules and circumnavigate them in the leaked emails from Der Spiegel surfaced. This ‘red cartel nonsense is nothing more than Man City and, in some sense some weird Newcastle and Villa fans, who are trying to talk themselves in to the fact that what City are doing is good for the game. Their self-interest is understandable, but the lack of self-awareness on what damage this stuff could do is quite staggering indeed.

I’m going to probably stop talking about this sort of stuff and just focus on us from tomorrow, as it’s clearly just a bit of mental online internet weirdos being weird in trying to justify what is obviously wrong. I’ve said my piece, I’m done, then it’s back to who we should be thinking about signing over the summer from tomorrow.

Have a good one peeps!

I’m back from a week-and-a-half sunning myself and whilst I haven’t bothered picking up the proverbial internet online quill to pen some thoughts, I’ve been following all the bits and bobs that have been happening in the Arsenal and football world over the last week or so. As expected, most of it was relatively quiet post-Premier League season ended, with a few transfer stories emerging about Sesko and a couple of others, but nothing that was so credible and large enough that warranted me firing up the laptop.

Until yesterday of course, in which man City decided to through the biggest hissy fit a Premier League club has ever thrown, albeit there has been nothing officially confirmed by Man City themselves. Instead it was Matt Lawton from The Times who dropped the ‘end game’ that City are looking to deliver to the Premier League following last year’s 155 charges stuff last February.

As a reminder – ‘Last February’ – i.e. just under 16 months ago, when they were charged with 115 counts of breaking the rules.

So what do you do if you as a club have been pulled up on so many offences? You make a counter offensive. That counter offensive has clearly been for the City Group and their owners to work hard on finding something – anything – that could render the Premier League’s charges irrelevant.

When the CAS stuff happened a couple of year’s ago by UEFA, their tactic was to essentially (and I’m super paraphrasing here because a – I’m not an expert, and b – I don’t particularly want to write 1,000 words on the details of that situation. There’s people far better qualified than me if you Google it that can go through the details of that case, as well as the 115 charges stuff) state that the charges that had been laid against them happened so long ago that they were not relevant any more and they won their case on a technicality. They weren’t ‘cleared’, they just couldn’t be punished, in the end.

That ‘get out of jail’ card couldn’t be used this time (again, see above brackets for why I won’t go in to that in detail), so they had to invent up a new angle on how to get away with it. And now we know what it is, which is essentially:

“The rules were wrong in the first place”

It’s honestly a level of arrogance the likes of which no club has ever risen itself too. Manchester City are saying that the rules they signed up to, the rules they agreed to in becoming part of the Premier League collective of teams to compete, the rules in which sporting integrity are supposed to be designed around, aren’t ‘fair’ to them. They have apparently used words like “the tyranny of the majority” to describe their attempt to sue the Premier League because of it’s majority rule approach; in a quite frankly amazing attack on what is essentially democracy in football. Essentially they should be able to do what they like and spend what they like because they have the money and others don’t. They should be able to over-inflate sponsorship deals because they can (that’s what the whole ‘associated party transaction’ stuff that you might have seen in the media in the last 24 hours is) and everyone else should just accept it.

It’s crass, it’s disgraceful, it’s an attempt to subjugate the Premier League in to dropping charges because of the money and power that the City Group wield and, if successful, it would essentially mean that sporting integrity is dead. It would open the floodgates for state ownership and turn the Premier League in to a shell of a competition, where football clubs become expensive dick-swinging exercises by excessively rich people/countries try to sports-wash their way into society.

Let’s remind ourselves about the Super League for a second on this, because I think it’s relevant, because that was an example of fans coming together to fight against something that was wrong, and the perspective was pretty unanimous in rejecting the idea. So much so that the clubs that all went public with the announcement, not only had rival fans up in arms against them, but their own fans, the Premier League, UEFA, as well as the broadcasters (obviously) all come together to fight what was an attempt to remove competition and sporting integrity from the game we love. Having a closed shop where no promotion and relegation exists, where teams can just spend higher and higher amounts of cash and rake in more and more, where the fans would have eventually have suffered, would have been shameful. So it fell down and died and I think most people suggested it was a win for football and competitive sport.

By showing their hands here, Man City have done exactly what the Super League tried to do; they want to see sporting integrity eroded by essentially saying the ‘haves’ must be able to do what they want.

The suggestions from The Times article are also that City have had the temerity to suggest that they would need to scale back on women’s football, youth development and fan ticket prices, were they not allowed to do this, in a completely and utterly bizarre attempt to wedge some sort of moral trump card into their argument. It’s laughable.

They have been backed in to a corner and they are lashing out by launching something so audacious that it almost sounds like an April Fool’s joke. The Premier League have to fight this. Football has to fight this. Everyone needs to come together to fight this. We all derided the Super League, I wrote against my own club in rejecting it, but unless this situation resolves itself in a way in which City fail in this desperation attempt and are now most certainly punished with their charges, then the game we all know might be gone and dead. I don’t even think that is overly dramatic. We all know football is a sport dominated by money, but at least there are rules in place designed to keep a somewhat competitive nature to the spending, to try to avoid the Premier League clubs becoming playthings.

This has to be stopped and there needs to be a universal campaign to counter what City are doing. From everyone.

Sorry, not a lot about The Arsenal today, but when a story this big comes along that threatens to change the game as we know it, you kind of have to talk about it.

I’ll be looking to do an Arsenal-related podcast tonight as part of our ‘one in, one out, one bangs’ series that we did last summer on the Same Old Arsenal pod. Come and join us at 8.30pm and hopefully it’ll be a bit more on Arsenal, although I’m sure we’ll talk about this too at the start, if only for a little bit. Link here if you want to pop along.

Back tomorrow with more Arsenal-related stuff. See you then.

Even though I have repeatedly told myself that it was ‘done’ post the Villa game, even though over the Christmas period I had also said the same, when you’ve seen Arsenal perform as amazingly well as they have done in 2024, I couldn’t tell me own subconscious to shut up and sit down. The excited feelings bubbled up after the win against the Scum in their Toilet Bowl of a stadium a couple of weeks ago and then again after we just about got over the line against a pretty crap United.

But football is football and the joys of Sunday’s result were quickly extinguished knowing that come Sunday it will once again fall to the sanitised and vanilla flavoured nature of yet another Manchester City title. Opposition fans will have a go at bantering Arsenal fans and will find it a lot easier because the team that has once again won it is as sterilised as you could possibly imagine. They’ll win the league, they’ll win the FA Cup, then they’ll do an open top parade in which about 500 people will show up in Manchester somewhere.

Of course this is the sound of a bitter Arsenal fan. I’m reacting emotionally to having such a great young team who have outperformed every other side bar one by some distance. Despite the fact people were telling us this was Liverpool’s season earlier in 2024 because of the Klopp factor, we could end up finishing seven points clear of them come game 38. We are the second best team in the league for the second season in a row and that will give a crumb of comfort in a couple of days time, but for now, I am just a bit downbeat because even though I know the Scum are a terribly organised banter-machine of a club, I thought that perhaps they could raise themselves for some hope of Champions League football. Not the fans, they’re as Micky Mouse as you can get, but I did wonder about those players. I hope those ‘fragile foundations’ that ‘Big Ange’ spoke about last night remain made out of papier mache.

As for the weekend, it’s done folks. Call me defeatist if you want, but I find it essentially impossible to make a case for West Ham to do anything at the weekend. The players are not playing for European football, so there’s no incentive for them to go out of their way. They aren’t playing for a cup final space a week later, so there won’t be any grand individual performances. They are also not playing for a manager as a ‘last hurrah’. Moyes isn’t a beloved figure at West Ham who they want to give a good send off to. The fans appreciate him because of the trophy he delivered last year, but most of them are looking forward to a change, as well as some of the players too I suspect. So these players won’t really give anything more than six or seven out of ten on Sunday and against City on their patch it needs to be nine or ten out of ten to beat them. There is nothing to suggest that will happen. City will pick up the win, they’ll have won their last 10 games in a row and that means they’ve gone the entire final quarter of the season without dropping a single point. It would be something to be begrudgingly impressed by if it was for all of the background that we all already know about. Ill gotten gains, a stadium that is muted half the time, an apathy from every other fanbase about City other than their own, in a league that is essentially as boring as the old Bundesliga used to be. We are the new Bundesliga folks. And there’s nothing we can do about it.

We have reason for optimism for next season though and although I don’t feel like that much right now, we’ve still got a good team, a young team, a team who has now shown that we weren’t one season wonders in competing. Arteta and the Arsenal coaching staff and administration will have another look, find out where we can potentially improve, then look to ‘go again’ next season. We’ve shown we can improve year-on-year and that’s the hope that we have to have for next season. For now we take the disappointment, probably a bit more on Sunday after it’s all confirmed, but for the boys who have done so well in Arsenal shirt’s this season, we’ll give them a rousing roar of appreciation for the final game of 2023/24.

Back tomorrow.

Of course the down side is that they have recent history with them, having won the treble last year, but that in itself is a bloody hard thing to do and the fact it’s only really been done twice in my lifetime makes me think that 90% of the time the more games teams get fixture congestion, the more difficult it becomes for them. Liverpool have the same challenge and tonight they play Southampton in the FA Cup before again playing Forest at 3pm on Saturday. I suspect they’ll still win both games but as long as those legs continue to get tired then you never know, there might be an opportunity for fatigue to creep in and slip ups to happen.

The Arsenal news yesterday that was doing the rounds was around FFP and the £52million loss that the club announced for their 2023 accounts. That’s no small amount of change and it really does serve to highlight why Arsenal were so careful about January. The club couldn’t go and spunk another £50 – £75million on players when they knew that this was about to be released in February and with both Forest and Everton facing the impending points deduction application to their tally (Everton have had theirs reduced to six points but I’m not sure if they have a second charge hanging over them), we saw the impact on all teams in this January transfer window just gone, as most clubs tightened their belts. But the most important point to note from the announcement yesterday was the confirmation from the club that they are continuing to be compliant with FFP.

Ironically enough the rules around FFP are that you are allowed to make a £105million loss over a three-year period, so just the fee equivalent for a certain Mr Rice, wouldn’t you know!

But in reality the club will be very mindful of needing to turn that around for next year and of course continued involvement in the Champions League will certainly help that. In terms of the three year period I’m not an expert, but the good folks at the AST have some clever accountants who are pretty accurate and in August of last year they published their best guess of the three year rolling period. The COVID year was £127million loss, the year to May 2022 was £45million loss, then this announcement is £52million. That would seem like Arsenal are in sticky position but when you think that this includes the COVID era in which football clubs were given a little more leeway, it suggests that perhaps Arsenal are in an okayish shape, but it does make you realise that a lot of this is probably predicated on that Champions League money.

Again though, at this juncture I’d point out that I am far away from being any kind of football money expert, so you’re better getting the detail from the likes of Kieran at Swiss Ramble over here.

That Champions League money feels like it was quite essential though. Arsenal will have that to add to the coffers and suggest that Arsenal will have received at least £23.75million (I did a conversion online from Euro’s to pounds) just from their four wins and a draw in the group stage, followed by the £13.37million that you get just for being in the competition. This website here spells it out but it looks like Arsenal will have received around at least £54million regardless of what happens with the Porto result. So should Arsenal qualify for that, there will be another £9million coming our way, as this website highlights with the prize money. So straight away you can see the difference between Champions League and Europa League; Liverpool’s prize money breakdown looks like it’s closer to £11million at this stage. That’s a big drop and you can see why the step in to the Champions League and then continued involvement in the competition is so important. Arsenal’s money men will have been very happy with the team last season.

So whilst Arsenal had to keep their January powder dry, so to speak, you’d expect that should we confirm another season in the group stages of the competition next year, there will be more money to be spent and a club that is a lot more comfortable about having no issues with FFP.

As fans we don’t look at the balance sheet very much – well most of the people I call Arsenal friends don’t, but when you start to see things like what has happened in the Premier League with Forest and Everton, you realise that these details matter. Arsenal’s success and continued involvement at the top table will enable us to dig deeper in to the transfer market this summer and that, in turn, with further strengthen the squad. Just look at the Declan Rice move. I know we amortise the value of the player over the lifetime of the contract, but I would be surprised if Arsenal would have been able to afford Declan Rice, had we not have gotten Champions Legaue. There’s an argument that the player might not have wanted to come as strongly had we have failed in that target too, but the numbers wouldn’t have looked like they were working out anyway, I suspect. What’s also a bit of a mindbender is that if you think about the timeline of how things progressed with us starting to talk to Rice just over a year ago, Arsenal must have been pretty confident in January that top four was in the bag, otherwise, why would you even bother trying to talk to Rice and his representatives? We need this team to be successful because we all want to see a great Arsenal side winning trophies, but the bank balance also needs a successful Arsenal too.

I think that’ll be me done for today, as I’ve got a fair bit of work on, but I’ll be back tomorrow with the usual musings. You have yourself a good one.

I was in the Algarve over the weekend and so didn’t have much chance to pen any thoughts, but as it was an international weekend that kind of worked out well for me, because Eddie Nketiah first England appearance aside in the last 20 minutes of the friendly against Australia, there wasn’t really anything exciting going on that is worth talking about. Well, not in the men’s game, but in the women’s match against Aston Villa at The Emirates it was. I didn’t watch it as I couldn’t get coverage and I was on my way to the airport, but it sounds like they took a leaf from the men’s team and dropped a couple of wonderful last minute goals to turn the game around.

Honestly Arsenal Football Club, can’t you just make it easier for us by just going 3-0 up in the first 30 minutes of games please!?!

Ultimately though I guess they got the win and their season needs to kick off now, because the WSL doesn’t seem like it’s like the men’s game; there seems to be less margin for error and even a couple of defeats scuppers the chances of winning the league it seems. Arsenal dropping points at home to Liverpool and away to United might already see them do that. Last season Chelsea lost twice and drew once to win the league. The season before that it was Chelsea with two defeats and two draws and before that it was three draws and one defeat. So with Arsenal on 1-1-1 already, you kind of feel they probably need to win their next 10 to 12 matches to be sure of having a short of winning the league in the season.

It’s a bit like Rugby in that sense; you don’t tend to get too many upsets and the gulf between the top tier teams and the next ones down is quite large. I watched some bits of the England vs Fiji game yesterday but didn’t see the end. Apparently it was a great game at the end and really tense, but ultimately England went through. I tend to flick on the Six Nations in February each year and it’s the same; Italy always finish last and are the whipping boys.

I guess the counter argument to that, however, is that you can see the same in the Premier League. It is all very well talking about the Leicester’s of the football world, but look at the winners of the last few major competitions in our country. For the Premier League in the last 10 year’s it has been City six times, Chelsea three times, Liverpool once and Leicester City once. In the FA Cup it has been Arsenal four times, City twice, Chelsea once, Liverpool once, then Leicester and Wigan once. Then in the League Cup we have seen City win it six times, United win it twice, Chelsea once and Liverpool once. So for all the talk from me of the WSL being one in which the margins and gulf is too massive, it isn’t like we get different winners of the competitions in the men’s game.

What we’re talking about here, however, is the sheer volume of games and when you add in so much volume of games, you inevitably get a greater probability of upsets. If there were 38 games in the WSL with three other competitions that the players have to play in, would there be more margin for error for those bigger teams? Would there be a higher probability of shock results? Probably. But I doubt there will be that many more games added in for the women’s game. If anything, the talk should be more about reducing the number of games in the men’s game. That won’t happen now. The genie is out of the bottle and the powers that be aren’t going to kill the Golden Goose that is the Premier League. There is money to be made in football matches and when that happens you don’t reduce the opportunity to make more money if you can. It is why we are seeing more and more football matches. It is why they’ve started to make concessions like the five subs rule; they know that players have been dropping like flies when it comes to injuries and as a result they are trying to make concessions without biting the hand that feeds it.

I am just a simple football fan, I have no immediate answers, other than cutting the number of bloody international matches that are played each season. This season alone has barely got started and yet we’ll already be on our third international break come mid November. I’d cut everything and then just have them play no friendlies, just the main fixtures that mean something for the World Cup and Euros. I’d bin the UEFA League thingy they have, as that’s a waste of time, then have smaller groups that need to qualify. But I’m biased because I can’t be arsed with internationals. Give me an uninterrupted English Premier League season all day long, thank you very much.

Sorry, getting a rambly-ranty today, so I’ll probably stop for now and check back in with you guys tomorrow. Maybe there will be some interesting Arsenal-related content coming through. And not the kind of ‘interesting’ where it’s bad, like one of our players’ legs have fallen off. The kind of interesting like how we find out that all of our potentially injured players are actually all now fighting fit ahead of Chelsea on Saturday evening.

Catch you all tomorrow.

It is the curse – or gift depending on how you see it – of this blogger that I spent half an hour yesterday writing about how we need to shift this ‘bad seller’ look and low and behold we’re making some moves. Albeit not exactly the big volume and big cash we’d have hoped for.

There was some pictures earlier in the week about players training away from the normal squad and I queried why you would do that, but for Balogun and Tierney you can understand why that might be the case. For the Scotland international, Real Sociedad have agreed a loan deal which pays his wages and also gives us a small fee, but ultimately we’re kicking the can down the road because nobody wanted to buy him this summer. I find that surprising and a little sad because he’s a really good footballer, but you just have to hope that this move is an overwhelming success. He admitted in the All or Nothing video that he got homesick living in London, so lord knows what he’s going to make of moving to Basque country and having everyone speak a different language. Hey, the pintxos are good and on the outer skirts of town the brilliant Casa Julian is well worth a visit. But the football will be very different and if it doesn’t work for KT then we’re going to find ourselves with a player who has a year left on his deal and whose value has dropped even more.

I guess if that’s the only club willing to put down an offer serious enough for Arsenal to consider, it is what it is, but I will be sad when it happens. KT has been nothing but the model professional.

The other news which is expected to go through this weekend is Balogun to Monaco for around £38.5million. That in itself is an ok deal, but if the player was coming the other way we’d be paying double that, so I really hope the ‘final details’ that all of the journo’s have been reporting is about sell on or buy back clauses. Because if he kills it in Monaco this season, I’d bet you a steak dinner that Monaco will be selling him back to an English club for £75million in a year’s time.

In that event, knowing that Arsenal have a ‘first dibs’ and a buy back for say, £50million, I’d be more than happy to see. But I would be stunned if Flo doesn’t make his way back to England before the end of his career.

Go out there Flo, make a name for yourself, then come back home in a few years.

On to more positive news, which was that pictures have been emerging of Gabriel Jesus back in full training, which is very good to see. Eddie has done well to deputise; he scored on opening weekend and despite me having my frustrations in the Palace game with him, he still created the chance that led to our penalty, ran the channels well and was unlucky not to score when his shot cannoned off the post. He’ll play this weekend I suspect and I’m good with that. Hopefully he scores and gives Mikel some thinking time, because after the international break it’ll be United at home and I would imagine that Gabriel Jesus will be ready and waiting for that game.

We’ll get an update on player availability at some stage in the day today and hopefully we’ll get an update on Zinchenko, because with Timber and Tomiyasu both unavailable, we really need confirmation that he can play 90 minutes tomorrow against the Cottagers. He did come on against Palace and he supposedly got 60 minutes in the friendly against Luton that was behind closed doors just over a week go so you’d hope there are no issues, but we do need that confirmation from the boss and I hope we get it today.

The other thing on the official site that I quite liked reading was Trossard’s interview about how he’s settled in since January. We’ve heard this a few times, but isn’t it still nice to see players come in and talk about how the culture that Arteta is built is a ‘family’ feel about it, eh? I mean, we have a dog, they all go out for meals together, they probably all get told to come in and have their dinners and stop playing football on the common at 6pm together too. It’s nice. It warms the cockles of one’s heart and the fact that even players like him have helped the new recruits like Declan Rice settle in, it’s really good to see.

That kind of mindset and “we’re all together” approach is what helps to foster that unity. That culture within the dressing room is essential if you want to get maximum productivity from your players and that is why it is important that any new player coming in embraces this approach. Some players are in competition with each other, but the mentality still has to be “for the good of the club”.

We also got another player talking about how Arteta is on another tactical plane to anyone they know before. We’ve had Rice talk about re-learning football, this Trossard interview and even if you go right back to when Arteta arrived, David Luiz did an interview saying “this guy will be one of the greats in world football” or something similar. And he’s ours. There are still people who want to dig out every opportunity to have a pop at him, but those people are, thankfully now in the minority and hopefully can just be consigned to a corner of YouTube or some other social media platform in which real fans kind of ignore them. Yes he gets stuff wrong, yes he makes some decisions that some of us might not like, but you can hardly argue that in the last couple of year’s we haven’t been going in the right direction and Arteta is a massive part of that.

And on that positive and happy note I’m going to call time on today’s Arsenal thought proceedings. For a bit of bonus content have a look at James’ Same old Arsenal preview podcast, in which he and JJ talk all things Fulham tomorrow.

Just getting in to the lingo for KT’s move to Newcastle, as apparently they’re ‘back in the hunt’ for the full back. The supposed reason they haven’t already gone in for him – given they are looking at signing a left back – is that they want to ensure they are complying with financial fair play rules. Which is interesting given that other financially doped clubs in the Premier League seem to agree that FFP isn’t really worth the paper it is printed on. You’ve got Man City who have 115 charges which, by the radio silence of it all, probably means that’ll go away with nobody seemingly able to enforce it. Then there’s Chelsea, who have just bid £35million for Olise, which they will add to the £53million they’re paying for Lavia and £277million they’ve already spent this summer alone. Add to that the £524.8million they spent last season and we have just the £889.8million spent on players in just over a year since last summer. With £58million recouped last summer/January, as well as the £218.9million this summer (yeah, all above board, that), that puts them just the £612.9million overspent. But that’s ok, because they have a totally above board sponsorship deal with an American tech firm nobody has heard of (Infinite Athlete) who are linked to Clearlake Capital for something north of £40million. It’s interesting that this new company formed one month ago out of a business called Tempus Ex Machina, has an annual turnover of $15million, yet they are happy to stump up $51million dollars per annum for a sponsorship deal with Chelsea.

Seems Legit, right?

Quite why the Premier League are sat there happy to see a club like Chelsea behave like this is beyond me. They will have better investigative people than me, some random fan who did some Googling and found countless links to stories like the above, or this one in which Chelsea are also on a UEFA watch list for FFP. Why are the Premier League seemingly incapable  – or just not interested – in dealing with this approach? Where has the sporting integrity gone?

To the dogs, that’s where. According to their last accounts Chelsea made £481million in revenue as this article talks about here. My back-of-a-fag-packet calculations (and again, I must tell you I am just a fan doing five minutes of Googling) says that they lost £121million in their last accounts, with that only getting worse because of all of the signings and lack of return. So we’re talking a £121million loss added to the £612.9million overspend in transfers, and the world is all supposed to just say “yeah, this is fine”.

Sort it out, Premier League. Just make things a bit more of a level playing field. I get it, the bigger clubs will always have more money and therefore the playing field may never truly be ‘level’, but what I’m looking at here from the outside in, is a club who are essentially bending every possible rule they can to gain a competitive advantage. Where is the sporting integrity in that?

Anyway, I don’t want to talk about that horrendous football club any more, so let’s go back to the Kieran Tierney to Newcastle rumours. The thing is, I don’t even hate the idea of it being a loan move, if we get a guarantee that the deal happens next summer. We’ve just done it with David Raya and the noises from journos who know is that the points in which the option is triggered to make it happen are pretty realistic. There is expectations that this deal will just go through, so it’s basically an obligation in most by name by the sounds of it. So why don’t we do the same with KT? A £3million loan deal, obligation to buy next season for £35million, then Newcastle get their guy, comply with regulations, we get the cash but on an ‘eventually’ deal.

The only sticking point might be if Arsenal basically need the money now to bank it on the book values so that we are offsetting some of the deals we’ve already brought in this summer. If we don’t get actual cash for KT this summer, whilst it’s fine for the next window in 2024, it probably means we have to sell one extra player that we didn’t think we’d have to sell this summer. We’ve all talked about the fact we aren’t going to get big cash for the likes of Cedric, Pepe, Holding, etc, so unless Arsenal can do some kind of deal for one of our other players for decent money, I suspect that we may even get a surprise sale. Could that be somebody like a Smith Rowe? Potentially. If we need to balance the books – which you’d have to assume we do because we don’t fiddle systems like certain clubs – then you’d have to say that it’s probably on the cards. You can see why we’re holding out for £50million for Balogun. If the plan was to recoup circa £100million in fees this summer and most of that was predicated on a Balogun, Tierney and Xhaka set of sales for £50million, £35million and £20million respectively, then having that KT deal turn in to a £3million loan deal suddenly doesn’t seem as attractive, because you have to sell another decent squad player for at least £30million.

But this is why Edu is paid the big bucks. It is his job to find a solution and he has to do that sooner rather than later. The pressure is on for sales now, so he has to be maximising the price for our fringe players.

Back tomorrow with some more waffle.

Laters peeps.

And clearly that’s the case for Kieran Tierney too, if rumours of a potential loan deal to Real Sociedad are true. I mean, there are worse places in the world to spend a year on loan, with the food and drink of San Sebastian being absolutely top notch. The weather will certainly be better than it is here, but if these noises of a loan with a Spanish club are true, it does feel a little weird. That’s because during the All or Nothing series he did speak quite openly of being a little homesick when he got to London. He brought one of his friends down to make him feel less homesick and it took him a while to get settled in. With that being the case, I don’t know what a move to Sociedad will do to help him feel more at ease? At least in the UK they speak the same language and a flight up to Glasgow must be, what, an hour max?

Heading off to a country in which he doesn’t speak the language, isn’t as familiar with the culture and if even further away from Glasgow feels like an odd move to me. Perhaps it is just spurious paper talk and indeed even today I’ve seen one of the gutter rags suggesting that West Ham might be interested in his services. If that’s the case then it makes a little more sense, although the idea of West Ham coming along and bidding for one of our players is enough to make any Arsenal fan chuckle.

Oh, you can have Tierney alright, but you ain’t havin’ him cheaply, you can count on that.

I think most of us now know that his time is up though. I’ve always had a soft spot for the Scot, but it has been clear for some time that his profile doesn’t quite fit what Arteta needs and when you have Jurrien Timber putting in a master class like he did against City at Wembley last weekend, it doesn’t feel like KTs route back to starting left back at Arsenal feels even more further away. He needs a move, we probably do for the right money and to bring down the size of the squad, so now it is on Edu to get a deal that works for all parties.

And this is where Edu needs to earn his crust. It has been too obvious to shunt Tierney off to Newcastle but that appears to be too obvious a move and now that other suitors have come along, this should be one that we should really to be looking to get over the line. I’ve seen rumours of an Arsenal expectation of £30million and I really don’t think that is unreasonable; a Scottish international, well liked amongst Arsenal fans, two year’s ago was an integral part of the team and at 26 he still has many good years ahead of him; that is more than fair market price for the player. I just hope this can be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. If it could be an overseas team then even better, although I don’t see how that loan deal happens unless there is an obligation to buy at the end, which is probably not something Sociedad would be willing to countenance.

So what else is going on in the Arsenal world, eh?

Well, how about Gary Neville admitting on a Sky Sports fan show that these new rules around managers shouting at referees has been brought about with Mikel Arteta in mind? If ever you wanted an example of a club that is very often ‘made an example of’, then there you have it. We’ve got a pundit saying he’s spoken to people in the game who have admitted that Arteta has been a chief protagonist, when we’ve seen the best part of the last five years of Jurgen Klopp screaming in assistants faces, with an article her FROM MAY THIS YEAR referencing that he does it. But no, it’s definitely all Mikel’s fault. Saint Jurgen can never be punished, can he? After all, he gives great interviews and soundbites.

Hmm…interesting that…Jurgen likes to give a good soundbite and the media love to fawn over him, whereas Mikel is a little more deadpan and gives little away in his pressers, yet one manager is highlighted as a problem where the other one gets away scot free. Hmm…interesting….

I am going to be watching with a keen eye this weekend to see how many referees book managers for complaining, because I can imagine Mikel will get the spotlight thrown on him whatever he does.

But do you know what? That’s ok. Let them come. Maybe it fosters an ‘us against them’ mentality amongst fans, players and the staff at the Arsenal. As long as we remain united as a collective, let them come at us, bro.

There’s still some stuff rumbling along re: Balogun to Monaco, but at £34million I don’t think it’s worth much debate over to be honest with you. So until they come back with something sensible then I think Arsenal are well advised to ignore. If Balogun bags another 22 goals in the French league for Monaco next season, I would bet you any money in the world that they would want £80million for his services.

I think that’s pretty much it for today; the Raya announcement is expected soon, which I think means the Turner deal will also go through. Then the goalkeeping stuff gets really interesting. I think I love Ramsdale even more when I read his comments on the situation too, which you have have a look at over at Arseblog News.

Right, I’ll wrap things up for today I think. Another day in the Big Smoke – with life now being hybrid and remote working it feels weird doing two days in a row!

Catch you all tomorrow.

I did think it was a little weird that there wasn’t a picture of him there and with it being a midweek there probably wouldn’t have been too many people around, so it could have been a relatively nice and low-key affair, but I guess he has other commitments with FIFA that kept him away. Still, would have been nice to get a quote from him and see a couple of pics of him smiling.

He’s done the whole ‘back to watch a game at the Emirates as a fan’ thing and I would have thought now that particular ‘thing’ was moved out of the way, he’d be open to the idea of returning a bit more, but I’m not sure whether we’ll see too much of him in the next few years if I’m honest. We’ve all seen the Wenger documentary and in it he does talk in a way in which you can tell he was hurt by the way it all ended, but as much as we all loved him, surely deep down he knew it had to end at some time and as many of us have mentioned countless times, he probably stuck around a little too long. But let’s not pick at old wounds; his statue is up, he deserves it, we can go back to loving the man who achieved so much and this is a token from the club that shows it.

Back to the most pressing matters at the club, which is for outgoings, as Arteta himself has already said we have too many players and some need to exit. We have 30 on the first team books I think and now that the team are back in Blighty and prepping for the Monaco friendly on Wednesday, we really do need to see Edu getting a wriggle on with the outbound movement now. We all know the names – Runarsson, Cedric, Holding, Tavares, Trusty, Lokonga (shame – I liked him), Pepe and probably Balogun (again – another shame) make up eight players that Edu must be asking around if there are any takers. Maybe you could chuck KT in on that as well if the right money comes in. I’m sure the club will need to recoup some money for these players but unless there is something that happens soon, we might end up seeing a bit of a fire sale.

And I wonder if that was part of the plan from the American owners perspective? I doubt it very much. I suspect the administration team at The Arsenal approached KSE and told them that they need to buy to get themselves set up for the season first, before they start to offload players and recoup some of the outlay that has already been made. That is what I imagine the pitch would have been anyway, because Arsenal can’t keep spending the sort of cash we have spent without bringing some dollar in. We’ve got circa £20million from the Xhaka sale, but if I was a guessing man I would have thought that Edu might have earmarked around £100million in player sales to make the ol “net spend” numbers appeal a little less excessive. If my speculation is correct, then you’re talking about £80million needed across the nine players I’ve mentioned above. That’s an average of £8.9million incoming from each player and when you put it like that then it doesn’t seem too unrealistic. But again, as I’ve just said:

Edu needs to get a wriggle on.

And he probably needs to do it with some of the easier sales first, which probably means KT or Balogun. If we get their respective market values then you’re probably taking two thirds of the required cash in amount right there. But the problem we have is that it all feels a little too quiet. The KT sale is a weird one, because it seems like everyone has already just earmarked him for either Newcastle or Celtic, but it doesn’t feel as though we’ve had any proper concrete links other than a bit of paper talk, which would suggest that there is no real immediate solution looking to happen. People have ut two and two together and just assumed Newcastle would stump up £35million, but there isn’t enough ‘smoke’ around this fire to suggest that’ll happen.

The Balogun stuff feels like it has gone quiet too. There were those Inter links, but apparently they are only thinking of something around the £30million mark and as we’ve already heard, Arsenal aren’t even going to countenance that for a guy who blitzed the French league last season.

So we are waiting for some movement right now. Perhaps now all the US touring is done we’ll see Edu making a few European trips to sort out some deals, but it does feel like it needs to happen asap.

Edu mate – get a wriggle on. 

Arteta will want his squad all in place, he will want his core of 25 all sorted and that means a minimum of five need to make moves. Hopefully that happens sooner rather than later.

Right, that’s me sorted for today. I’m off to pray to the weather gods that the sun stays out this afternoon so I can get the BBQ lit.

Catch you all tomorrow.

I decided to go for a little bit of ribeye steak last night with homemade triple cooked chips and, as a result, drank a little too much Napa Valley red before going to bed and having to get up early this morning for a run. Exorcising the demons didn’t feel great at 6am, let me tell you that much; but I’ve got the endorphins in my system all fired up now and I’m excited about The Arsenal.

That’s because on Saturday about four hours after I blogged, we announced Declan Rice was confirmed and as a result my Saturday afternoon was spent absorbing just about every piece of content I could possibly lay my hands on. Videos, podcasts, blogs, opinion pieces, pictures and interviews on the official site, the lot. I was immersed. And despite the fact we’ve all spoken and read about a billion things on the internet with regards to this transfer, it still gets you giddy when you see the player himself in red and white.

Then later on Saturday I saw the Athletic deep dive on how the transfer went down and I gotta tell ya, it got me even more excited, because it opened the lid a little on the importance of the Rice deal not just for the way we are going to line up next season, but also how it impacts other plans, like the arrival of Kai Havertz. I think we’ve all been given a little glimpse of where Havertz is going to play, but when you read things like that you start to realise that actually, this is all part of a very coherent strategy; we are no longer scrabbling around trying to find a David Luiz because Laurent Koscielny has gone on strike at the club. We aren’t desperate to bring in a Demba Ba on transfer deadline day because we’ve left ourselves a little too short in attack. We have our targets, we have our plans, we want everyone ‘on board’ by the summer tour and we want to get those players knowing exactly how they are setting up from day one of the Premier League in a few weeks time.

The players departed yesterday for the summer tour and the squad that was announced was a pretty strong one to be fair. No place for the likes of Nwaneri or Lewis-Skelly and only Cozier-Duberry is a player who has joined the team on the plane from the youth set up. The rest are more senior pro’s, although Alex Runarsson has joined the travelling squad, probably because we needed three ‘keepers and Turner isn’t around at the moment as he was on international duty.

No place for Cedric or Pepe though, so I would assume that pretty much all but confirms that they’ll both be looking to find clubs elsewhere in the coming weeks. There were some noises a few weeks back about how Cedric wants to fight for his place and I’m sure with the vibe at the club right now that is of course the case that he’d feel that, but if you’re not being including on tours like this then you surely must know that your card is marked and you might as well find somewhere that you will get regular game time. I doubt we’ll get any decent money for either of those players, but this is the biggest indication that we’re looking to move on players. There will be clubs out there willing to take a punt, although not for any real value and if you look at Pepe as an example, you’d think we’d be hard pressed to get more than £10 – £15million for a player who cost us £72million just four years ago.

The other absence that I thought was interesting – and potentially telling – was Thomas Partey not being with the team. There was a note saying that Partey and Smith Rowe are set to link up with the squad later in the week, but I wonder if that is because there is some smoke behind the fire of the rumoured interest from Saudi Arabia? Partey played in Nurnberg and he’s clearly somebody that Arteta is happy to use. We all know he tailed off a little towards the end of the season but you can’t just dismiss a guy who has been one of our transformative players in recent seasons (when fit) and although I’ve seen some Arsenal fans suggest that with Rice we may not need him any more, I’m not sure I can fully get behind that line of thinking now.

If, however, he’s looking to make that megabucks move and there is something going on, then it makes sense why he wouldn’t be travelling with the squad this week because there’s been no noises about a potential injury. Odegaard and Trossard picked up knocks in Germany but they have both travelled, so Partey must surely be talking about a big money move. And you’d expect the only way Arsenal are letting him have those conversations are if we are getting a pretty decent fee for the guy. If you’re talking about recouping all of the £45million outlay we spent on him, for example, then you have to be looking at that as a deal that has to be done.

The key though will be in ensuring that we have cover. Could that be Lavia? Liverpool are sniffing around him but haven’t made a move, so if Arsenal were to be pushing for this Partey exit then you’d wonder if we’d move quickly to see if we could get that done. But it feels like a lo of ducks have to be lined up for that to happen, so we’ll have to wait and see.

That’ll be me for today I think. We’ll be continuing our series on Wednesday this week with our ‘one in, one out, one bangs’ on Wednesday night for the Same Old Arsenal podcast and I’ll post a link to where you can watch that tomorrow. Until then, you guys have yourselves a good one and I’ll catch thee all in the morrow.

Arsenal are – at the time of me writing this – still yet to officially confirm his arrival, but I suspect that will happen at some stage today. Probably as soon as I hit ‘publish’ knowing my luck. But that’s ok, because I have tomorrow to spend some time with some thoughts on the signing and finally wrap up this saga.

On the West Ham statement, I can kind of understand that they and Rice want to carefully stage manage the exit, which is why I understand that they wanted to ‘go first’ on the announcement. They want to be able to get the nice messages out from the fans and Arsenal and the PR team probably agreed; they want to be able to probably get a little bit of time between this announcement and Arsenal doing all of the video stuff, the behind the scenes, etc.

So I think I will leave the Rice chatter now too, because yesterday the club confirmed Jurrien Timber and if you want to talk about how to properly manage an exit with a lot of class, look no further than what they did yesterday. It was well managed, it tugged on the heartstrings, there was a clear communication between Arsenal and Ajax and the way in which it was handled made me think that we’ve got a really great kid in Timber:

And that speaks a lot to the type of player that I think Arteta wants in his team. No mega superstar that is going to swan in with a solid gold Rolls Royce feeling like he’s made it; we want players who are going to work hard to prove themselves, who are going to drive the team forward and have the motivation and hunger to improve, as well as the technical ability.

The signing is a welcome one. It isn’t in a position of the pitch that I thought we’d needed it if I’m honest, but when you look at his versatility, coupled with the fact that last season we lost both Saliba and Tomiyasu at crucial stages, then Timber coming in gives us an uplift in quality and that depth that Arteta must have been craving since we lost out on the league last season. He’ll give a different dynamic, a progressive, ball carrying, good passing, defender and I suspect he can probably expect to get plenty of matches this season.

I also think that this is the kind of move that shows that Arteta is willing – and will – be rotating a little more. You don’t spend £34million on a player and then tell them to sit down until White or Saliba are injured. I think Timber will be getting weekend and midweek minutes and I think we will need to be prepared for that ourselves. Picking a team in the morning before a game is going to be a lot more difficult than last season and the season before that and I am absolutely here for it.

I watched just about as much Timber videos and stories as possible and although this transfer is flying under the radar a bit because of the Rice rumours, the more I read about this lad the more I think this could be a very astute move by Arsenal. When you’ve got players like Van Dijk saying that Timber is further ahead in his development than he was at that age, you know that potentially you’ve got an absolute star on your hands. It won’t be easy for Timber to break in though; this is a team that fought all the way to the end for the Premier League and has been very impressive defensively. I think it would probably be a stretch to expect him to walk in at right back or centre half, but certainly he’ll be earmarking some minutes when the Champions League kicks in in the latter parts of September. Until then it is obviously all about integrating him in to the team, getting him some pre season minutes, then getting him some minutes – maybe as a sub – in those opening weeks. But I think when he does get on, there will be plenty of us who will start to realise just how good he is.

The team travel to the States tomorrow I think, so I expect the squad to all be together and ready to fly off with two more newbies in the team. There will be plenty of press I suspect at some stage today because of Rice for that reason I suspect; it’d be a bit weird if they released images of Rice getting on the tour plane before the club have event announced it. So until we see some of those confirmations, I’ll leave it for today and catch you tomorrow.

Have a good one peeps.

It would suggest that he’s not got a place in the squad any more and is not part of Arteta’s plans, but to not even have him join the team is a little weird if you ask me. They have Runar Alex Runarsson in the travelling group and I think we can all agree he has no future at the club. He is behind Ramsdale, Turner and probably even Hein or Okonkwo in getting close to the Arsenal team. So why has he travelled but Pepe hasn’t?

There hasn’t been any noises about injury like there was from Sambi, so perhaps he has been told to stay away? Again, a little weird if so, if you ask me. We paid £72million for him, he still has a year on his contract and if we want to try and recoup anything for the player, surely we should take him on tour, right? We all know the season he had on loan at Lille was hardly a world beating one; 28 appearances, eight goals and one assist is hardly pulling up trees and there’s no surprise that Nice have decided against making this a permanent move. But surely he has value to somebody? Surely somebody wants to take a punt on a player who did show glimpses of great technique and showed flashes of skills that looked elite? It was only a couple of seasons ago that he had what many of us described as an indifferent season, whilst still bagging 16 goals and five assists in the Premier League and Europa League in a season. That’s got to be worth something, right?

I guess Arsenal have not had very much interest in a player whose rumoured salary is around the £140k-per-week mark. There aren’t many clubs on mainland Europe who would be prepared to take that on, but if Pepe is somebody who just wants to get back to playing football, surely he’d lower his wage demands to get a club interested in signing him? Let’s just say he halved his wage demands, for example, to £70,000-per-week. Even that to be fair would be a stretch for a mid-table French side, which is probably what he’d be looking at. I know wage websites you always have to take with a pinch of salt, but as an estimation I took the three clubs in France that finished ninth, tenth and 11th and had a look at their wage bills:

• Nice – highest player on the books now is Kasper Schmeichel on £65k-per-week (Pepe salary is lower than £140k because I think that’s what Nice paid of his wages)
• Lorient – Romain Faivre is the highest on £18k-per-week
• Reims – Balogun was the highest on £32k-per-week

So already I am starting to see why, if we want Pepe to go this summer, we probably aren’t getting a fee for him. I can’t see any of the big clubs taking him; there’s no money in Italy, so unless a Saudi bid comes in, I think a termination of his deal is likely. And that will mean Arsenal probably forking out close to £7million to terminate his contract and let him find another club. And when that happens I am sure there will be a few clubs willing to take a punt, only on their wage terms. I could see a club like Fiorentina, Roma, or maybe even Juventus have a sniff at the player if he was free, for example. When you look at their wage bills it feels like getting Pepe on a free feels more realistic. Fiorentina have a bunch of players on around the £40 – £50k-per-week mark. Roma have a load on north of that, whilst Juve too have a big squad they are trying to offload to make money. But getting a player in for free and paying him €70k-per-week wages wouldn’t be too much of a stress if they sold off one of their players on north of €100k-per-week like Chiesa, who has been rumoured to be attracting interest from a few clubs.

But for Arsenal to get any kind of deal from this they’d probably have to ‘mutual consent’ Pepe and that means paying him off. A ‘good’ deal in this instance is probably Arsenal not having to pay the full £7million in wages, to be honest. So if we gave him £5million to go away, then a Roma or Juve offered him a four year deal at £50k-per-week to start from next season, he’d make £5million from Arsenal which is akin to an extra £95k-per-week, which would offset the fact he’s taking a big pay cut next season, then the season’s afterwards he still secures himself a wage that is probably more realistically aligned to the outputs he’s shown so far in the last few seasons.

Everyone’s a winner, right?

This football contract lark is easy, yeah?

Of course there are so many variables here and it is certainly NOT as easy as I am making out, but I guess where I am at by the time I now come to the end of today’s blog, is that I can understand why Pepe might be training alone, I can understand why Arsenal might be looking to terminate his contract this summer and I can understand why ideally you want that to happen now. Equally, if nobody will come in for him but there is an option for another loan for a year in which a club takes on half of his wages, for example, that could work too. Let’s take a Roma for example, who may not want to sign up to a player for four years because of the financial risk. But if they paid half of his wages to test him for a season, at the end of the season if he has been a success they can sign him on a free contract. And for Arsenal, instead of having to pay out £5million for a player to go away, they have paid out around £3.5million for the season to cover half of his wages. They then let the player go next summer and they haven’t had to do a ‘mutual consent’ big pay off. It would be a kind of ‘win win’ for all parties.

Anyway, I’ve probably rabbited on about this enough for today, so I’ll stop there and let you get on with your day.

We’re podcasting tonight at the Same Old Arsenal pod at 7.30pm for our latest summer series ‘one in, one out, one bangs’ featuring my mates Woz and Ben. Give us a listen if you can here.

Catch you all tomorrow!

Why is he joining Arsenal? I hate them now so much. Why didn’t he go to Man City? That would have been better.

This kind of thought process confuses me. When did West Ham fans develop such a hatred of The Arsenal? This isn’t something I’ve ever seen before, it is purely arising – from what I can see – as a result of the impending transfer of Declan Rice to us.

I tried to break down in my head where West Ham fans might be frustrated, annoyed, cheesed off, with Arsenal and the way they have behaved and, to my mind, this is how the Rice situation has played out:

He stated late last year whilst away with England that he wanted to play in the Champions League, intimating that ideally it would be next season (Arsenal were top of the league at that stage and West Ham were in 16th).

At that stage if Arsenal were looking at their central midfield options they would have been sounding out a few players. As we know they must have also have sounded out Caicedo’s people, because we made a bid for him in January.

At some stage during that January period…

News broke out that Arsenal were interested in Rice and that he was impressed by Arteta and had been open to the idea of a move (Arsenal were still top of the league in January when this news broke)

In an ideal world nobody talks to anybody unless the club gives permission but if any Arsenal or West Ham fan thinks that any player currently at their club hasn’t even spoken to other clubs via agencies and intermediaries, then they are living on Cloud Cuckoo Land. If you think that I would recommend Sky’s “Deadline Day: Football’s Transfer Window” programme. In it you LITERALLY see agents talking to players about how “this club, this club and this club are interested in you, I have spoken to them” from the agent. It happens, it is football. We do it with players, we get it done to us (van Persie anyone? Cesc? Nasri? They will have all have had sweet nectar of promises poured in to their ears).

So with that in mind at that stage all Arsenal have done is work out if there’s any point in bidding and how interested the player is. And for it to come out publicly that he was very interested and impressed with Arteta, then there must have been quite positive feedback from the Rice camp.

So now we have a player saying he wants to play Champions League, a player with whom it was widely reported that he wouldn’t sign a new deal, interested in a club at the top of the league. Strip out the names if you want, just think of the circumstance. So, what next?

Rice has a brilliant end to the season, wins the club their first trophy in decades with them and West Ham – including David Moyes – talk about how he might leave the club, but he has to be on their terms and around £100million.

Then David Sullivan goes on national radio and admits they have to grant him a move, he’s done so much for the club, he’s a great kid, he has turned down an offer for them that would have got him an extra £10million in wages, to stay at West Ham.

Why did he turn down that deal? He wants to play Champions League football.

Does he have Champions League football next season at Arsenal? Yes.

Is there a guarantee he will play Champions League football the season after? Of course not, but from the end of next season we have five teams in the revised format. That increases his chances. In the last seven seasons Arsenal have finished at least fifth four times. And this has – we as Arsenal fans all admit – been some of the worst of times until the upturn we saw in the last two season’s under Arteta. If you go back 20 year’s, Arsenal have finished fifth or above in 16 of the last 20 seasons. So with that in mind, if he’s looking at the numbers, he’s probably thinking we have a pretty good chance of playing Champions League football in more than just next season. It is not a guarantee, but it is a pretty good shot.

So that’s another thing ‘ticked off’ that has been factually spoken about by Rice and that West Ham and their fans have known about for eight months at least.

What about the fee then? Should West Ham fans be annoyed about the fee?

If anything, I’d argue myself that they should be pretty happy about that situation. I think Rice is a superb player, will be great for us, but I think he’s probably more like an £80million player. So Arsenal could have potentially overpaid. If you are going to lose a player, for the reason’s I’ve stated above, at least console yourself in the fact you get good money to reinvest. But I have still seen West Ham fans ignore that. That was one of my biggest annoyances when we lost Cesc; his market value at the time was probably closer to around £40million. We got around £29million for him I think. So we lost out captain for around a quarter of his value. West Ham are losing their captain for £20million over his value (for context, Transfermarkt has Rice at €90million / £76.9million. I know that isn’t an exact science, but as a rough benchmark I think it is usually around 10% within the fair market value myself). So why are they still annoyed? If they are sensible they could probably buy two or three really good players and build bigger and better for next season with that money. They could be in an ever better position than they were WITH Rice in the side.

But how about how Arsenal behaved? Has that annoyed the Hammers faithful? Or how Rice has behaved?

Again, I’m struggling to see how, here. The player himself has said nothing. No interviews in the press, no leaks to the media about how he has ‘begged’ West Ham to let him go, nothing. He has played this out as West Ham have wanted and one of the results of that is that they have managed to inflate the price to their asking price, despite the noises coming out now that Rice only wanted to go to The Arsenal, with just a year left on his deal (and yes, I know there was an additional year to extend but that hadn’t been triggered as of when this all started).

But what about Arsenal? Have they behaved poorly? Again, I don’t think so. What we’ve heard is that they waited until after the Europa Conference League final before making our first bid, we bid higher than our club record bid first time, before going back twice more to eventually give West Ham their asking price. This deal has dragged on because Arsenal and West Ham couldn’t agree payment terms, but we’re talking about ONE HUNDRED MILLION POUNDS here. That’s a NINE figure sum from a club that aren’t backed by a nation state or oil oligarch. That’s a HUGE sum of money and Arsenal just don’t have that kind of Scrooge McDuck vaults of cash to drop on West Ham’s lap.

Paying in stages is the norm these days too. Todd Boehly has made that and amortisation a common word in the football lexicon these days.

So here we are. I still remain confused with some of the anger of West Ham fans. But maybe it is just a small minority of them online that are raging at their timelines. Perhaps the majority of them are quite ok with what has happened. I have seen some suggest going to City would have been better for them, which I find bizarre, but maybe that is a London thing. But that is another factor as to why Rice wanted to stay; be close to his family and friends.

What are your thoughts on this? And if there’s the odd West Ham fan reading this too, do you have a hatred of Arsenal that is now bigger than CHelsea or the Scum? If you do I’d love to know why.

Catch you all tomorrow.

Quick P.S – last night I did the Same Old Arsenal pod for our summer series of ‘one in, one out, one bangs’. I had Mark and Kevin on and it was great talking to them. Have a watch / listen here if you fancy it.

**Shakespearian aside moment**

Fabrizio was speaking yesterday on his channel – I think it was a YouTube recording but can’t be arsed to go hunting as I’m doing today’s ramblings on the Met Line heading in to the City so only have finite time – saying that despite some rumours that both West Ham and Arsenal are about to walk away from this deal, that isn’t the case and both parties are ‘nearly there’. So when this transfer is ‘hopefully’ complete, we really will have gone through all of the many complicated stages of any deal, played out very publicly. Even as I said yesterday that there is no mystery in football any more because there were leaks that the Rice video had already been completed, we then get stuff about the deal nearly being off, before Fabrizio steps in with a ‘chill yer beans’ moment for those Arsenal fans (Like me) currently devouring any new angle.

********************************

And it is ‘new angles’ that I wanted to touch on today because as I was saying, having listened to the chaps on the AOP this morning, I couldn’t help but be surprised that there have been these rumours surfaced about us being in for Tchouameni this summer for around the £70-£80million mark. Now, I am not going to look a delicious gift horse in the mouth and scoff at this player given his pedigree and the fact that many of us would have LOVED him last summer (I gotta mate Giles who I know was hot on him), but I just can’t see Madrid parting with a player with still so much football in his legs to be paid. To be fair to the AOP lads I think they effectively said the same thing, but it just got me wondering why we are still be linked with some of these big names. If we get a deal for Rice and Timber over the line, we’ll have hit up a cool £200million. Now, I know we have some sales to make and that could help to bring the ol’ ‘Net Spend FC’ trope back in to play, but I couldn’t see us a) prizing him from Madrid, and b) having enough cash to go that big.

It is nice to be linked to these players, but unless something massive happens in the outgoings side, then a deal like this feels like one too far for us if I’m honest.

I also think it is why I’m not sure we’ll end up getting Lavia. Great prospect, good talent, but dropping another £40million+ on a guy like that? Feels a little un-Arsenal like to me. And I think we can all see that Arteta is being backed and the club is making some impressive moves, but I just don’t see how this spending splurge continues after we’ve got Rice and Timber over the line. I suspect the noises to quieten down a little bit and whilst we’ll continue to be linked with players, I think the focus will go to moving out players.

And that could be happening sooner than we think, as yesterday it emerged that Granit Xhaka to Leverkusen looks to be entering the final stages. And I gotta tell ya, I find it amazing how we’ve gone from a guy who this time two years ago there were questions about a Roma bid for around €7million I think, to now Leverkusen stumping up a cool €25million to secure his signature. Why the inflation? Well, I guess that’s what happens when you are good. Clubs come to you and try a little bit of shifty business and you simply bat them away. Leverkusen were rumoured to be on the verge of doing a €15million deal at the end of the season if the stories were to be believed. But perhaps Arsenal have realised that if you want to be seen as one of the Premier League ‘Big Dawgs’ then you need to puff out your chest a little more and when you get the eyes from a Euro bloc club, don’t blink.

That’s what it sounds like has happened here and the result could be that we’ve bagged an extra €10million based on what we thought we’d get, for a guy turning 31 in a few months time who only has one year left on his deal. It still has to happen, but if all of these details play out, then you have to tip your hat off to Edu.

It also should make us a bit more bullish for the sales for the rest of the summer. You want Balogun? Sure thing – drop £50million on our laps. Oh, West Ham, you want Eddie? No probs, but that’s a minimum of £40million I’m afraid. Sambi Lokonga to Burnley? Go play with Vincent, Sambs, but Burnley need to give us the £17.5million we paid for him when we signed him.

These are the kinds of moves that I want to see us making. I want to here more stories like the Xhaka one and given we are only just at the start of the summer with clubs having players return to training now, the signs feel good and bode well for us.

Despite all of this though, I still don’t see us making another big money move. And for me I feel like anything over £40million is pretty big. So whilst I’d love us to keep our eyes open for a good deal or two, I’m going to be happy with our lot providing Rice and Timber get over the line in the next week.

That’s be the lot for me today. You guys have a good one and I’ll catch you all in the morrow.

Peace out.

So I think today I’ll keep that chatter short. I’ve given my thoughts, I’ve talked about City and what their plans might be and if they bid again today you’d expect West Ham to probably accept it because the payment terms will no doubt be better.

Whatever.

We either get him or we don’t, but I just want to talk about other things now, as Havertz is due to be announced today and there was even a leaked video of him doing his first interview in an Arsenal shirt. I suspect the club will announce that today at some stage. Then we’ll dive back in to some Havertz chat and what he said on the official site tomorrow.

Speaking of the official site, I saw that the club are offering up the opportunity to pay up front for match day programmes for the upcoming season. You can pay £119 for the lot if you’re based in the UK and if you count 19 Premier League games, three Champions League games and then maybe a few cups to make 25 matches, it works out at £4.76.

That’s not too bad given the price is now £4 per programme when you’re at the game, but I don’t think I’ll be partaking in the bulk purchase of the programmes. I’m a sporadic purchaser of programmes when I go to the games; I used to buy them all of the time up until I got my season ticket, but in the last few years I’ve scaled back a bit because I wasn’t properly reading them all. But I also used to buy them as a memento of me being at the game, a hard copy memory of a football match, but I am fortunate enough to go to the vast bulk of the football matches at The Arsenal these days, so I don’t feel like I need a memento of a game.

For the games that I do miss, I don’t think I want a programme to remind me of the match, so whilst it’s a good move from the club I think I’ll give it a pass.

There we go, managed to fill some online space NOT talking that much about transfers and specifically that lad from the East London team! But I’ll pause for today and be back tomorrow with more musings on anything that might get announced today.