When it comes to signing players why do Arsenal seem so slow?

 

 

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By Tony Attwood

So Arsenal have signed a player: Kepa Arrizabalaga from Chelsea who is a kepa, sorrry keeper.   Last season he played on loan for Bournemouth.   The cost was £5m. Meanwhile two players have left for modest fees, (Tavares and Marquinhos), Tierney has gone on a free to Celtic,  Jorginho has gone back to Brazil, and the loans of Neto and Stirling have come to an end.   So in effect we have swapped one Bournemouth keeper for another and six players have gone.

It’s not quite what those who are begging for a £200m centre forward had in mind.

This compares to Chelsea who have brought in four players for a total cost of around a quarter of a billion pounds, although they have been selling and loaning out others at the same time.

Manchester City have spent around £107m, Manchester United £62m andTottenham Hots have also dished out £62m (all these figures calculated from transfers reported in the Guardian)

Arrizabalaga leaves Chelsea seven years after joining for £72m from Athletic Bilbao.  He has spent the past two seasons on loan, at Real Madrid and then Bournemouth.

In one sense it seems a bit strange that the first deal done by the club with the beest defence in the League last season is for a keeper, but then on the other hand the management team doing the arrangements is the one that created the best defence in the league last season, so I guess they know.

Meanwhile, the issue of a centre forward goes on. The decline in goals scored came from a massive increase in injuries – and it is quite possible to argue that this came from clubs lower down the league believing that the only way to stop Arsenal scoring is to kick the defence to pieces.   In some games it certainly looked like that. – hence the injuries.  

According to Physioroom Arsenal had 23% more serious injuries than any other club in the Premier League last season, which of course can be put down to bad luck, chance, having players who are weak and likely to get injured, having a poor medical staff who don’t know how to treat injuries, or a manager who rushes back players too soon.

Or it could be that Arsenal’s attack was targeted and the referees did nothing about it.  

Last season in fact Arsenal did only have 22 squad players listed for the first team which was pretty much the norm for the League, and the reason clubs don’t have full squads is simply because players who are good enough to be in the squad don’t want to spend most of the season on the bench and so tend not to go to or stay with a squad when they are getting no games.   Arsenal could of course have done with one or two more forwards last season – but they would only have come if they felt Arsenal forwards were being kicked to shreds by the opposition. 

And that is the problem now – which players want to come to a club where everyone knows that the opposition kick their attackers and get away with it?  “Come to Arsenal and get injured” is not a very attractive slogan.  

Anyway, Arrizabalaga is Arsenal’s first signing, and all the talk is that Christian Nørgaard from Brentford will follow, with Martín Zubimendi coming from Real Sociedad after that.  

Meanwhile we see the story over and over again that Arsenal are too slow in their dealings.  But technically, transfer procedures are regulated.  If a club wants to sign a player, they must first send a notice of approach to that club. Only after 7 days can they then approach the player directly. If they contact the player before sending the notice or before the 7-day period has elapsed, it would be considered an illegal approach, and they can be fined by the League, and lose the chance of getting the player at all.

And because of the worry that another club might jump in and get the player first, a lot of transfers involve clubs that trust each other, while at the same time various clubs absolutely refuse to do any deals with certain other clubs whose managerial team they don’t trust.  And of course here football is no different from any other business – virtually all companies have other firms they simply won’t deal with because of past incidents of slow payments, “lost” paperwork etc.

And we can also see utter disasters of transfers as with Unai Emery’s bringing Nicolas Pépé to Arsenal for a record fee which nigh on wrecked Arsenal’s budget for a year, and whose performances ensured Arsenal were going nowhere fast.   The problem was that for Emery to drop Pépé would have been an overt omission of the manager’s gross incompetence, so Emery plodded on and on until he was relieved of his duties and the player removed.

Mind you, Sir Alex Ferguson brought in Bebe from Vitoria de Guimaraes who had themselves only just bought him and hadn’t yet had him play for them.

It is said that Ferguson only met the player on the day of the transfer and signed the deal because he was told Real Mad wee after him.  It was a totally false rumour, and I suspect they still chuckle about it in the management refreshment lounge in the Bernebau.  The player played twice for Manchester United and was then shipped on through a series of loans to Beşiktaş, Rio Ave, Paços de Ferreira before they managed to flog him to Benfica for whom he played once before going on more and more loans. 

So who is it who causes these transfer catastrophes where a player moves for lots of dosh almost it seems on the whim of a buying manager?

Basically it is the same people who do the regular buying – and what this shows is that the notion that they really can predict who will be a great player is not true.  Which is why having such an active and buoyant youth set-up as Arsenal do, is so vitally important.