- How much does it cost a club to rise one place up the Premier League?
- If all these journos know so much about transfers, why don’t Arsenal employ them?
By Tony Attwood
There is an element in Arsenal’s recent development which one can hardly fail to notice – the way Arsenal not only have a vibrant youth academy, but also that the players move up from the youth squads to the first XI. Indeed we certainly saw a fair number of such players joining the first team training sessions during the injury crisis of last season.
If nothing else marks out the difference between Arsenal and Chelsea, it is this willingness of Arsenal to invest as much as it takes into the youth academy, and that is logical given that the academy has produced Saka, Martinelli, Nwaneri, and Lewis-Skelly. (And yes I know Martinelli was transferred from Manchester United, but that really makes the point – as a youngster Man U were not interested, but Arsenal were willing to give him time.)
So who else is coming up? Declan Rice recently picked out 15-year-old Max Dowman as the “best in the country” at his age, and he has apparently been training with the first team. and could well be seen in pre-season games.
Max was playing with the under 18s last season and was said to have taken control of games in doing so. Of course, Arsenal can’t sign him fully as yet, but when he reaches the age, you can be sure they will.
And this Arsenal approach of finding more and more young players is obviously the direct opposite of the Chelsea approach, which was highlighted in a recent article under the headline “Chelsea’s willingness to change course in search of improvement”
Indeed, it is this fixation with the signing of players for lots of money as being the only way forward that helps build up the criticism of Arsenal for not signing more and more expensive players. Yet if the club did this, not only would it risk more and more finances in doing so, but the view young players have of the club would change. Instead of Arsenal being seen as the home of Saka, Martinelli, Lewis-Skelly, Nwaneri etc – the club where these players will really get their chance if good enough, Arsenal will come to look just like any other club – the place where the youngsters are cast aside in favour of big money transfers.
That is in fact the Chelsea model as they have continued to sign anyone they feel like (Liam Delap and João Pedro – and those are just the strikers signed since the end of the season). Young players no longer have any feeling that they have a future at Chelsea – it is just a shop window.
There is, within all this, a question of seeing either what the player is now and what he can do for the club now, and what the player could become in the future. Clubs like Tottenham Ho and Manchester U can only focus on what the player can do now, because their form last season in the league was so desperate; improvement is the only relevant word on the table.
So Tottenham are signing and signing players – six signed so far for fees, according to the Guardian’s list. That Manchester United have only signed two may seem to contradict this policy view, but Manchester United have been constrained simply because UEFA fined the club €300,000 for breaching Financial Fair Play rules, not just once, but several times over a four-year period between 2019 and 2022. In fact, the only thing that allows them even to think of a new player is the fact that the club has increased its income by over 10 per cent in the last financial year, as the fans seem willing to pay ever higher prices and buy ever more players.
Tottenham too have increased their turnover thanks to the prices within, and the size of, their new stadium. But their league position is fragile and is not helped by the fact that Nottingham Forest have put a stop to Morgan Gibbs-White’s transfer for £60m to Tottenham because Forest are said to be preparing legal action over an alleged illegal approach.
It is the sort of thing that can arise when the need for new players is deemed to be so utterly desperate and urgent that short cuts can be taken and rules can be broken.
The argument in that case is that Forest say they did not give Tottenham permission to talk to Gibbs-White and that there was a “breach of confidentiality” when details of the player’s contract were revealed.
But Tottenham are so anxious that they are seemingly still pushing forward with the transfer arrangements. And this really is the point facing Manchester U and Tottenham H – they really do need new players, not just to boost the squad but to show their fans that last season’s disappointing league positions are not going to be repeated.
