We are just a couple of weeks into the transfer window but it seems like Arsenal are already struggling to make up ground on their rivals. With London rivals Chelsea winning the Champions League, one would think that alarm bells should have been sounding at the Emirates.
The first and fastest way to show some real intent would be the transfer window but as usual, the north Londoners are stumbling out of the blocks. Teams all over Europe are identifying, going after, and acquiring their targets. However, they began the window by losing out on Emi Buendia to Aston Villa, which to be honest, was a little embarrassing to put it nicely.
Now the Gunners are being linked to just about every player who plays football and it seems that their transfer plans are all over the place. Fans should be patient and ‘Trust the Process‘, as it is too early to be fair but when you see other clubs moving with efficiency and quickness in the window, it makes you think why such a big club cannot do the same.
One of the most frustrating things about the club is their transfer struggles and that too under different managers and leadership. A lot of fans, some Arsenal some not, seem to have this belief that recent struggles in the window are due to the fact that the club don’t have Champions League football.
This couldn’t be true because Arsene Wenger had Arsenal in the Champions League for 19 years straight from 1998 to 2017 and in about nine or ten of those years, the Emirates club have missed out on targets by moving too slow or by being cheapskates and not wanting to pay for players who would have possibly put the club back at the top.
This was evident in the final years of Wenger’s reign, he along with Ivan Gazidis and the Arsenal board were never able to acquire the striker that would have put the club in a great position. We can talk about the £40m and one pound bid for Luis Suarez or the countless links to Gonzolo Higuain and Karim Benzema.
A defensive midfielder was another position that was neglected over those years. Or how about the year Leicester City won the Premier League and the north Londoners finished second, but they were the only club in Europe’s big five leagues not to buy an outfield player. Seems as though that turned out to be a huge mistake.
The Emery, Sanllehi, and Mislintat era didn’t fare too better. Although they seemed to do more business than the previous regime, the majority of the signings have not worked out. Most of the signings are gone like Sokratis and Stephan Lichtsteiner and others such as Lucas Torreira and Matteo Guendouzi will almost certainly be sold this summer while we are still waiting to see William Saliba play his first game for the gunners.
They did get a couple of signings right with Kieran Tierney and Nicolas Pepe but even still, one is proving to be injury-prone while the other seems like he may be just finding his feet at the Emirates club.
The Arteta and Edu partnership is not off to the best of starts but it’s been decent. Gabriel seems like a good signing but the awful signing of Willian cancels that out. They did manage to tie down some of our young talents with the contract extensions of Saka and Martinelli while getting rid of some of the deadwood and freeing up some of the wage bill.
However, there is still more work to be done as far as that goes. The signing of Thomas Partey hasn’t had the expected impact but there is a feeling that the best is yet to come from him. At the end of the day, there is enough blame to go around for Arsenal’s poor transfer windows in recent years.
The Kroenke’s, the Arsenal board, previous managers, and the current director of football Edu along with Mikel Arteta all can take their share of the blame. There is hope that this summer, Arsenal can handle themselves like a proper big club in this transfer window. It has been beyond frustrating in recent years seeing the way the club has conducted itself when it comes to transfers. Josh Kroenke told us fans to ‘be excited’ so hopefully the Kroenke’s will stick to their word.
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