Compiled from headlines and links posted by individual websites. Gathered by Tony Attwood and the Untold team. If you spot some more, please email Tony@schools.co.uk and don’t forget we need the player’s name, his position, who he plays for at the moment, where you saw the story, and how much the player might cost. Don’t worry if you don’t have every detail, but as many of those as possible will help.
Untold Transfer News. For many seasons, we used to enjoy ourselves reporting the various transfers that were listed by multiple websites during the summer months, invariably ending up with the discovery that only three per cent of the players mentioned by the websites as moving to Arsenal actually arrived.
That failure rate of 97% didn’t mean that websites were making these stories up. For although that might be true in a few cases, it also seemed very likely that larger clubs would explore multiple possibilities in terms of player purchases, in order to keep the various selling clubs guessing – and indeed to keep prices lower.. After all, clubs that found themselves with a true gem on their hands might well want a very high price for him, but would also know that all players, especially in the less popular leagues, were just one crunching tackle away from having their transfer value chopped in half..
So it gave us a bit of fun each summer cataloguing these often fanciful stories, but then a couple of years ago we found that the websites that exist on running summer transfer tales were perhaps cleaning up their act by actually doing some real research, as the number of players listed each summer as coming to Arsenal declined.
Or, of course, it could be true that sites that existed primarily on transfer rumours were getting a bit embarrassed by the fact that only three per cent of the stories they ran turned out to be actually true.
Anyway, as a result, instead of ending up with over 100 players each summer window, all of whom were tipped as being on their way to Arsenal, the number sank and sank, and so running the occasional piece about players tipped to be coming to N5 got to be far less fun. So we dropped it.
But what with this being the summer and all, we thought we would take another look and see if anything had picked up. Could it be that without us making fun of the whole transfer window farce, with 97% of the rumours not resulting in a transfer to Arsenal, things had become a bit more realistic?
But it seems the fun we used to have stung a bit, or on the other hand, maybe everyone really was just copying everyone else with their transfer rumours. But either way, the number of players tipped to be coming to Arsenal now appears to be at a much lower level than it was in mid-June a couple of years ago. So it is possible that the players listed here today are genuinely men who are engaged with their agents in thinking about Arsenal.
One thing we did note, however, was the 97% of the transfer rumours we found in the course of the summer window never happened, which made transfer stories a bit of a naff idea. Still, it gave us a laugh, and we thought we’d see what we could find this time around.
And do remember we are not in any way saying that the players listed below are not coming to Arsenal. Rather, we are suggesting that in the past, potential transfers to the club seem to have been invented by some overexcited journalists, rather than based on reality and evidence. But maybe this summer it will all be different…
But one thing we have already noticed is that there is a much higher level of duplication of names from one site to another. This developed last summer, and meant that as soon as a player’s name appeared on one site as a possible target for Arsenal, his name appeared on multiple other sites as well. And this had nothing to do with the liklihood that the player would actually move to Arsenal.
| Player | Position | From | Source | Amount |
| Julian Alvarez | Centre forward | Atletico Madrid | Football Fan Cast; Sky, Sport Witness | £150m+ AFC preferred bidder |
| Andria Bartishvili | Attacking midfield | Kolkheti Poti | Gooner News | Not known |
| Bradley Barcola | Winger | Leipzig | Sky Sports, Caught Offside, Football London, Arsenal news, Sports View, Give me Sport | £45m+ |
| Andria Bartishvili | Attacking midfield | Iberia 1999 | Daily Canon | Not quoted |
| Phoenix Blayney. | Goal keeper | Larne | Standard | Free? |
| Ayyoub Bouaddi | 18 yr old midfield | LOSC Little | Hard Tackle | £60m+ |
| Alvaro Carreras | Left Back | Real Madrid | Hard Tackle, FFC | Only just signed |
| Ivan Fresneda | Defender | Real Valladolid, | Just Arsenal, Arsenal Station | No price specified |
| Manu Kone | Midfield | Roma | Sun – Agreed deal | £43.2m |
| Maxence Lacroix | Defender | Crystal Palace | Just Arsenal News | |
| Morgan Rogers | Attacking mddfield | Aston Villa | Mirror; Sky, FFC | £100m |
| Sandro Tonai | Midfield | Newcastle | FFC | Totts interested |
| Nicolo Tresoldi | Striker | Club Brugge | Arsenal News | He’s honoured |
| Christos Tzolis |
Winger | Club Brugge | Football 365 |
Elsewhere of late
- How about a discount for Arsenal season ticket holders who find Rice can’t play at the start of next season?
- If PSG and Arsenal played in the same league….
