- What happens to a club when the transfer policy goes wrong?
- It will not be long before another club defaults on its debts
By Tony Attwood
Arsenal are in real trouble – there can be no doubt about that, for they are currently looking at signing… well, we’ve counted – 50 players. And the question can be asked, as we ask each year, are Arsenal really looking at 50 players or are the media just making this up to try and grasp our attention through the summer while they have to do the minimal amount of work and just pick players at random and suggest they are coming Arsenal’s way?
Of course, we know that the desire of the entire media world is to cause turmoil, because that automatically gives them a story about how the club fell into such a situation and what it is doing to escape. And nowhere is this clearer than in the headline which tells us that signing one particular player will not only be a good move but will liberate Saka and take the entire team to new heights. And then the subsequent headline that Arsenal were too slow in their negotiation, and the player slipped from their grasp. Stupid bloody Arsenal.
Now we know that what happened in the 2023/24 season was that Arsenal had a multiplicity of goal scorers, one of whom got 20 but six of whom got eight or more – hence the huge total of 91 goals.
So take the case of Viktor Gyokeres for whom the selling club want £13m more than Arsenal are currently offering. The implication is clear. Arsenal arguing over a bit of what is in footballing terms loose change could lose the player and hence the title. And that will be the theme if he or anyone else on the list doesn’t sign, without any of the people who made up the stories actually thinking, hang on, maybe Arsenal didn’t want him or need him. Not with 91 goals in the season when everyone stayed fit.
So here is the goal-scoring record for that penultimate season. Surely the argument should be, we need more trainers to help the players avoid the thuggish tackles that refs don’t protect them against.
Here are the figures for the season before last….
| Player | Games | Sub | Goals | Pens |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bukayo Saka | 46 | 1 | 20 | 6 |
| Leandro Trossard | 25 | 21 | 17 | |
| Kai Havertz | 43 | 8 | 14 | 1 |
| Martin Odegaard | 45 | 3 | 11 | 2 |
| Gabriel Jesus | 21 | 15 | 8 | |
| Gabriel Martinelli | 31 | 13 | 8 |
But it is now worse than that because what we are now seeing ten times a day are headlines such as, “The mission is clear for Andrea Berta this summer. Sign a new striker or risk the wrath of Arsenal fans the world over.”
Threatening members of the Arsenal management team with the wrath of the multitude is not exactly the way most of us show our support, but clearly it is what some journalists and bloggers like to do.
So of course that is not the mission – the mission must be to get back to that level of diverse scoring seen in the season before last, which took Arsenal up to the top while retaining the best defence in the league which Arsenal had in 2024 (29 goals against), 2025 (34 goals against).
Fortunately, I think it is quite likely that the Arsenal board take no notice of media who clearly know nothing about football tactics and the value of a multi-scoring forward line, and who are deliberately seeking to whip up anti-Arteta feelings, so that the board is put under pressure. They want him to leave so Arsenal sink down the table once more and the media can continue to print junk articles about Arsenal.
Thus this media’s ploy involves convincing people that Arsenal did not have a brilliant attacking team in 2023 and 2024, and despite what we saw with our own eyes, and did not lose that attacking team’s goalscoring because of the mulitplicity of injuries to the forwards in 2024/25 allowed by some odd refereeing.
But in this coming season, Arsenal will of course still have the bulk of the attacking team that scored 91 goals in 2023/24 playing in the side once again. (That was, in case you missed it) the team that scored Arsenal’s highest number of league goals in over 70 years. So they obviously must have been quite good. Why on earth would you want to change that lineup and format in any way other than by bringing in better backup players to cover for injuries?
Of course, the wretched anti-Arsenal media PR campaign has been so relentless that there is a chance that the management team at Arsenal might be drawn into thinking along those lines; one can only hope they are made of sterner stuff than most bloggers and newspaper journos.
So no, what we need to do is to try and reduce the level of injuries to our forward players. Whether any of the players mentioned by the media can do that I don’t know – it seems unlikely since the media refuse to admit Arsenal forwards were kicked to pieces last season by oppositions that had decided this was the only way to stop Arsenal scoring. But still, we’ve created the list of players the media say we could bring in and it will be published on Untold Arsenal later today.
But for now my view remains – keep as much of that team that scored 91 goals the season before last as possible, and bring in a couple of players who can defend the forward line from assault.
The transfer table of the players the club has been tipped to buy, follows later today.
