ALL EYES ON SPAIN | UPGRADING FORWARDS
I never thought I’d see it…
My knees are shaking…
… pass me that chair.
Reiss Nelson, leaving Arsenal, on a permanent deal.
It’s true.
No man gripped tighter to an Arsenal life than dear Reiss. Apparently, he has agreed terms with West Ham, and the fee has been sorted (anything above a mill at this point is good work).
Wow.
Maybe Berta is the most skilled Sporting Director in the short history of them at Arsenal?
That impacts nothing, really. Well, I guess it does put £5.2m back in the kitty. What a crazy contract that was to give to a player we had trouble finding loans for. We’ll always have Bournemouth… and that little stint at Hoffenheim when we thought he was going to be the greatest Arsenal player of all time.
Treat him well, West Ham, treat him well.
All my focus and energy right now is on two deals. Viktor Gyokeres and Julián Álvarez.
The Atleti fans, god bless them, have made the Argentina man’s position at the club untenable. They abused him and threw a scarf at him as he limped out of the tunnel. THREW A SCARF AT HIM. You love to see it when you’re an Arsenal fan. BREAK HIM. And we will open our arms and welcome him.
The fee is purported to be in the region of £120m. If you take the £60m for Martinelli, the £1m for Reiss, and the fee of £60m for Gyokeres, you land in a place where you’re kind of covering his cost.
The Gyokeres story is one that looks like it might have two options. You use his fee to lower the base cost for Álvarez. Making it look like the deal was more expensive than it needed to be. A Chelsea move, you could call it. Atleti need a striker, this is what Simeone said yesterday.
“The only thing I know is that if Atlético Madrid want to win a title, we need to be together, we need to have forwards, and we need to have important forwards. And for that, we need to work on it as a result, everyone, on what we need.”
Viktor is his type of player, brutish, decent in front of goal, absolute workhorse. €150m fee looks a lot different if Viktor goes for €75m.
The second option appears to be Barca. They sold Lewandowski and Ferran Torres, and they currently have no centre-forward options. It would seem like Barca have Viktor far higher up the list of potential names than it should be, mostly down to Deco desperation. Viktor’s agent has been there working on a deal apparently, so we’ll see how that pans out.
That would leave the left wing quite exposed, unless the plan is to do what Chelsea did with Madueke and play him on the left this season. If that is not the plan, then I would suspect the two lead names on the left would be Yıldız and potentially Ndiaye of Everton (whose numbers, outside G&As, are crazy good).
Both options would be very expensive, but solving any Arsenal problem tends to be expensive, unless you do a Tzolis-like deal, which can sometimes end up looking like a Fabio Vieira deal.
But, overall, I’m calm. We have the best squad in the league, without a winger and a striker. Add those two, and we will be at an insane level of talent for the upcoming season.
Ok, that’s me done. I’ll be talking to Tim Payton a bit later today about all things Arsenal. Should be a banger. x
LE GROVE is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
