Morning everyone.
There’s a long section on transfers in the new Arsecast Extra, recorded last night. We spoke a bit about Morgan Rogers, and his move to Chelsea (more on that anon), and Bruno Guimaraes. Yesterday, there was some reporting from the Arsenal press pack that Arsenal had opened talks with Newcastle about the Brazilian.
That was countered from the other side, with one journalist in particular taking umbrage at the idea of our interest, and the timing of it.
That’s an all-timer. Kevin Keegan was a brilliant player and a much loved figure in the game. The news of his passing this week was very sad, but the idea that there’s anything disrespectful about something as ordinary as a player transfer between to clubs is absurd. Then, after denying there was anything going on, the same bloke posted a story about how Arsenal were ‘stepping up’ their interest in the Newcastle captain. I swear, transfers make people lose their minds. This was the guy who insisted, more than once, that Alexander Isak was not for sale last summer, by the way, and we know how that turned out.
I have to say I am really curious to see how this one plays out, because I think Arsenal are under some extra pressure to get it done after losing out on Morgan Rogers. He was a main target, and whether you think the club were right to not pay that much or not, he was a player we wanted, put plenty of groundwork into behind the scenes, and he’s gone somewhere else. If, after a quite public, and slightly messy, pursuit of Bruno Guimaraes, we fail to complete this one, the optics really would not be great.
The question of valuation is such an interesting one. Arsenal apparently had a valuation for Rogers which was around the £80m mark, which is probably a figure most fans would have been more than comfortable paying for a 23 year old England international with a long contract and plenty of potential. But does that valuation stack up to the market reality now that certain deals have been done?
There’s clearly a connection between the £116m Man City paid for Elliot Anderson and the £117m Chelsea paid for Rogers, and reports that Aston Villa are now interested in Alejandro Garnacho should come as no surprise as both those clubs have engaged in financial shenanigans before. Nevertheless, if £80m for Rogers made sense when Arsenal were making their transfer plans, deals like Anderson, Sandro Tonali, and Matheus Fernandes have shifted the landscape.
For City, money is simply no object. There is no impediment to them spending as much as they like. Not even 115 charges. Sp*rs, meanwhile, are willing to overspend to get good players because they’re in a dreadful state after finishing 17th, so big fees and huge wages for those players are the only way they can attract half-decent talent to try and improve. The why of the spending is irrelevant though. The reality is that every club is now looking at those deals as a kind of benchmark, and we even saw yesterday that Crysencio Summerville is going to Saudi Arabia (admittedly a distinct destination), for a fee that could reach £70m. That’s what’s being paid for an average player from a Championship club.
So, let’s say Arsenal value Bruno at £60m and Newcastle want £80m, what do we do? I think there absolutely is merit in some measure of parsimony. You can’t just give the opposite side everything they want from the get-go, that’s not how negotiations work. At the same time though, are we at a point where we need to accept the reality of the market this summer? I think some of the prices paid for some of the players who have moved this summer are borderline insane, but if you want a Premier League ready international midfielder, there’s no way to get that cheap these days, even if he is 28 years of age. Which, by the way, I think ought to be a consideration for both Arsenal and Newcastle when they do, eventually, talk about a price for Guimaraes.
So, we’ll see what happens over the coming days and weeks. It is tough to operate in a market where you’re going to struggle to get what might be considered value for money, but if it’s the same for everyone, what choice do you have? Another thing I’m curious about is, now that Rogers has gone to the nastiest club in London (he mispronounced ‘biggest’), who else we’ve got in mind for the role Mikel Arteta has envisaged for him? We can’t have had all our eggs in that one basket, and we’ve shown before how we can pivot to a different target if we miss out on a particular player.
My hope is that as names like Rogers, Guimaraes and even Julian Alvarez have played out very publicly, we’re playing our other cards very close to our chest. There must be other targets, and while it’s always difficult to keep things under wraps these days when it comes to transfers, hopefully our planning and strategy is such that we see new names emerge as this post-World Cup part of the summer progresses. There are rumours of Christos Tzolis being announced today, by the way, but let’s see.
Ok, as I said there’s more on this in the Arsecast Extra which you can find below. Happy listening!
