I know everyone has to play everyone but that’s a ridiculous start to a season.
For my money you want lots of weaker teams first up, get some momentum and get ahead of of other teams rather than having to chase.

You also want as easy as possibly home games immediately after the CL ties, or playing a fellow club who also played midweek in Europe. Every team has a points drop off for league games post Europe. So you want to be able to rotate or be at 80% and still win.

Apparently these are the last 6

Manchester City (A)
Newcastle United (H)
Fulham (H)
West Ham United (A)
Burnley (H)
Crystal Palace (A)

I’d have been keen to get Chelsea or City on the opening day. With the club World Cup thing I think they will both suffer early on being not quite fully rested or having done a proper pre season. They both have huge squads and cheat their way through football so zero sympathy

5 home games and 3 away games after champions league fixtures
The 3 away are Sunderland, Leeds and Chelsea. Chelsea will have Europe as well.
That’s a good set of fixtures following champions league

Slightly odd that there are 2 rounds of fixtures AFTER the Cup Final.

On twitter “fixture list” is top trending topic followed by “world war 3”.

Interesting times folks

MLS reported to have agreed a new long term deal with The Arsenal

https://www.theguardian.com/football/20 ... drugs-test

Bullet dodged.

It’s actually ok if Mudryk gets banned for 4 years because Chelsea have him on a 7 year contract.

Sounds like Partey is off. It was always going to be tough to get him to renew given he’s 32 and on 250k a week. There was always bound to be someone who would offer more.


Despite what some naysayers say he’s been a decent player for Arsenal and was signed at a time when we couldn’t get decent midfielders for love nor money. Whilst having some injuries that 45 million which seemed a lot at that time was shrewd

Probably his loss not theirs...............

Can you hear the pin drop?

In our news conference room

This would be worth it to see the reaction from our fans alone

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/20 ... i-madueke/

Ornstein saying Liverpool are close to selling Quansah to Leverkusen for €40m. How have they generated such a high fee for a defender like Quansah, he’s shown nothing to justify a fee like that. I’d have been surprised if Liverpool had got £20m for him this summer

We have to find a way to get better money for our sales because that figure is ridiculous

Very good player. So we need 2 defensive midfielders in the transfer window. After the fixture list was published a fellow supporter commented to me about the first 6 games. If we won them all it did not follow we would win the league but a really bad run here and we could almost rule ourselves out. Really important to get all the transfers done asap and have all new players at first day of training.

How can he be worth that much but we have Italian clubs quibbling about 20 million for Kiwior who is probably a better player.

I’m a bit surprised there hasn’t been any interest from other premier league clubs in Kiwior. He’s far better than most of the other defenders in the league and if he was somewhere like Everton or villa he’d start every week.

Hi Rich,

I am bemused by how certain clubs are able to sell fringe players for top dollar and we cant seem to do so, despite being amongst the best teams in europe.

Would it surprise anyone if Zinchenko or Kiwior go for less than £20m?

Priorities, eh?

We just have to hope that Trump's Clouseau-like bumblings will be accompanied by Clouseau-like luck!

Zinchenko will. He has a year left on his deal. I bet most suitors will be put off by his wages and he’ll for for something like 12 million towards the end of the window.

On kiwior we would be mad to accept 20 million. He’s a decent player and under contract until 2028. Just no point selling him for peanuts

I understand Quansah will be on low wages so that is factored in to the deal - but usually the inflated deals happen between prem clubs. I thought we did well to get £30m for Nketiah to be fair.

Zinchecnko at 28, on high wages and 1 year left I'd snap your hand off for £20m

Kiwior should be valued at £40m, he added at least £10-15m to his price at the back end of the season - slotting in well to one of the top 3-4 defences in europe. If no one offers that then keep him

Those opening fixtures (plus Man U's which are equally hard) sets up a nice win/win narrative for broadcasters - if Arsenal start well - 'title is on', if we don't 'title over in september, Arteta sack'......for Man U if they start well 'Amorim has got them ticking, have they turned the corner'......if they don't ' catastrophe, relegation? groundhog day'

On the CM I'm worried we won't sign another and will instead rely on bodies in other positions covering, ie: Rice dropping back and MLS stepping up - that in itself doesn't hugely concern me but the tactic of using flexible players as your cover is going to stretch you so much - we saw this last season. Just in numbers of players our squad is wafer thin compared to nearly all the other top clubs.

I'd definitely be replacing Partey with a younger CM who can be bought on. Maybe like we tried to do with Lokonga. Luciene Agoume is the right profile, Lamine Camara is another seriously impressive young CM - both look ideal for prem football

David Ornstein has said we are supposed to be signing Zubimendi

that’s encouraging.

Basically it’s like watching back to the future 2 at this point

Its interesting to see the fan psychology around the transfer. If we'd heard nothing of any Zubimendi transfer and today was Ornstein dropping some breaking news of him ready to sign for us Arsenal fans would be hugely excited about signing a Euro Champ winner, in his peak years for just over £50m. But....because it was kind of a done deal in Jan, and has been trickled to the line since then it doesn't feel as exciting. This is a seriously good signing in my view. Super player

I'm also fully on board with Kepa signing as a No.2 GK for £5m - that would be excellent business.

Add in one of Gyokeres/Sesko as our striker and a high quality left winger and that would be the 4 key positions we needed signings this summer.

The remainder of the signings are unlikely to be first 11 players but are still really needed to bulk out the squad.

Should have shot them dead. Depressing

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx24nppdx0lo

He’s a great signing but until we sign new forwards any new players will receive a muted reception

We are being strongly linked with Jorel Hato. If we sign him before anyone else there will be all manner of stupid opinions being formed and morons on you tube demanding Artetas dismissal

If you take City's squad as it is I make it they have 29 first team players (3 of those being younger players - Reis, O'Reilly, McAtee - who may go on loan) - Still a 26 man squad

Liverpool, if we include Kerkhez and Wirtz but take out Quansah and Robertson their squad is 24 first team players plus 1 youngster (Morton) - and they will sign another CB

Arsenal taking out zinchenko, partey, vieira, nelson but adding in Zubimendi gives us just 21 players including our young players MLS and Nwaneri

We're really lacking numbers. Midfield is a worry as we only have Zubimendi, Rice, Merino, Ødegaard - just 4 players. I know Havertz, Nwaneri and MLS could play there but we're not stacked in their positions either.

In an ideal world, on top of Zubimendi - no.2 gk, striker, left wing, def mid (partey replacement), creative CM (take some burden off Ødegaard) and a defender (can we rely on Tomiyasu?)

Zubmimendi 51

Rodrygo 70

Kepa 5

Sesko 70

Lucien Agoume 18

El Khannous 35 https://tbrfootball.com/after-martin-zu ... 0600cca916



Hato 40 (funded by the sales of vieira, Zinchenko)




… job done, give me Bertas salary please

Hearing from my nephew in rural Senegal that Zubimendi is at Colney for a medical.

I logged onto the Arsenal site in anticipation of a latest signing, but the top news is this:

https://www.arsenal.com/news/30-years-d ... ns-arsenal

Dennis Bergkamp, my Number 1 favourite Arsenal player

May this be a prelude for a rush of announcements for top players coming in

The midfield across the park is light on, and was so last season. In an ideal world: I think we need to try and upgrade on Ødegaard, Rice is a difficult player to place in a system, defensively great but not quick enough to transition the ball. I would be tempted to put him in Party’s role and buy a quality box to box player. But I see our midfield depth as a weakness. Over the last couple of years we have missed the transfer windows and it’s proving difficult to catch up.

No signing we have made or will ever make will come close to this. sol, Declan nobody.

bonafide world class talent. I’ll never forget staring at Ceefax for ages which said we had signed him. It didn’t seem real. Prior to this the clubs attitude to transfers had developed into something of a dinosaur approach and even when he signed Hill wood bemoaned spending half our gate receipts on a player.

Genuinely think the flying thing may have prevented him being held in the highest esteem in world football because he was one of the greats

I agree. From afar, I couldn’t believe the news and that was the signing that told me we were a serious club. He was absolutely magical on his day.

I wonder if WW3 will have any effect on transfer fees.

I think unless we have our eye on signing a b2 stealth pilot we should be okay.

Incidentally I can’t get my head round the fact that a plane can take off in Missouri, Fly all the way to Iran, bomb it and come back. Technically that’s mental.

I saw one of those things flying once. Utterly bizarre, like a UFO flying across the sky. Incredibly menacing

Zubimendi to wear 36 apparently

24 hour rolling news for transfers kind of works across the global and European market, if you care about the thing as a whole, but for a single club, particularly us, it feels like watching an elderly snail race an injured sloth for months on end.

Like, they’ll get there, maybe, but it isn’t a spectator sport.

100%. It’s a funny thing. Clearly we aren’t going to sign anyone before July 1st in order to comply with the 3 year PSR requirements. It’s why last summer was also lean.

The you tube streamer lot are hysterical. They have no content because it’s pre season so they resort to making themselves look complete mugs about nothing to get views.

I present to you exhibit A

https://youtu.be/kQGFgRkQHUA?si=gVEeLiuEA4L3qdsG