https://www.arsenal.com/

We finally get a CB in this window .......... about time too

Best of luck to Pablo Mari.

yess get in

Just ordered my new Pablo Mari away shirt to go along with my Denis Suarez and Dani Ceballos ones.

I see Suarez is at Celta Vigo now. I was wondering what had happened to him after he left us.

Loan with an option to buy for £8m - looks like Raul and Edu got their way.

Aren’t they running the place? I would have thought the reason they are employed is to get their way? Who’s way is the alternative?

I would think a lot of our transfer future rides on the success of Pépé. If he bombs good luck convincing anyone to spend big for quite a while and loan to buy punts will be the preferred option for the next few windows.

To add to your prized collection of Xhaka, Özil & Mustafi?

i'm a bit optimistic about this transfer because Arteta has a wee bit of history with the player when Arteta was at City. Plus we are desperate.

How Mustafi is still an Arsenal player is astounding. His injury saved him. The guy has 9 lives.

I think had Ramsey still been with us he'd shine under Arteta's system. Too bad.

Sky now reporting that we have made a late bid to sign left back Cédric Soares from Southampton.

Ornstein saying £5m loan fee and pole position to sign once he’s a free agent in the summer.
For 4 months worth of player I’d have thought the £5m could be put to better use.
What loan fee are we extracting from clubs when we loan them our players? £5m is huge. Apparently Inter only paid £1m for the same player at the same stage last season.

He provides cover, great, but £5m!!!

The alternative was the Flamengo way which was surely a permanent transfer or a loan with obligation to buy.

Surely it’s not a loan. That doesn’t make sense. For 6 months ? Plus his wages !

Why would saints insist on a loan if they know he’s out of contract.

Financially we are all over the place at Arsenal these days. Özil and Mustafi take 450 grand a week, do nothing yet the club can’t afford to sign a back up right back.

Ah, so he’s a right back. Sky have altered the reporting here. I had been wondering why we were going for another left back.

Meanwhile Southampton have taken another right back on loan from Tottenham, presumably to fill the gap. And presumably not for £5m.

Ah, i see. I misunderstood. Apologies. There’s a lot of talk at the moment about how Sanlehi has taken control and the dealing with super agents and such.

The numbers don’t quite seem to stack up do they? If it was 5m inclusive of wages...? Still a bit odd. He can play both full back slots so will provide real cover and hopefully quality, but honestly I’d never even heard of him! And of course he’s injured at the moment, out for 3 weeks

What?!

Like Tierney then? I guess that the winter break will help then if it is really 3 weeks.

Yes that Tierney 3 weeks was totally inaccurate & then of course it turns out he really is injury prone. So do you think he will get on the park at all for the rest of the loan period or is he just the same type of dud.

It is a bizarre signing.

Probably around 7 million in fee and wages for a 6 month loan for a player who’s injured for 3 weeks who even some saints fans were unsure about.

Is Maitland Niles that bad a back up right back?

Who’s the guys agent. Another mate of sanelhi

It seems to ignore that if he impresses he’ll go to another club as a free agent

The signing of Mari and the speculation around the Saints player got me musing today on the days when transfers were a much less frequent occurrence.

As a kid, every summer I would scan the back pages of the papers for news of a signing. And it was usually just the signing; very little pre-speculation. Supermac for the princely and exact sum of £333,333. I can't remember if was 33p as well. But I did buy the wrist sweatbands.

These days the number of comings and goings at a football club must be murder for the commissionaire and the tea ladies. Not to mention security.

Ah, nostalgia is a wonderful, if slightly foggy thing.

With Sanllehi allegedly being so strongly linked to agents, if Raul wasn’t so strongly moralistic one could possibly suspect he was earning a few extra bob on the deal.

Oh well, at least that’s made impossible by Sanllehi being such a trustworthy sort of chap.

I do wonder about this. It’s what was being suggested when Mslintat left that after Gazidis went the model changed from a strong scouting strategy to essentially relying on Sanelhi and his contacts from his boardroom days at Barcelona. Ie a dictator model based on acquisition of power. All favours and back slaps

In my day to day business I see Sanelhi types all the time. Here today gone tomorrow and never have to deal with the consequences. He wasn’t my favourite but i prefer a gazidis type who at least seemed to want to run a decent ship.

I get the impression all the new lot like Edu, Sanelhi and Vinai are just easy stooges for Kroenke not to run the club properly.

Here you go. Feb. Winter break explained. There will still be matches played, but they'll be split over the break time.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.espn.c ... atform=amp

Maybe the contract includes an option to buy that if exercised, would knock £5-7m off a pre-agreed purchase price. Or £7m is the maximum possible amount based on how many times he plays and Arsenal hitting top 4. What I'd be certain of is that whoever is reporting that figure, has no clue what the clauses might be with regard to payment.

Whether it's this guy or another, we probably need another RB anyway. Maitland-Niles could be viewed as a longer term backup for Pépé should he get injured. Rather than what happens usually when we push an attacking midfielder or wrong-footed spare striker to the right as a replacement. Not that I've seen much evidence to suggest Niles can perform there but thought that was his favoured position before becoming a backup for Bellerin.

P.s. I always had a problem with Wenger's failed experiments of pushing unused Attacking Midfielders out to the right of a front 3 so would prefer we have like-for-like replacements.

My annual anxiety about our unbeaten season wasn't so crazy after all.

Blimey, the season ended early this year.

The Arsenal today in 2000 with the Ladies' team playing.

Serious question TG:
What has Gazidis done that means you don't view him as a "Kroenke puppet".

The facts as I see it, make him more of a puppet than any of the others.

Le grove interesting on the sanelhi topic

The soares move connection, Portuguese player Mendes involved etc

He looks far more of a chief executive running a steady ship than sanelhi or any other type technical director type of typically tends to flit around and once a better offer arrives moves on.

I’m not sure AC Milan would have gone for Edu or Sanelhi. You need a chief exec who gets the club and runs it not a load of conflicting directors competing with each other. Peter Lawwell at Celtic would be a good choice for example.

I just don’t know how we can really know. Other than based on results, and how successful signings are, which have a load of other factors involved. You only really get a sense of it looking back and when people speak after the events.

I always thought Gazidis would come into his own once Wenger left. Turns out he *%^@** off at the first opportunity. In hindsight, I feel the guy was a spoofer. I also feel that Sanllehi has a big question mark hanging over him. Reports that he wanted a new deal for Emery over the summer and the way many of these player deals seem to be made. Maybe we went too far the other way under Wenger and didn't deal with certain individuals but this feels a little bit too 'old pals act'. I don't know, whatever works I guess?

Obviously I don't know the ins and outs of what happened with Sven Mislintat but it felt a more progressive, balanced approach with them both at the club. Data meets connections type thing.

Mixed emotions. Arteta seems to be a game changer. Still early days but the feeling is that things will change for the better. I thought it would eventually be Emery but will say the move looks like a good one so far.
But this happens amid us having our worse season for over 20 years and Liverpool making mince meat of our once unbreakable record only 16 years after it happened.

Thanks Both
That's why I asked the question as from what I've seen, I think Gazidis purely acted on Kroeke's instructions and used Wenger to shield himself from any flak.
He also used his links with the media to talk up a fight for control with Wenger. yet as soon as he "won" this self-promoted battle he began to work on his own exit.
The Miislintat stuff is also a bit of a myth - he left because he made a play for the technical director role, and then threw his toys out of the pram when he didn't get it. And I know as a fact that our recruitment is more led by watching players than because of them being represented by certain agents.
We have had, and continue to have, lots of problems with our management structure, but it shouldn't be that some get more blame than others just because they haven't hung around.

Hodd, do you know or can you say who took the decision that Wenger should leave? Did it come from Gazidis, as from what you say there it doesn’t sound like it was him?

Regarding Gazidis, I’ll say what I’ve said many times before after chatting a few times with him one on one, seeing him at numerous Q&As, and speaking at quite a few (now defunct) AGMs. He could talk the hind legs off a donkey. He could bullsh*t not only for the UK or USA, but China if he needed to. He could talk endlessly, for hours, without saying anything remotely meaningful.

He made a well paid career from having the gift of the gab, and from what I could see and others I know who spoke to him more than I did, not much else. Speaking without saying anything sums Gazidis up. If that’s what Darren meant by calling him a spoofer, I think he’s spot on.

Top Gun called Sanllehi a ‘here today gone tomorrow’ type who many of us have met in our own careers. I’d say exactly the same of Gazidis. They talk themselves up all day long, but achieve next to nothing.

The summer of the Charlie Nicholas transfer was amazing. The papers reporting that Charlie was wanted by Liverpool, Man U and us. Liverpool were the best team in England by a mile. It was just fantastic when he signed for us.

So it seems any deal for Cédric Soares is a £1m loan and we cover his £65,000 a week wages. Some journalists saying its a max outlay of £3m

He’s a free agent at the end of the season so could easily move to someone else but I suppose we’re banking on him liking the place and being 6 months settled. Also a loan rather than a permanent deal now keeps things really flexible for the summer.

We needed defensive reinforcements and if there isn’t any proper money available until the summer then I think the two loans we’ve bought in are on the whole good low risk moves. Some may be underwhelmed but we have to adjust to where we are. Not every signing can be slotted straight in to the first 11 and be good enough to make us challenge for the title. Hopefully we can pick up 2-3 of these types of players each year and improve and develop our own players from within with good coaching. Some transfers will need to be low money, low risk to plug some gaps.

I hate middle management, see it all day through my job. They always infight and are here today gone tomorrow. Sanelhi and co remind me of that.

Gazdis however is a CEO who wanted to fire an employee but couldn’t until we fell vastly behind our competitors. He knew Wenger was finished by speaking to the fans at AGMs. We also know now that Wenger just dealt with Kroenke directly. Matter of time till he left

Try telling Tim Cook at Apple he isn’t allowed to fire a senior engineer and see how far you can get. A lot of this is down to Kroenke And I see the recent appointments lesser characters than before. If I was Gazidis I would have left to. You can’t be responsible for something and take the blame for it when your not allowed to make necessary decisions. Elliot group bought Milan and delegated it to Gazidis to run it effectively which is far more attractive a role than being a stooge.