Myles Lewis-Skelly: where is the truth amidst these rumours of him leaving on the cheap?

 

• Fifa equated with Mafia: so do we actually need Fifa at all?
• How far does financial chaos stretch with the big clubs in London?

By Tony Attwood

What’s really going on with Myles Lewis-Skelly?   I ask because we have the headline now that says, “Why Arsenal may be forced to sell 19-year-old England star – and why £45m would be nowhere near enough.”   And then as I start to gather work on that up pops a tale about Arsenal trying to flog Gabriel Martinelli to Galatasaray.  who allegedly have offered £38m and also want to buy Alexis MacAllister.

According to Football365 the issue within the muddle about the Arsenal player is that Arsenal are struggling to comply with the latest Uefa spending rules.  But – and this is a big part of the story – absolutely zero details are given of what spending rules are screwing Arsenal – a relevant question given the club’s propensity for nurturing more players from the youth team than most of its PL rivals.

Now the way the media are presenting this, is very much a traditional media vs Arsenal approach.  Which is to say that the media accuse Arsenal of having gone out and bought the players they want, but now suddenly have realised they have spent too much and haven’t got enough English players in the squad and are thrown into turmoil.

No evidence is given to support such a notion, and that is usually a sign that the story is a load of old cobblers.  Arsenal know the rules and regulations as much as anyone and will have planned things accordingly.  Buying in players as they become available and then suddenly thinking, “Bugger, we’ve broken the spending rules” might be typical of of West Ham or Tottenham, but not normally associated with a club that is packed with youngers (who don’t count in terms of the spending rules). 

The only issue that can go wrong is that a club offers to buy a player of a certain football nationality (which as we have noted in recent days may not be the same as the player’s passport nationality) and on the basis of such an agreement, the selling club moves quickly to bring in another player they want.   If the third party in all this doesn’t stick to its word, a club can find itself with not enough “home grown” men in the team.  But I’ve never seen AFC get stuck with this issue.

One might argue that club’s should not get involved in a chain of events until everything is clear, but in that case most transfers would never happen at all – or players will have transfered elsewhere while clubs are trying to sort out who holds which passport.   Managers dither, chairmen are unsure about how much they should spend, financiers change their minds… the whole transfer era is an utter shambles – not just this summer, but each summer.   

And all that is before we even contemplate the demands player agents’ come along and make.   For we’ve already noted, Arsenal insist they have not offered any Arsenal “born and bred” academy player to anyone, despite the reports.   And we can surely concur, it sound as very Un-Arsenal thing to do, to suddenly find the club has too many foreigners on board.

The real problem here seems to be an over-excited journalist or an over-excited agent has had one drink too many and started telling clubs that Lewis-Skelly is for sale.  And there is more evidence to the fact that this is a make-believe tale given the lowness of the price mentioned.

Uefa’s rules operate by calendar year, which means that even if reaching some sort of imbalance in terms of their allowed expenditure, Arsenal have the rest of this window to get it fixed and could indeed agree to sell a player at 0001 GMT on 31 January to get out of trouble – if there were any trouble in the first place.   

The point is also being made that Arsenal quite probably do want to sell Gabriel Jesus (nationality Brazilian)  and Reiss Nelson (English). But throwing in fantasy moves for Lewis Skelly and the announcement that AFC are in breach of European rules, allows the media to run their usual story of Arsenal in chaos and no-one wants Arsenal rejects together.    Fortunately not every outlet is written by dodos and some are making it clear it is all a load of tosh.  And indeed Arsenal’s media department specialise in keeping players up to date with which media tales are simply hogwash (which is a level higher than “utter tosh”, itself one step beyond “mindless drivel”).

But the story does of course give the media and other clubs another chance to knock Arsenal.  Thus already we have Caught Offside, meanwhile, writing that, ‘It’s been suggested that Chelsea and Man Utd have ‘rejected’ the 19-year-old,” but that’s not accurate.   And it is not accurate because you can’t reject a player who isn’t for sale and who isn’t looking for a move.

Of course once the window is over and the player hasn’t gone, but is selected for a game, the media will be full of Arsenal having had a disastrous window and are now reduced to including in their squad a player who they failed to off-load during the course of the last window.  In fact that story is probably already written.

But there is a twist in all this, in that although Arsenal have no desire to let Lewis-Skelly go they, like every club, they know that occasionally a player really wants to leave because of the treatment he receives by the media.  That is always a shame, because it is based on the false belief circulated by agents who get a commission out of each sale, that somehow things will be better elsewhere, but that’s never true.   So we can never say definitively never, but perhaps we should say “it is extremely unlikely that Arsenal will let this player go,” unless perhaps there is a brilliant replacement waiting in the wings.